It didn’t seem to affect Lumin. She sometimes asked about her father and I told her he lived far away. We were a team, the two of us. Right from the start, we were a tight unit. We didn’t need anyone else who might disappoint us … or be disappointed by us.

I knew I’d need to get back to work after I had her. Throughout my pregnancy I’d lived on the money I’d earned from the Iceland trip, and while the flat was paid off by Reg and was now mine, there was still money to be found for food and everything a child would need once the Iceland money ran out. So I made some calls and finally something came up: a stable part-time filming job for a stock video company run by an old uni friend of Julia’s, Steve. He was based in Northumberland and mined most of his footage from the Druridge Bay area with its stunning nature reserves, which teemed with wildlife. It felt right: far enough away from London to feel like I was making a new start with my daughter. Not too close to the Highlands of Scotland.

I’d been honest from the start, telling Steve I had a newborn. The fact that his wife Tina, now a good friend, was a childminder made him more sympathetic. Eight weeks after I gave birth, Lumin and I moved to the village Steve and Tina lived in, a quaint little town filled with cobbled streets just a short drive from the magnificent Druridge Bay coast. Lumin was looked after by Tina on the three days a week I worked and I got the chance to earn money doing something I loved: shooting rare and beautiful wildlife. Yes, it would eventually be cut up into chunks and farmed out to be used by marketing people for adverts, not the wildlife documentaries I once helped create. But I couldn’t be fussy. I had a child now.

But I’d been feeling a restlessness lately, those old dreams of filming wildlife in abandoned buildings resurfacing. I hoped the consistency of school hours would give me the chance to spend the two spare days I’d have on my hands pursuing it.

‘Right,’ I said to Lumin, glancing at the clock. ‘We better go.’

I saw a flicker of nerves in my daughter’s eyes and my heart went out to her. She was so determined to seem brave and grown up, just as I had when I was young. But sometimes the vulnerability showed through. I squeezed her hand and she looked up at me, a brave smile on her pretty face. ‘Do you remember your first day at school, Mummy?’ she asked as I opened the front door.