Minstrel mystery

Christmas 2018

Bink came home for two days, at Christmas.

This in itself raised Christmas considerably higher than one or two previous Christmases. For instance, Christmas 2013 when we had absolutely no idea where she was nor any way of finding out. I wasn’t convinced we’d even know if she was no longer alive, though Shaun assured me months later (it’s the sort of momentous conversation you don’t think to have at the time) that of course the news would have reached us somehow.

Now I make myself face the fear again, I’m still not sure how. Woman of unspecified age, hoodie and joggers, dies on the street on a cold winter’s night, no ID. Happens all the time, I imagine...

Anyway, it didn’t happen then and it didn’t happen this year and there is much to be grateful for.

On the previous Christmas Day, 2017, instead of going to church, we held a service in my father’s bedroom. He had broken his femur a few weeks before his 100th birthday celebrations, and we hadn’t yet had a stair lift installed. It took me a good half hour to persuade Bink out of bed to join us – in the end, she did so out of kindness, because I said it would be the best Christmas present I could have, all of us in the room together – and in that very-Bink-way which sometimes gives me such hope for her future, she most graciously told me at the end of the day that she was glad I’d persuaded her and she enjoyed Christmas more out of bed than in it.

True, not long after that she crashed very badly and was briefly back on the streets again.

It was weeks before we understood why. Earlier in that December 2017, Serena had found for her an apparently perfect place to live. Five minutes from Serena herself, so Serena could provide company and Bink could provide help with Serena’s then six-month-old. In an immaculately clean house. Which was affordable.

Alas, we realised afterwards that the reason it was so immaculate and Bink felt so at home was almost certainly because the landlady herself had OCD: after three days she evicted Bink on the grounds that she (the landlady) had noticed that she (Bink) had not yet had a shower.

The cruelest and most destructive thing anyone could possibly have said to her…

Bink, who can take months to summon up courage even to brush her teeth. Whose life has been wrecked by wondering whether she is clean enough. No wonder she felt such despair, after this comment, that she preferred to sleep on a bench for a freezing night or two while we were all wondering why she wouldn’t come to the New Year’s Eve party we so enthusiastically invited her to…

So this year, this Christmas, was better, right?

At nine am or so, we called her down for tea and stocking-openings in the kitchen. She wanted to stay in bed. At ten, Buck’s fizz and oysters: Bink never says no to champagne. But she did. At eleven, I tried to get her up to join us for the service we were again holding in my father’s room: he has a severe chest infection and can’t get to church. She seemed to say she was coming… but didn’t. So we waited and waited. I tried again, and tried. We waited some more.

Eventually, the conversation reached that point it often has before, which chills me to the bone.

What do you want, Bink?

I just want to die.

There is nothing in her life... nothing, nothing, nothing... that she looks forward to and enjoys. There is only pain. Unremitting, unrelenting pain. There is only a longing to end it all.

Is there any treatment for such despair? Is there any help out there or indeed anywhere, for someone whose life is so dreadful, so unbearable, that all she can do, if she won’t – thank God – kill herself, is hide under the covers and wish she could sleep for ever.

At some stage I happened to tell her that after our service we would be going to our newly opened local, and singing carols for them.

This she said she would like to do, but it would take her forty minutes to go to the loo so could we please go ahead with the service without her?

She was very jumpy in the pub: could only sit in that one chair over there, that Ben happens to be on already, or she wouldn’t join in; became very distressed by the dogs being so near her.

But she sang, and she seemed to find it worth doing.

Now here is the paradox.

Or not. 

That evening, after my extended family had gone home and we’d settled my father upstairs and lit the Christmas tree candles and stoked up the fire in the twinkling magical light, Rose wanted old-fashioned charades. Proper charades, where you have to guess the whole idea. None of this one-syllable sounds-like cheaty-rubbish.

We had some good ones: Serena conveyed Brexit in less than seconds, as soon as she started arguing with herself. Primordial Soup took me a little longer, a few odd bubbling bloopy sounds, a fish flying up into a bird and a Neanderthal evolving into a Frenchman.

Then it was Bink’s turn. I honestly think I may have laughed more in those next twenty minutes than in the whole of 2018 till then.

Bink gasping, dying of thirst, licking the tiniest drop not appearing from heaven. Bink’s face, so forlorn it was like the funniest cartoon of any misery you’ve ever seen. Bink’s hands twitching at her neck, like a penguin trapped and wrapped in packing tape with only its fins flapping. Bink shooting an arrow with a whoosh and explosive pop. And then back to the desperately doleful face and the palms like fins fluttering at her throat.

Got it yet? Neither did we, though we laughed so much we didn’t care if we never got it at all. She could have continued the performance till morning without explanation and it would have been a night out to remember.

Eventually somebody – Serena, of course – asked Bink if she realised an albatross could have a wingspan of twelve feet or more at the exact same moment that I said, ah of course, instead of the cross the albatross, and Bink said, how on earth could she know the size of an albatross and how did the ancient mariner get it round his neck in that case, and would we really have guessed it if she’d stretched her arms out and flapped them wide apart like this, instead?

So we said, well, at least then we would have stood a chance.

And then Alex gave her another and she enacted the most terrifying child-eating clawed and roaring dinosaur, enough to give us all nightmares for weeks, and this turned out to be a packet of Frosties and somebody said, Bink, please don’t go into marketing because you haven’t yet quite got what it takes to present a friendly kiddies’ breakfast image that parents will go for.

And the next morning, long before Bink was up, I said to everyone else in the family, “There must be hope for Bink, right? How can it be possible to be so sidesplittingly, hilariously funny” – which set us all laughing again, just thinking of that woeful expression and frantic flapping – “and not enjoy life? There must be a solution...”

Until Alex mentioned Kenneth Williams, Tony Hancock, Robin Williams… and all the other comics who hadn’t been able to bear it any longer in the cold light of day.

Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
And my throat
Is deep with song,
You do not think
I suffer after
I have held my pain
So long?

Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter,
You do not hear
My inner cry?
Because my feet
Are gay with dancing,
You do not know
I die?

Budget shortfall.

We apologise to our customers, but due to recent cuts it is not possible to provide:

1. Ennoblement.

2. Athletics.

3. A dozen of any one item.

We have substituted with one vicar sleeping in the hope that this will give satisfaction.

(If you don’t wish to accept our substitute please tell the driver and indicate on the form provided.)

Your understanding is much appreciated.

[Normal service will resume as soon as possible.]

(PS In the interests of research we did in fact make a visit to the Upper House and discover there is no such thing, anyway. Staid lot, in the Other Place. Unlike vicars-sleeping, which are still relatively plentiful, lords-a-leaping are now to all intents and purposes virtually extinct. We might just about have persuaded a few lords spiritual to prance about the lawn in their surplices…

(For example, here is one just before he leaps – though we fully appreciate it’s not quite the same thing:)

Eleventh...

[Normal service resumes at Epiphany.]

Tenth...

(In pub with drummers. Won’t be long.)

[Normal service resumes at Epiphany.]

Ninth day...

(MU tea-break. Back soon.)

[Normal service resumes at Epiphany.]

Alternatively:

Eighth day...

[Normal service resumes at Epiphany.]

On the seventh... here we go...

(And almost as many seagulls.)

[Normal service resumes at Epiphany.]

I might as well inflict a few more of these on you…

And here:

And here is one seriously ambitious seagull:

On the sixth day...

[Normal service resumes at Epiphany.]

(PS for my speciesist daughter: Don’t, Serena. Please. Just don’t, ok? Of course I know the difference between turtle doves and common-or-garden fantails; but we live in a highly urbanised culture, and – as long as you keep schtum – there’s just the teeniest tiniest sporting chance that one or two seriously-hungover readers may not notice…)

The only useful present-day...

That may be it, now, folks. Unless I can be bothered to go down to the river and find the correct number of swans a-swimming.

[Normal service resumes at Epiphany. Unless I have any interesting news in the meantime...]

On the fourth day...

You’re going to have to take my word for it: there genuinely are four birds in this tree, calling to visit our bird-feeder below. I think a blue and a great tit, a sparrow and I suspect the robin I’d just seen on the lawn, but I had to be jolly quick to get exactly four – no more, no less – so I didn’t have time for an extensive ID check.

[Normal service resumes at Epiphany, after which you will be spared more of my dreadful photography. Except on Sundays.]

Happy third day...

Please don’t get too excited about this. I’m not going to find eleven pipers (or whatever it is) all in one place, am I? Or not before Burns Night, anyway.

[Normal service resumes after we’ve had twelve days of this nonsense.]

Happy second day...

[Normal service resumes at Epiphany. Assuming I can work out when Epiphany is…]

Happy first day of Christmas!

Here’s a bit of Christmas trivia for you: the pear tree of partridge fame was in truth a tree of English quinces. Like these.

[Normal service resumes at Epiphany.]

Analysis

December 1997. Twenty-one-years ago.

Bink was home. All our worries over. We thought.

For the rest of that week, we found ourselves giving press conferences; smiling for photo calls; opening hate mail; bracing ourselves for patronising opinion pieces telling us where we’d gone wrong. 

I slipped up – on the way out of a meeting with journalists for which we’d all agreed, with Gordon our liaison officer, that I wouldn’t say a word – when one of them asked whether we would be telling Bink off.

Were they mad?

Does the Good Shepherd rebuke the lost lamb, found in the crevice of a cleft rock? Does He wag and nag as He brings it home, rejoicing, on His happy shoulders?

My brief unguarded negative gave rise to plenty of angry column inches: our indulgence of this renegade who had cost the taxpayer such a fortune, and wouldn’t even be punished by her parents. (She hadn’t, of course, as the Met themselves pointed out in response: the resources are there anyway; and what better use can they be put to, than reuniting a child with her parents?)

Virginia Ironside, agony aunt for the Independent, delighted in many hundreds of words telling the Telegraph’s agony aunt how she had gone wrong. In all my years of suggesting ideas to enquirers in the writing of my own column, it had never once occurred to me to intervene in the lives of people who hadn’t asked me to. I hope it never would. 

I sincerely trust and believe that if Virginia (whom I liked very much) had, God forbid, lost her twelve-year-old for an agonising day and a half, and thought her dead, I would not have presumed to tell her why her child had disappeared, or how she the mother should have been better caring for her family. (Indeed, the first principle I laid out in my own book on childrearing is that we parents shouldn’t knock each other: we all love our children; we’re all doing the best we can; and the spectacular survival and success of the human race suggests our best is pretty darn good.)

But alas, we were doing it all wrong, apparently.

We shouldn’t have made Bink share a bedroom with her younger brothers, for instance. (Presumably it never occurred to this worthy agony aunt that there are some who can’t afford a bedroom for each child. It obviously hadn’t occurred to her that Bink preferred it like that, and had chosen to share a room with Alex and Ben rather than sleep on her own.)

Nor should we be in the habit of watching the tv with our children, as we had been doing on the evening before she disappeared. This was interfering, oppressive and over-controlling in the extreme. No wonder Bink ran away, if our children had so little freedom...

It’s silly to be hurt by it, I know. Such journalism is a game, not to be taken seriously.

(As it happens, there was a return match many years later, when Virginia visited Serena’s school, and Serena came home hooting with laughter at her hilarious advice. A teenager has authority no mother has, and I was able to relate the scene, in Serena’s witty words, in my own paper. Sadly Virginia wasn’t able to take my tap on the chin with the reticence I had exercised over her blow some years earlier, and retaliated in the letters page. I believe, more than once...)

None of it matters. Some of it was funny. It is all a very long time ago now.

What does matter, still today, is something which has only hit me now, with deep sorrow, as I relate these events with the objectivity of twenty-one years’ reflection.

Bink’s brief disappearance was in every national newspaper. Most of which chose to comment, in one way or another, giving plentiful unasked-for opinions on the incident.

Was there no psychiatrist, or psychologist, or therapist, or mental health worker of any kind whatsoever, reading all these words, seeing all this spewing-out of unnecessary and sometimes vitriolic analysis, who could have joined the dots for us? Who might have had an inkling that this is not the normal behaviour of a happy twelve-year-old, living in an intact family?

Who might have rung alarm bells? Who might have helped?

Who might have said, perhaps Bink isn’t well? Perhaps there is an explanation for her need to run? Perhaps she could be taken to someone who knows more. Perhaps diagnosed...

So that perhaps we – and far more important, she – could have been spared much of the last twenty-one years of almost unbearable pain.

(And the tax-payer, if we want to care about such things, over a million quid.)

Not one?

Ah well.

Bink is coming home late tonight, from the Priory, for Christmas Day.

Her next month is assured: she is repeating the bootcamp programme, which has done her much good already. After that, mists of uncertainty swirl into the future.

Sufficient unto the year be the evil thereof.

There will be no posts from me now until Epiphany. (Except possibly a picture of a partridge in a pear tree, if I can find one.)

Please enjoy your Twelve Days of Christmas, as best you can. And, if you will, rejoin me – and Bink – in the New Year.

On Twelfth Night... or what you will.

Still hoping...

Fourth Sunday in Advent

I passionately believe in being cheerful.

I also believe in being honest.

When there is a conflict, truth trumps optimism every time. There is absolutely no point whatsoever in any writing which lies to the reader.

Some years ago, a clergyman friend criticised one of my novels. I love feedback, so I welcomed this. And was intrigued and taken aback when I heard the reason.

I hate spoilers so I won’t tell you the full story, but the crux of it was that he said I shouldn’t have written a novel in which a believing, practising Christian turned out to be the baddie. I gave this much thought... until he told me he also thought CS Lewis shouldn’t have written A Grief Observed. A work I very particularly admire.

Lewis, my friend said, should have rejoiced when the love of his life died. He let the side down by being open about such searing and brutally honest grief. Where was his faith?

I have nothing in common with such a view. Absolutely nothing at all. Lewis faith was howling, as his heart was breaking, on the grave of Joy Davidman, where any man’s love would surely be. Where my father’s was – a man whose Christian example I have looked up to all my life – when my dearest mother was laid in the cold, dark earth and battered and soaked with the winter winds and bitter rain.

The truth will set you free. I genuinely believe this. (And on a much more humble and personal level, that being honest, describing exactly what I see and feel and know, will set my writing free.)

Was Saint Peter a good example? Such cowardice and deceit! Or indeed, Mary and Martha, with their petty domestic quarrels; Martha’s lack of faith in the resurrection; Mary’s selfishness in leaving Martha to do all the work?

Do we really believe these friends of Jesus should have been sanitised and smartened up into better rôle models for us?

At its most basic level, would they then really be more helpful models, such perfect plaster saints we could never emulate?

A few days ago, I couldn’t imagine anything positive I would be able to bring myself to say about Bink’s situation, when it came to today’s post.

I had pinned so much hope on her having treatment at last... This year had promised such a game-changer... Everything apparently about to be torn up and lost…

Today, the future still looks stuck somewhere between uncertain at best and bleak at worst.

Nevertheless, there is still much to be optimistic about:

1. Bink came to the theatre with us on Thursday. Romeo and Juliet, Barbican. She claimed to be bored... but noticed when both title rôles deviated from well known lines. “A rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” “I deny” (not “defy”?) “you, stars!” We sat over tea afterwards, discussing whether this was a difference between the Quarto and Folio as the opening chorus is… or simply a mistake. How bored can you really be, if you are listening? 

2. And she is coming home for Christmas Day. Here is her list of instructions:

   a) Buy new bed linen for her.

   b) Not from Primark, because it must be in packets.

   c) Clean the table of whatever room she is sleeping in. (Which mustn’t be her own room.)

   d) Clean the shower.

   e) Again.

   f) Buy all the following: loo paper (in unopened packet); kitchen paper (ditto, distinct from loo paper); hand-wash; flushable wet-wipes; clean bottle of water (no good from the tap); sanitary products.

&c.

Good news. Really. She is coming home.

See? It is possible to be positive. (Whilst also being honest...)

(PS Oops: I seem to have pre-scheduled this a day early by mistake. I am getting the hang of this technology thingy, really. Anyway, you all knew this was today’s post, right? I will now attempt to preschedule tomorrow’s, so I can start thinking about Christmas presents. After which there will be silence from me, for twelve days.)

Click, ticks and rituals, cont...

Circa 1996

Bink about ten years ago:

‘The final rituals were to do with coming out of the water: for some reason that I can’t quite remember now, it was very important to move each part of my body from being in the water to being in the air in exactly the right way. One aspect of the logic behind this was that I wanted to whip my body up out of the water as fast as I could so that there would be no soup suds left on my skin (you know how if you stand up slowly from a soapy bath it leaves bubbles on your body, but if you quickly plunge down and up again it doesn’t). Another part of the “getting out” process was to get my hair in the exact right position (slicked back by lying on my back in the bath and then coming up out of the water face first). The main part of my “getting out” ritual was, from sitting up, to lie back down in the bath, touching my head on the bottom of the bath, and then sit up again. I had to do this as fast as possible, and smacking my head on the bottom of the bath as hard as I dared, and I would do it over and over again until it felt right. Then after that, the final ritual was a very long one to do with lifting my genital area out of the water. I can’t even remember now what the original logic was behind this process, but it was the most important part of the bath and eventually this one thing in itself became the most enormous, vital task, which sometimes took me up to half an hour (making me very late for things).

‘After I got out of the bath, my hair was not allowed to touch anything until it was dry, apart from when I put on my T-shirt and jumper, which was another ritual to get them over my head exactly straight so as not to mess up my hair. There were rituals for getting dressed too. It could take me ten minutes to do up the zip on my trousers. I wore slip-on shoes because laces or Velcro would have been to hard to do up exactly right. Putting on underwear was a big task: I had to pull it up in the exact right way so that it would be exactly straight, with the label in the very middle of my back and the side-seams in symmetrical positions. I would pull them up and down over and over again, until it felt right. Of course, I also had to do all these rituals every time I used the loo (as well as all the wiping rituals). I remember one time when I was about thirteen, when I changed my underwear before going to bed. At least, I meant to change my underwear, but after spending about twenty minutes pulling up what I thought was the clean pair and finally getting them on “right”, I then discovered that I had actually put my dirty underwear back on. So I had to choose between wearing dirty underwear all night, which made me extremely uncomfortable, or having to do the ritual all over again. I wouldn’t have minded the extra twenty minutes, but the main annoyance of the rituals was not that they were time-consuming, but that they were extremely stressful.

‘So I kept the dirty underwear on.’

Beginnings...

Circa 1996

Bink, about ten years ago:

‘One day when I was about eleven, I wrote a list of all the things I had to get done that evening (homework, music practice, brush teeth etc.) and then ticked them off as I did them. Because I found the list useful, I used it again the next day, adding a second column of ticks as I did the things. I kept the list for about ten days, each day ticking the things off, until there was no more room on the page. Then I wrote up a list on my mother’s computer, so that I could print one each day. I used these lists every day for several years, until I was fourteen. I had two separate lists. One was a list of daily tasks, which included sensible things like homework, but also various things that I had to do each night before I went to bed, including: brush teeth, wash face, use loo and set alarm clock. The other list was a set of things that I had to do in the bath (which I had every morning before school, getting up at 6.30 to give myself a good hour or so before leaving the house at 8.15). I had a whole set of rituals that I did in a certain order each time I had a bath, and each of these rituals had to be ticked on the list. They included washing each individual part of my body, as well as: wet hair, put shampoo in hair, rinse hair, check hair. Of course, “wet hair” doesn’t just mean get hair wet; it meats a complicated ritual to make sure that hair is completely wet. “Check hair” involved rubbing the bit of hair in the very middle of my forehead, next to the scalp, between my thumb and finger to hear it squeak (when I was little, my mother told me that clean hair squeaks when you do this). I had to make seven squeaks, and if they weren’t satisfying enough they didn’t count. Then I had to do the same thing with the hair at the nape of my neck. Another thing I had to do was hold my body under the water for a certain length of time (a few minutes); with my face, of course, I dipped it underwater several times and timed how long each dip was. The longest ritual was that I had to sit in a certain position in the bath for fifteen minutes. The point of this ritual was to clean my anus, and the special position was intended to make my legs be spread as wide as possible. There was a difficult ritual to get into the right position, which I then held for fifteen minutes. As well as this, I spent a long time each morning cleaning out the inside of my vagina (they never tell you useful things in those school sex education lessons, such as that it’s a bad idea to wash inside yourself). I saw my genitals as by far the dirtiest part of the body, which I think was because of being bullied in a sexual way at primary school, and I was very anxious about getting them completely clean. In fact, genitals were not just a particularly dirty part of the body; they were actually in the category of “dirty objects”, such as poo…’

[Continued…]

Tombstones in the mist

Monday 8th December 1997.

[Bink, about ten years ago, cont…]

‘In the middle of the night, I woke up. The cemetery was all misty and completely silent. I could see the gravestones all around me. I knew I should be scared but I wasn’t. I just looked around at all the tombstones looming out of the misty dark, thought: “Oh right, graveyard, dead people, ghosts,” and then went straight back to sleep. I didn’t feel anything at all.

‘When you have a very strong emotion, it overwhelms your capacity to feel anything else. This is why very perturbed people are able to self-harm, though under normal circumstances it’s almost impossible to hurt yourself even slightly. (Try sticking a pin into your skin.) When I was in the graveyard, I was unable to feel any fear because of that overwhelming sadness.

‘But something very interesting happened after I came home. That first night as I lay in my warm bed again, I remembered the night-time graveyard and became absolutely terrified. It was as if my emotions suddenly caught up and made me feel what I should have felt that night but couldn’t. It wasn’t an abstract sense of fear: after the sadness had subsided, I felt genuine and present fear of the dark graveyard.

‘Early on Monday morning, I was woken up by a gardener pruning the trees or something nearby. I lay still in my sleeping bag behind the bush. I think he probably saw me, but he pretended not to. After he had gone, I packed up my stuff and left the cemetery. There were lots of commuters walking on the path through the cemetery on their way to work, and they stared at me coming out from the bushes and walking across the grass. I hoped they would just think I was on my way to school and for some reason had gone behind the trees to look at something. Then I went to Hammersmith Broadway, which is a big shopping centre and Underground Station near my school. On the way I passed my school.

‘There were several police cars outside it. I thought there must have been a problem at the school; but I crossed to the other side of the road anyway.

‘When I got to the Broadway, I went upstairs to the bus shelter and just sat there for several hours. Eventually an old lady came up to me and asked me if I was OK. I said, “Yes, I’m just waiting for my friend.”

‘I thought I looked normal.

‘She gave me £5 to get myself a meal...’

Found

[Forgive my posting a little late this morning: worries about Bink. I will update you when the news is more encouraging. It will be. The Shepherd never stops searching…]

Monday 8th December 1997, evening.

Around 7 o’clock that night Serena, and Shaun’s two sisters, arrived back at the Vicarage, escorted by the police. With the best present I’ve ever had... before, since or ever.

A (slightly sheepish) Bink. Not harmed. Not hurt. Not murdered or thrown in a ditch. Not even run away for ever.

Just Bink. 

Just dear, wonderful if slightly baffling Bink.

The police, in the way of the wonderful British Police, made a quiet and unobtrusive exit, leaving us to enjoy being together again: all six of us, now the boys had been brought home. Alas, the slightly less unobtrusive British press were still camped out, if not quite in our front garden, then certainly on the road beside it.

The police had smuggled Bink through the door of the church, a long way down the next road; through the unlit vestry; through what we called “the secret passage” – the little vestibule between vestry and Vicarage – into our house. But the press weren’t fooled, and were now ringing our doorbell incessantly.

Thank goodness for our neighbours beyond our garden wall!

Thank goodness, too, that we had left a gap in the trellis above for our children to scramble between our gardens. We all climbed through it that night, over the wall, leaving the press still leaning on our doorbell.

Never before had we ignored anyone calling at our door. Not on Shaun’s day off, nor at three in the morning. Not when the children were having supper, nor at nine o’clock on a Sunday night when we had at last finished for the week, poured a glass of wine and turned the telly on to watch an Agatha Christie and relax together at last.

Never did we ignore wayfarers at our door. So we had to get out of the house, to stop me feeling guilty...

When have we ever celebrated as much before or since?

This our child had been dead and was alive again: had been lost and was found.

(We had no idea that she might die to us and be lost again many times before today...)

When we got back some hours later, they were still camped on the street outside. With uncanny instinct, though we never turned on any lights, they knew we were back and starting ringing the doorbell again.

All we could do was go to bed and try not to take any notice. We had the advantage of being very tired. Some time in the night they gave up the game, and the last car drove off.

The didn’t give up for long, though.

The next day was when the onslaught really started. Bink had been lost and found all in one day, leaving the papers cheated of their story.

The last thing we wanted, now, was press attention. We just wanted to be left alone. To find out why Bink had disappeared.

But that didn’t seem fair. We had to give the papers what we could, to thank them for Bink’s homecoming. The rest of the week was spent on a gruelling round of press calls and photographs.

Had it helped?

I often wondered that afterwards. Wouldn’t she have come home anyway, without all that intrusion? Well, it was certainly how she was traced so quickly: a teacher saw the lunchtime news, saw Bink walking past, and rang the police.

No doubt she would have been found, and brought home again, eventually. Probably safely. But she might have spent another night on the streets... and who knows what danger that might have brought?

The irony was that she herself had walked past a news placard saying a West London schoolgirl was missing... and it never even crossed her mind that she was that lost child.

Still. That lost child.

Alone

Monday 8th December 1997

Dictated by Bink about ten years ago:

‘When I was twelve, I ran away from home. I left a note which said: “I’ll be back soon, so don’t worry.” This was supposed to have a double meaning: at first my parents would think I had just gone for a walk and left a note saying that I would be back shortly. Then, when they realised that I had run away, they would reinterpret the message and realise I would come back one day soon.

‘I planned everything in advance. I decided that the best time to leave would be on a Saturday night, because with church on Sunday morning my parents might not notice that I wasn’t around, so it would give me the longest possible time to get as far away as possible.

‘I packed a sleeping bag and a rucksack full of food - at least, it was supposed to be full of food, but the only thing I could find in our fridge was a jar of cooked cabbage. I also took my Post Office Account book, in case I needed to take money out.

‘I left the house at about 5 in the morning and walked to Hammersmith, which was about two miles from our house and the area my school was in.

‘I spent the whole day just walking around Hammersmith. I didn’t have a coat and I think it was quite cold, but I didn’t really notice that. I didn’t feel like eating anything all day either. I wasn’t really thinking about anything - in the same situation now, my brain would be whirring round and round, turning everything over consciously - but I had a huge, deep feeling of sadness. The sadness was because there was something very badly wrong with my life. I didn’t know what it was but I knew there was.

‘On Sunday night I went to a cemetery which was on the route of my bicycle journey to school. I knew that the cemetery gates were locked each night at dusk, so I thought I would be pretty safe. I wondered why homeless people didn’t shelter there at nights. I hid in the cemetery and waited until the gates had been locked, and then I looked around for a place to sleep. There were bushes lining the cemetery walls. I chose a tree by the wall to sleep under and I got my sleeping bag out.

‘Several times during the night, I heard helicopters flying overhead...’