I could not see who had spoken. The voice was male, confident, well-modulated. The voice of a man in charge. I was relieved he had arrived. Surely he would soon tell the camera operator to stop filming. The imminent end to my ordeal gave me courage. “Where shall I look, then?” I asked.

“Look at me, if it would help.” And the man stepped in front of the light.

He looked young, in his mid-twenties, and wore a suit and a thin moustache. I liked his face; it was boyish yet serious, with an expression of sympathy. “Just speak to me as if you had met me in the street,” he told me. “Now, how did you travel to the studio today? By omnibus or train? Move your head a little, out of my shadow, and I want to see some animation in your face as we speak.”

It was a great deal easier when there was someone to address. “By train,” I said tilting my chin.

“Use your hands too,” he said. “Did you come from Waterloo?”

“Yes, I did!” I had ceased to be myself. I was outside my own body, watching this stranger performing as if she were in a film. I put my hands on my cheeks and widened my eyes. “All the way from Waterloo on a train!”

“And was your seat comfortable?”

I took my hands away, lowered my chin and gazed up at him, pretending, as I had done all my life, to be someone else. If no one liked my attempt to be a film star, at least I would have the comfort of knowing it was not Sarah Freebody who had made such an idiot of herself but a formless, nameless product of her imagination. “Oh, it was splendidly comfortable, sir!” I assured the man.

“No need to call me sir, Miss Freebody.” I felt his hand upon my wrist, and he turned to the darkness behind him. “Dennis, I believe we have enough.”

“Cut!” said Dennis, and the noise of the camera stopped.

The man turned back to me and shook my hand. “Thank you very much. That was very nice. Please do stay for lunch, then a car will take you to the station.”

It was over. The dead glass eye of the camera was no longer following me. I could feel perspiration trickling between my shoulder blades. Exhaustion spread through my body. “Could I have a glass of water?” I asked.

“Jeanette, water for Miss Freebody!” ordered Dennis.

I sat on a canvas chair and drank the water, watching Dennis and the man who had spoken to me standing in the corner, talking and nodding. I wondered who the man was. Dennis’s superior, evidently, but how important? I was grateful to him, whoever he was. I had been floundering, and if he had not actually rescued me, he had given me the opportunity to rescue myself.

Back in Haverth, they would be waiting for my triumphant return. For a few days their expectations would remain. But then I would receive another letter from Mr Bunniford, which I would burn in the kitchen range before Mam or Da or Frank could get hold of it.

Crumple. Whoosh. Crackle. The end of my adventure.