My first intimation of the meaning of death came when the little girl next door died of diphtheria. We were both the same age, and she was only six when she died.

We had played together ever since I could remember. My father had made a small gate in the wall that separated our gardens, and I was as at home in her house as she was in ours. In the springtime we would break branches off my father’s lilac bushes, tie them into small bunches and then – secretly – carry them in a marketing basket to the corner of our lane where it joined the main road. There the two of us would squat conspiratorially, doing a brisk trade – for not yet understanding the value of money we would sell a really generous bunch of lilac for a very reasonable price. In any case, we only needed the money to buy packets of assorted liquorices called Students’ Fodder, of which we were extremely fond.

Then there’d be the time of ripening cherries. The trees in our garden were small and easily climbed – ideal for two little girls to plunder. In the summer we would go for excursions together. Either I would join her family on trips to the Zoo or Botanical Gardens, or she would come with us when we went on our Sunday Picnics to the woods or nearby river. My father was an expert in picnics, and he always managed some rare surprise for us.

In the autumn we’d collect chestnuts and acorns. And came winter we went skating together on the lake in the park, holding on to each other as we learned to balance. Once snow started falling in earnest we’d pull out the old toboggan that my father had used as a boy and, dragging it behind us through the snowy streets we’d make for the tobogganing slope that was set apart for children to enjoy the snow. How I remember the cold clear winter smell as the afternoon turned into early dusk, and then the icy winter night! I saw her in the coffin. She looked as if she were asleep, in her Sunday-best frock, and her favourite doll Rosa by her side. Her hands were neatly folded, strange hands in their immobility. All I could think of was how I had played with Rosa not so long ago. And then I became terrified at her mother’s grief – I had never seen an adult crying like that. I could not understand.

Not until we went to the cemetery.

The day of the burial was a heavy December day. They had brought the little coffin and left it in the chapel. The chapel was cold and bare. It had snow-white walls and grey stone floors, and the coffin stood on a solid stone slab in the middle of the room. Just above it rose an enormous window through which the sky-wide and lonely on this snow-laden evening – seemed to enter the room.

Then they carried the coffin into the cemetery which to my six-year old height seemed to stretch endlessly in all directions. It is winter, and there are no flowers – only the bare, ice-hardened earth and granite grave-stones all blacks and browns and white. No colour, no comfort. And standing by the side of the open grave, watching the straps that let the coffin sink down into the hard earth I see my father’s hand tremble as he holds the prayer-book in his gloved fingers, and the wrinkle near his mouth carve sharp and deep into the skin. The earth is frozen, and falls heavily onto the little coffin – clop – clop – covering it completely, making a small mound of earth.

And suddenly – standing under that enormous dome of threatening sky I understood that she had gone away for all time. I can still feel the intimation of that immense loneliness as we turned away, and left her there, a little girl alone under all that weight of earth.

An then, through the gathering darkness, the snow began to fall.