I buried my eight-year-old daughter. Eight years later a new student walked into my classroom with her face, and when I finally called that girl’s parents in for a meeting, the door opened and my own husband was standing in it.

That was when I started teaching English at[ Calderhill] High. I had taught before, years earlier, and then I had not for a long time, and then I could again.

And then one morning in the September a new student turned up at my classroom door.

She said: sorry I’m late, I’m Etta.

And while she said it she tucked a curl behind her ear.

I dropped the marker.

The eyes. The small crease at the side of the mouth that is not a dimple and that I have never been able to describe to anybody. Even the thing with the hair — the same hand, the same movement, the same speed.

That is what Iona would have looked like at sixteen.

Not similar. Not a reminder. That.

I cried in the staff toilets at lunch and then washed my face and went to my afternoon classes, and in the car afterwards I said the sensible thing out loud to myself, which is that Etta was not mine.

Iona would have been old enough to remember me. Iona was buried at [Wrenfield] and I had chosen the stone and I had been to it that January.

There is no version of any of this in which my daughter is alive and I have never once let myself go near that idea, not for a second, and I want that in the record because of what people assume about women in my position.