Except I don’t want to just stop there, I want to go anywhere that fate decides to take me. I want to see it all, and not just because Dad says I shouldn’t (although, let’s be honest, that’s a massive part of the reason why), but also because I can. I have absolutely no idea what the future might bring, but it has to be better than staying behind like Violet and Bess (who both think I’m crazy and should go ahead with the wedding as planned, but please, I mean, Henry is lovely and kind and has a “great future ahead of him,” but in ten years’ time, I’d be knee-deep in children, he’d be having an affair and I would be completely miserable and wishing I’d left when I had the chance).

Anyway, I digress, or am waffling, or using a thousand words when one will do, as Miss Hamilton always liked to remind me during English class. But that’s just it—I want to write, I want to explore, I want to feel something more than just the day-to-day. Because all great writers go on adventures. They actually do something: live, cry, dance through the rain, kiss handsome men on station platforms—I did not do that, but wouldn’t it have been amazing if I did? Just kissed someone without even knowing their name and then run away into tomorrow? Leaving them wondering their entire lives who I was.

Of course, there’s always the risk that this goes horribly wrong and I have to head back home and grovel to Dad, but it’s worth it, surely? Regret the things you do, not the things you don’t. That’s going to be my motto, my rule, to live by from now on.

In fact, I think that, from this very second, I will be that person. I will take risks. I will embrace everything the universe has to throw at me. I can be whoever I want to be, because to the world I am just another stranger, sitting on a train, heading who knows where, to do who knows what.

Just like that man over there with his top button undone, looking a little flustered as he reads a copy of Ulysses without anyone staring and thinking him crude—I wonder if he’s got to the bit in the brothel? I imagine he has a sweetheart waiting at home for him with a glass of sherry and slippers that have been toasting by the fire. Or perhaps he lives alone, with a dog who he takes for hikes on the moors at weekends. And he writes poetry that he recites to women before making love to them under the stars.

Then there’s the woman sitting neatly in her tweed skirt and silk blouse. Hair lacquered into a chignon and a cluster of pearls around her slim neck. No doubt she is someone’s secretary. Perhaps a government minister or company director. That’s what Mum always dreamt of for me. Sitting in an airless, soulless office somewhere, taking dictation and making endless cups of tea. She thought it would be a stepping-stone to something more, to meeting an influential man who might one day become my husband.