The letter to Gladys Jones arrived without fanfare - and probably without much hope of a reply.
It had been sent by a family she’d met just once on a Danube riverboat in Vienna five years earlier.
A little boy’s shoe had threatened to muddy her skirt as he’d knelt up to get a better view, but she’d laughed it off and accepted his father’s invitation for coffee and a slice of Sachertorte (a rich Austrian chocolate cake) by way of apology.
On Gladys’s return to England, she’d sent a note thanking him for his hospitality. Then, one imagines, this middle aged wife of a Chester dentist considered the encounter no more than a souvenir of her 1934 holiday.