‘She was following me – I know she was,’ said Marion desperately. ‘As I was coming up with my bucket full, I heard her humming to herself behind me, and she spoke to me, and I didn’t turn round again to check on her after that. She could have gone back to the stream. You know how children like stirring water.’

Molly accompanied her down to the water-place but Alice was not there.

‘Not so deep that she couldn’t climb out even if she had fallen in,’ said Molly, poking about in the mud with a stick, but Marion well knew a child could drown in a few inches of water. They called again, and started along the path towards the village, and then suddenly Alice appeared from between birch trees ahead of them, trotting about unconcerned.

Marion ran ahead and picked her up, angry. ‘Where have you been, running off like that, you naughty girl? Where have you been?’

But Alice’s vocabulary was not up to an explanation. She wailed at Marion’s angry tone. She had been perfectly calm when lost, but quickly picked up fear from her mother’s agitated voice and began to cry, which at once softened Marion’s heart.

Marion carried her back to her cottage, leaving Molly on the way who said, ‘Well, it’s all ended happily this time,’ as if deprived of the thrill of a disaster.

Holding Alice in her arms and saying, ‘There, there, shush, shush,’ Marion vividly remembered her own terror at being lost as a child.

She had been older than Alice, probably about seven, and had gone out with a group of children, mostly a bit older than her, with sacks to collect beechnuts in the forest. Memory did not supply details of the outward walk, nor of the finding and collection of beech mast, which was probably some hours of work, but started on the intended journey home. She had found an oak apple with a small oak apple, still soft, attached to it, and with three short twigs projecting from one side on which it could be made to stand. Ever toyless, she had pretended it was a cow and managed to stick two little curved bits of twig into the small oak apple for horns. She was talking to herself as solitary children often do, and started making a little cow shed for it. She pushed four sticks upright into the moss at the foot of a tree and scratched out other bits of moss to lay against the sticks for walls and roof. It was absorbing. Then she delicately balanced her ‘cow’ in the doorway of the shed and looked round for an audience. No one was there. She suddenly heard the silence of the forest. Incredulity struck her and she shouted. As her cry faded the silence returned. Panic arrived. Which way could they all have gone? She had no idea; there was no particular path. She shouted again. No answer.