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to me as hearing about something that would happen to someone else, many years from now.
    Once we reached Paddington, I insisted that my father not wait for the train to leave. He had barely said a word to me on the journey from home, and I didn’t think I could bear the tension between us a moment longer. The panic that for weeks had risen inside me whenever I thought about going away, nasty spurts of fear that only sleep could temporarily quell, had actually eased a little now I was on my way. I knew I would feel better still once I was alone.
    â€œPlease don’t wait,” I said again, when he seemed reluctant to move. “It won’t go for almost half an hour yet.”
    â€œWell, if you’re sure,” he said, and looked at me properly for the first time in weeks.
    I looked down because I thought I would cry if I didn’t. My father had always made me feel quietly adored, and I didn’t seem to have entirely ruined that. He pulled me towards him briefly and then patted me awkwardly on the back.
    â€œTake good care of yourself, won’t you?” he said, and when I looked up from searching in my handbag for a handkerchief, he had done as I asked, just as he always had, and vanished into the melee of the station concourse.
    My hand was trembling as I pulled the door of the second-class carriage shut behind me and took a seat. After what seemed like an age, the whistle blew, the last door slammed, and the train started to move off down the platform. I had unthinkingly chosen a seat facing backwards, and as we picked up speed and pulled away from the station’s grimy bulk, I experienced the unnerving sensation of watching my hitherto life recede into nothing.
    As we gathered speed across the metal tangle of tracks that erupted out of Paddington, I reflected on how strange it felt to be making a journey I had last made as a little girl. My mother had grown up just five miles north of the valley that shields Fiercombe Manor from the rest of the world, and so this was a journey she had done many more times than I, clattering back towards the easy green fields of her girlhood.
    She had left for London to work in service when she was sixteen. My father, a groundsman she met a few years later, was a Londoner who didn’t understand the appeal of the open countryside. On the contrary, he had found the silence and emptiness oppressive on his sole visit to meet my mother’s family. It was too dark to sleep, he said, and never went again.
    By the time I was born—a good way into the marriage—a pattern was already established: my mother visited Painswick once each summer, while my father stayed at home. In my earliest years I went along with her, but at some point that changed, my mother deciding there was no sense in taking a child on a long, stuffy train journey. After that I went to my father’s sister in Archway instead.
    My own memories of Gloucestershire soon narrowed to a few crystalline images: my grandmother’s dresser with its ranks of Blue Willow pattern plates; a morning when I was allowed to eat slice after slice of buttered toast because my mother wasn’t there to say I was greedy; being wrenched through a late-summer field by a dog that was stronger than me. After I had stopped going, my Gloucestershire relatives seemed content enough with a new studio photograph of me every so often. There was apparently no thought of them coming to London. After my grandparents died within months of each other when I was ten, we seemed to lose touch with the rest of them altogether. Now I was returning, though I could never have predicted the reason for it.
    The first leg of the journey passed quickly. I was hungry—I was always hungry by then—and so I made my way to the buffet car and treated myself to a round of ham sandwiches, which I washed down with lemonade. I hadn’t experienced any strange cravings, only the urge to eat lots of red meat and anything