She was the first girl I ever ‘noticed’. Perhaps not a well-chosen term. Earlier I had pulled little girls’ pigtails but did not count that as “noticing”.

I did not want to pull Sybil’s pigtails. She did not have any!

Once I had started to earn some money as proof-reader for the Zionist Record I invited her to the cinema and in the dark, very boldly, I dared to put my arm around her shoulder.

A few days later her father, Dr B., invited me to tea. I realised I was being looked over. Was I a respectable young man? Was his daughter safe with me?

He asked about my schoolwork, my plans, my parents. I must have passed muster because he invited me to drop in again. He probably felt he had a double responsibility as father and mother. Sybil’s mother had died a year or two earlier.  He still wore mourning clothes.  There were several photos of the mother around his house. He had been a successful GP but I picked up rumours: patients were deserting his practice.

Why? Because of his eccentricities., I asked no questions but soon heard – people at Bulawayo were gossiping about it. He was striving to establish contact with his dead wife. He had become a spiritualist.

It was not a matter I dared raise with his daughter. She lent me some books and we discussed these books. This was obviously an intelligent girl. But spiritualism – which I dismissed as hocus pocus – I dared not raise. And she certainly never did.

I then went off to university at Johannesburg. She told me she was hoping to study literature at Cape Town. She had relatives there. After two or three exchanges of letters our contact petered out.

Fast forward: many years later. I was on a London Underground train. Sitting opposite me, struggling to control three hard-to-manage children, sat a lady who might have been Sybil. But those unruly kids kept her busy. I was not entirely certain this really was Sybil. And she never looked in my direction. So we never spoke to each other.

And I did regret it – but later.

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