Panic started to rise in the back of my throat like bile. The smoke was a hazard and the flames would be dangerous if they spread much further, but the real danger was what was hiding on the far side of the clearing. A cliff edge and a 100-foot drop onto the rocks below, just waiting for one misstep, one confused stride in the wrong direction among the smoke and chaos.

‘Daniel! Lucy! Can you hear me?’

The heat was strong on my face from the crackle and hiss of flames as they leapt from branch to branch. I pulled in a lungful of acrid smoke and instantly started coughing, trying to call out again before the words were cut short by a retching, choking gag that tore at my throat.

Smoke drifted between the trees, stinging my eyes. It was getting thicker.

There.

A child, shouting. High and terrified.

I felt a fear I had not felt for years, not since he had been born, tiny and silent and blue-lipped, slick and motionless in the arms of a maternity nurse, the cord lifted away from his neck. Willing him to breathe, willing to trade my life for his, just to hear him cry. To hear him breathe. A visceral fear that clutched at my heart, squeezing and squeezing until all the blood was gone and I couldn’t catch my breath because the terror was so close, so close I could feel its hot breath on the back of my neck, the fear that maybe this was the moment when my world would go dark. Silence. Doctors and nurses working fast, skilled hands desperately trying to tether my baby to life. But silence, still. Only silence. Please let him cry. Please let him be OK. I will do anything to hear him cry. Anything. And finally, wonderfully, he had: a fierce gargling cry that pierced me with a shaft of pure love as I lay exhausted in the bed, tears hot on my cheeks. And then he was in my arms, tiny and perfect, his face screwed up and purple and crying hard, the most beautiful sound, his voice strong and high and bursting with life.

He was crying now.

‘Mum! Mum!’

I turned towards the sound of my son’s voice, leaving the path and plunging blindly into the woods on my right. My eyes streamed with tears from the smoke.

‘Daniel! I’m coming!’

‘Mum!’ he shouted again, his voice taut with panic.

There was movement to my left, people in the smoke near the clearing, but they were adults. They were not my concern, not right now.

Daniel was straight ahead. My son. My boy.

And then he was there, stumbling through the trees towards me, his face dirty and streaked with tears. I grabbed his little hand tightly and we ran, both of us coughing and hacking in the smoke, through the trees and back out into the vineyard.