For all I knew they may have got up search parties, husbands and boy friends and fathers all out in a pack looking for me, all having a great time as people invariably do when they’re hunting something or someone. After all, when all was said and done, what did I do? Nothing. I didn’t molest them or insult them or try to touch them, I merely stood and looked at them and ran after them – or ran when they ran which isn’t necessarily the same thing.

There was no harm in it. Or so I thought. I couldn’t see what harm there could ever be, and believe me, I thought about this quite a lot, for I’m just as guilt-ridden as the rest of us. I thought about it, justifying myself, keeping guilt at bay. Young women don’t have heart attacks and fall down dead because a man chases them. Young women aren’t left with emotional traumas because a man stares at them. The oldest woman I ever frightened was the one with the Maltese terrier and she was no more than forty. I saw her again on my third or fourth visit and followed her for a while, stepping out from behind bushes and standing in her path. She used the same words the girl in Queens Wood had used, uttered in the same strangled voice: ‘What is it you want?’

I didn’t answer her. I had mercy on her and her little ineffectual dog and I melted away into the woodland shades. The next one who asked me that I answered with professorial gravity: ‘Merely collecting lichens, madam.’

It was proof enough of how harmless I was that there was never a sign of a policeman in that area. I’m sure none of them told the police, for they had nothing to tell. They had only what they imagined and what the media had led them to expect. Yet harm did come from it, irrevocable harm and suffering and shame.

No doubt by now you think you’ve guessed. The inevitable must have happened, the encounter which any man who makes a practice of intimidating women is bound to have sooner or later, when the tables are turned on him. Yes, that did happen but it wasn’t what stopped me. Being seized by the arm, hurled in the air and laid out, sprawled and bruised, by a judo black belt, was just an occupational hazard. I’ve always been glad, though, that I behaved like a gentleman. I didn’t curse her or shout abuse. I merely got up, rubbed my legs and my elbows, made her a little bow and walked off in the direction of the Wake. Carol wanted to know how I’d managed to get green stains all over my clothes and I think to this day she believes it was from lying on the grass in a park somewhere with another woman. As if I would!

That attack on me deterred me. It didn’t put me off. I let three weeks go by, three miserable yearning weeks, and then I went back to the Wake road one sunny July morning and had one of my most satisfying experiences. A girl walking, not on the road, but taking a short cut through the forest itself. I walked parallel to her, sometimes letting her catch a glimpse of me. I knew she did, for like it had been with the girl in Queens Wood, I could sense and smell her fear.