The screen burst into a pat- tern of green leaves and pink briar roses.

Briar roses and honeysuckle had been cunningly trained to festoon the trees, until the whole effect there was one of enchantment.

The drift was thickly overgrown, a dank tunnel out of whose bushy sides the tendrils of brambles and briar roses caught at his clothes.

I believe I had envisaged something of the picture40 postcard variety, something romantic, rustic and picturesque, an ancient thatched cottage cosily nestling in flowery woodland, with briar roses thick in the garden hedge, and lilacs crowding beyond the chimney pots.

A bower of briar roses guarded the final stile that led into Nod and, in later life, Paul never smelt that sharp breath-taking sweetness of the wild rose without remembering the languor and warm happiness of those golden afternoons with Molly Piggott.

The leaves of the tree over him rustled softly, and among the fresh green smells there came the scent of the red flowers that grew along the water's edge; a scent that brought a brief, nostalgic memory of the old-fashioned briar roses in his mother's garden when he was a boy.

Turn the torch on it to see what had happened . . . Turn the torch into the midst of this circle of briar roses, brambles with wicked thorns - onto an outflung arm, a buried face, a logo and acronym, red on white cotton - ARRIA and the raven-woman.