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canopy which makes Alice think of the carapace of a beetle. Perhaps her enigmatic expression is merely the result of the heat, the waiting, the kicking. Mr Armand thinks she is beautiful, an unexpected rural Madonna. When he returns with her photographs, he thinks, he will ask her to run away with him (he is eccentric).
    Flash! An explosion of chemicals and my great-grandmother is consigned to eternity. ‘Lovely!’ Mr Armand says in the parlance of photographers down the ages.
    The fate of the three glass buttons was as follows –
    The first one was found the same evening by Ada and thrust into the pocket of her pinafore. Before the pinafore was washed she transferred it to a little box of treasures and trinkets she kept (a length of red ribbon, a piece of gold wire found on the way to school). When Alice was finally lost for ever Ada took the button out of the trinket box and threaded it on silk floss and wore it round her neck. Months later, the evil stepmother Rachel tore the offending button off Ada’s neck, infuriated at the sight of her defiant, tear-stained face. Try as she might, Ada could not find the button and sobbed her heart out that night as if she had lost her mother a second time.
    The second button was found by Tom who carried it around in his pocket for a week along with a conker and a marble, intending to return it to his mother, but before he could he lost it somewhere and then forgot all about it.
    The third was found by Rachel, during a vigorous cleaning session not long after she moved into the cottage. She prised it out from between the two flagstones where it had lodged and placed it in her button box, from where, many years later, it was transferred to my grandmother’s button box, a presentation tin of Rowntree’s chocolates – and from there to Gillian’s stomach of course, and from there – who knows? As to the fate of the children – Lawrence left home at fourteen and nobody ever saw him again. Tom married a girl called Mabel and became a solicitor’s clerk and Albert died in the First World War. Poor Ada died when she was twelve after a bout of diphtheria. Lillian led a long, rather strange, life and Nell – who on this hot day is unborn and has all her life ahead of her – will one day be my grandmother and have all her life behind her without ever knowing how that happened (another woman lost in time).

CHAPTER TWO
    1952
    Birth
    I DON ’ T LIKE THIS. I DON ’ T LIKE THIS ONE LITTLE BIT. GET ME out of here somebody, quick! My frail little skeleton is being crushed like a thin-shelled walnut. My tender skin, as yet untouched by any earthly atmosphere, is being chafed raw by this sausage-making process. (Surely this can’t be natural?) Any clouds of glory I might have been trailing have been smothered in this fetid, bloodstained place.
    ‘Get a move on, woman!’ an angry voice booms like a muffled fog-horn. ‘I’ve got a bloody dinner party to go to!’
    Bunty’s reply is inarticulate and indistinct but I think the general gist of it is that she’s just as anxious to get the whole thing over with as our friendly gynaecologist. Dr Torquemada, I presume? The midwife angel sent to preside at my birth creaks with starch. She raps out her orders – ‘PUSH! PUSH NOW!’
    ‘I am bloody pushing!’ Bunty yells back. She sweats and grunts, all the while clutching onto something that looks like a small shrunken bit of mammal, a furry locket round her neck (see Footnote ( ii ) ). It’s a lucky rabbit’s foot. Not very lucky for the rabbit, of course, but a talismanic charm of some potency for my mother. I’ve gone off her actually. Bunty that is, not the rabbit. Nine months of being imprisoned inside her hasn’t been the most delightful of experiences. And recently there’s been no room at all. I don’t care what’s out there, it has to be better than this.
    ‘PUSH, WOMAN! PUSH NOW!’
    Bunty screams convincingly and then all of a sudden it’s over with and I slip out as