Sometimes a young reader comes up to me and asks, ‘What happened to that girl on Deoli platform—the girl with the baskets—the one you couldn’t forget?’ Well, that story was written over fifty years ago, and it’s nice to know that the young reader of today is touched by it. I am now ‘old and grey and full of sleep’, but that girl on the platform is still there, as young and beautiful and sweet as ever, and I still see her in my dreams. That’s the ‘essential’ Bond—still dreaming…
