A Woman on the Edge of Time by Jeremy; Gavron

can’t help either. Susie says she would recognise the cottage if she saw it, and suggests we drive out together next time she is in London, though she is not due down for a few weeks and I am impatient. It is hard to explain why it is so important to me, but it is: this is the cottage where Hannah grew up, where she lived in the stories that until recently were all I knew of her childhood.
    I think about the Clarks. Susie says they stayed on at London Road after the Fyvels left, and though she doesn’t know where they went, it is not unlikely that they remained in the area. Clarkie would surely be dead by now, but what about her son, Roger, Hannah’s friend in my grandmother’s stories?
    Clark is a common name, and I am not sure it wasn’t Clarke or even Clerk, but searching online I discover a Roger Clark from Amersham, of about the right age, who belongs to a vintage-car club, and through this I get his phone number.
    When I call, Roger seems almost as delighted to hear from me as I am to have found him. Evescot was the third cottage from the left, he says. The Clarks’s was the end cottage. They lived there until 1961. Hannah came with my grandmother to visit when he was about fourteen or fifteen, he remembers, but he stayed in his room and refused to come downstairs.
    HIS WIFE IS about to have an operation, but he would be happy to see me after that. Less impatient now that I have found him, I suggest a day when Susie will be in London, and a couple of weeks later, Susie and I drive out to Amersham.
    On the way, Susie reminds me of my grandmother’s stories, some of which I have forgotten. The incident with the chicken shed was apparently part of a broader campaign Hannah waged against Clarkie. On another occasion, she helped Roger escape when Clarkie locked him in his room by instructing him to tie sheets together and climb out of his window. She also orchestrated the local children to hide in the brambles when Clarkie went blackberrying and to jump out at her. These stories carry me so readily back to the images in my childhood mind that I am almost surprised when we knock on Roger’s door and it is answered by a smiling grey-haired man and not the boy of my imagination.
    In his sitting room, Roger shows us a picture of himself as exactly the gap-toothed boy I pictured. Though when we tell him about my grandmother’s stories, he corrects us. His mother may have helped my grandmother out with eggs — it was her chicken shed — but she wasn’t anyone’s housekeeper. Nor was she ever cruel to him.
    He and Hannah, he tells us, were part of a gang of children living in the cottages who went around stealing apples and walnuts from people’s gardens, picking mushrooms, hunting squirrels with homemade catapults. The men were mostly gone to war, and the fields and woods and roads were empty. In those days, you could wait for an hour for a car to come along London Road.
    There was a rubbish dump a little further along, and they would search through it for anything they might be able to use — old toys, bicycle parts. They found a bathtub once, and dragged it down to the river, and plugged up the hole and used it as a boat. At night they would sit on the dump, smoking cigarettes.
    All this is new to me — Hannah the tomboy, as Roger describes her, running wild with her countryside gang. Though I wonder how much these are Roger’s stories, how much Hannah was actually present in them, whether she wouldn’t often have been at Chesham Bois or gymkhanas with Sonia and Tasha.
    He had seen Hannah coming up the drive, Roger says, the time she and my grandmother came to visit when he was fourteen or fifteen, and had shouted down to his mother to say he wasn’t there. Why? I ask. ‘Because she looked so beautiful and sophisticated’ and he was ‘a teenage boy with acne’. He stayed in his room until they left. That glimpse out of the window was the