Memories grow hazy with time and sometimes we fill them in with the pictures adults paint for us. I did not really remember the long journey back to England after Saffie disappeared but I do remember being back in that house of my grandparents. I hated it and I remember feeling constantly afraid of what was going to happen next.

My mother seemed numb and silent and strange. I could not understand it as a child, but it was in the days when doctors handed out vast doses of tranquillisers and all my mother seemed to do was sleep.

I would go and climb into my grandparents’ bed to feel the warmth from their bodies. Mum always seemed so cold. I would pretend in the dark that it was Saffie who lay beside me.

Sometimes I would wake up and Gran and Grandpa would be holding and rocking me. I never knew I was crying. I cannot remember if it was then that I began to sleepwalk or on another visit to that house. I would wake in the dark on the stairs or downstairs and I always knew in those moments that Saffie was near.

I would see her turn a corner ahead of me, a small, lonely shadow, and I began to believe that she was not really dead but somewhere I could not reach her; somewhere trapped where she could not get back to me. Her puzzlement and fear touched me with icy fingers and I would shake and shake my head over and over and whisper, ‘No. No. No. No.’ I had to banish the sensation of her frightened and alone. Banish the sickness that rose up in my throat for the dark unknown thing that had happened to her.

I remember vividly the day Grandpa had to fly away from us to join his regiment in Northern Ireland. Someone else large and safe was leaving me. I would go and sit in his small dark study and stroke his sweater, smell his smell of tobacco and whisky which reminded me of my dad, too.

I was too young to understand why, but the atmosphere in the house with Mum and Gran became stiff with resentment and I clung protectively to my mother as I felt Gran’s disapproval of her.

Later, when I was older, I realised it was always this way between them; something unsaid that has always unnerved me in its intensity.

One morning I heard them shouting at each other. Terrible words that I could not make sense of and made them both cry. Mum told Gran that she was taking me to stay in a chalet in Cornwall belonging to Fergus’s parents while she thought about what she was going to do.

I remember Gran’s face as they shouted. She suddenly said.

‘David was a wonderful husband and father. He did not deserve to be betrayed by you and his best friend…’

We left the house abruptly in a taxi. On the train Mum tried to pretend it was exciting but I’ve always remembered how long that journey was and how the tears slid down her face underneath the dark glasses she wore when she thought I was asleep.