FLong ago I knew a rare child with a name - it was Connie Waters - as pale and delicate as herself. Remembering her again this wintry afternoon has set me wondering about a whole summer of forgotten children. Seeing her there, alone and untouchable behind her iron gate, I saw, too, the children who used to pause at the gate on their way home from school. I was back in the clear, morning air of satchels and plaits and pinafores, of pencil boxes and sailor collars. I was hearing afresh the creak of garden swings and the hum of tops on the pavement. They were all there - Herman and Hertha Basket, Flora and Mildred and Mabel.

There was an affinity about this group of children which must have endeared the one to the other. Only on Sunday morning walks, when hand in hand with our fathers, did we behave with a feigned indifference. The weekly possession of a father made us feel, if we chanced to meet, rather ridiculous in each other's eyes. We had all reached nine or thereabouts that particular summer. We lived in similar bleak Victorian houses in the same suburban road, with an equal number of steps up to the front door. In all our gardens there grew either a lilac or a laburnam tree.

We wore our hair in plaits and, apart from Sundays, idled through the days in cotton pinafores excepting, of course, Connie Waters who had never been caught wearing a pinafore. Our Sunday straw hats were wreathed with garlands of buttercups and for-get-me-nots.

It was a summer when a sense of goodness hung in the air. Together, we became members of a movement called 'The Band of Hope' where we handed round tea to our elders and sang and recited. It was at 'The Band of Hope', one Saturday evening, that we swore, over a glass of water, to drink only water for the rest of our lives. We were given a tract showing a picture of British glass-blowers at work under the influence of total abstinence.

Sometimes we were sent out in the suburb to collect pennies for the heathen children, and on the missionary box there was a picture of a fat, black baby sitting under a palm tree. At that time, too, we liked to do sad things and would follow a funeral procession for miles into unrecognisable streets. But most of all we liked to sit under Hertha Basket's lime tree and read a book about a poor girl who was so lovely that there was no end to her loveliness, and who married the Prince from the castle which lay East of the Sun and West of the Moon.

The girl in the story made us think of Connie - pale and far off like the new moon above the castle. When school was over we would stand outside her high gate with its twisted iron  

flowers and look through the gaps into the unruffled garden. There were trellises with clematis growing on them and flower beds filled with prim, neat roses. There was a hammock slung between two trees on a wide, very green lawn. Connie wore flouncy dresses with long transparent sleeves tied at the wrist with black velvet ribbon. She had a burn on her arm which none of us had ever seen. Her long yellow hair was tied up with two bows on top of her head, the ribbon being looped across from bow to bow, like a white bridge. We thought she was like an angel and never attempted to put our hands through the gate. We would no more have dared to touch Connie Waters than we would have dared to be friendly with an angel who had dropped from the clouds. She was something to marvel at, like the fairy on top of a Christmas tree.

Connie rarely spoke to us but sometimes she would run up the steps of the large brick house to bring out her drawings for us to see. The charcoal pencil which she used made everything she had drawn look like a dark and stormy day. There were black suns and black floers with smudged petals and the windows of the little square houses seemed to stare like dark eyes in a white face. Connie drew the doors black, too, which made the houses look lonely and empty - as if everyone had felt sad there and gone away. Charcoal made such thick lines that the wands of fairies looked more like broomsticks and the sun hung in the sky like a large, black spider. We never said so to Connie, but we thought our own drawings of golden crayon suns and brightly coloured flowers much more pretty and clever. Nevertheless, it was a beautiful moment in our day when Connie held up the drawings behind the iron gate while we stood in a row outside in the street. For, often, she was only to be seen far away at the other end of the garden wheeling her doll's perambulator round the tidy paths or rocking herself to and fro in the hammock. On Sundays, only, when she walked beside her mother to church wearing a bonnet lined with pink satin, did we ever see her out of the garden. And I doubt if there was quite the same importance about her when she was no longer a prisoner behind the gate.

For a while I saw a vision of a child's face, and with it came back ghosts of other children lost in an unremembered summer. Very soon they will be forgotten again. They are already running into the distance along the road of the laburnam trees. Now, round the corner, has gone the last glimpse of a pinafore. The little forlorn ghost in the garden, is she still there? Or, in that startled flurry of a white skirt across the lawn, has she gone too, faded for ever into the winter afternoon?