Mrs Baldwin

And then there's the one about the old woman who very apologetically asks the way to Church Lane, adding 'I ought to know: I've lived there since the war'. So you go with her. This comes with variations, usually leading (via a list of demented ancestors) to calculations of how much time you've got before you're asking the way to your own house. But it's not so often that you find the one about how, whenever you hear of someone diagnosed with cancer, you have to hide that muffled pang that clutched you, at fifteen, when you saw Pauline Edwards holding hands with the boy from the Social Club you'd always fancied.