My instructions are to take the right diagonal from the station ticket barriers. The concourse is full of people: I scan the figures more than, at this distance, the faces. No, that one is too short, that one’s clothes look too young, bright blonde hair isn’t how I remember her. But she could have changed. We haven’t met for nearly 50 years. When we first set eyes on each other it was 1955 and we were both 11 and wearing the stiff green uniform of that stifling school in Acton where I learnt the rules which govern apostrophes (‘Haberdashers’’, because there were lots of them, ‘Aske’s’ because there was only one Robert Aske) and the inappropriateness of disliking Jane Austen. The school’s regimentary attitude announces itself in all the formal photographs we had to have taken: rows of uniformed girls with ironed hair-ribbons. The person I’m now searching for at Birmingham station was my best friend; we clung to each other in what for both of us was a rather alien environment, and we left the school together at 16. She married even before I did and went to live in Canada. Now she has come to England for a holiday, to stay with another friend in Birmingham.

Suddenly she springs out of the crowd and I see the face that I met in 1955: smooth, open, friendly. We hug each other tightly. The years fall away: we aren’t nearly 70-year-old grandmothers, but girls again, pristine, guileless, unsullied, pawns in our parents’ and teachers’ hands. One day our class teacher asked us to hold our feet above our desks; it was one rule among many that our shoes should always be freshly polished, so here we were being checked up on. Her shoes, the Start-rite sandals of the advertisement, with a T-strap and little holes in the toes, gleamed orange-brown in the sharp sunlight of the classroom. They were much the shiniest in the class and certainly a lot shinier than mine. The teacher congratulated her, but I knew it was really her father and not her who had buffed those shoes to such a congratulatory sheen.

I wonder why that memory has lasted when others haven’t.