Yesterdays of their lives - Miss Streatley

It's hard for me, the narrator, to write evenhandedly about Miss Streatley. That's because both of my hands aren't necessarily doing the same thing when I'm thinking about her. But I'll do my best to paint a truthful portrait of her, worts and all (her windowboxes are full of wild flowers like mugwort, bladderwort and St John's wort).

You'll know already about her penchant for long A-line skirts, her brown hair drawn tightly back into a bun, her steel-rimmed glasses and sensible shoes. You may not need reminding that she works in Wellminstow Public Library and lives in a small, well kept flat in Fenton Gardens. But you probably do not know that she never wanted to be a librarian, nor may you have ever mapped the circuitous route by which she arrived in Wellminstow.

Tabitha Streatley had, at the age of fourteen, run away to join the circus. As a young and preternaturally flexible teenager living in a chocolate-box West Country village there was little to do other than practise flickflacks and arabesques on village green for the amusement of a few strangely stunted and lethargic children (one of whom was a banjo prodigy and none of whom, contrary to certain beliefs about the genetic traits of the residents of such villages, had gills), Ned, a pudgy, middle-aged man with glasses and a greasy comb-over, who wore a duffle coat and who sat on the edge of the park bench and kept his navy nylon shopping bag clamped a little too firmly in his lap, and Gaston, the village idiot. Who happened to be her uncle. We can picture her with her hair in pigtails, her freckled face flushed from her exertions; she is barefoot, her charcoal grey school trousers rolled up to the knee and her white blouse covered in grass stains.

The day Tabitha Streatley disappeared from the tiny village of Much Sodding on the Marsh was a grey day indeed for her family. Her parents didn't find out until late in the day, when Tabitha's euphonium teacher, Mr Stroud, called them to say that she had not turned up for her lesson. He had been privately worried that his predilection for gazing at her as she laboured over her arpeggios and murmuring 'Big lungs' had somehow been misinterpreted by his pupil. Who was his cousin. And who had her own views about what 'tonguing' meant. Tabitha's parents had put the phone down and asked Ned, who often came round to the Streatley's cottage overlooking the village green for a cup of tea round about the time Tabitha got home from school, if he knew where their daughter had got to.

It was true that their daughter had been a little uncommunicative lately. They had put that down to the fact that the presence of the circus on the village green had brought a halt to her tumbling practice. Little did they suspect, when Tabitha complained how much she hated the circus, that this was a ploy; that when she said that she wished it would go away and let life get back to normal, this was a diversionary tactic. Because as soon as that Big Top went up, Tabitha had been in there, watching the trapeze artists practising high up beneath the translucent roof of the tent, chuckling as the clowns drove their Krazy Kar round the ring and breathing in the smell of horses, lions and greasepaint. And minutes later she was demonstrating her quickfire tumbling skills to the moustachio'd ringmaster (also known as The Ring Master, but that's a different story), snatching the euphonium from a band member and improvising a Theme to the Krazy Kar as it careered round the ring, and pleading for a chance to join up with Frollick's Circus.