Catherine grew up in the village of Cressington that had long since become a suburb of the nearby town. Her street was one of late nineteenth century houses that backed onto the 1960s junior school which she herself attended. By 13, she was delivering the local evening paper. Mum had not been entirely happy about this and insisted she carried an alarm and constantly warned her against speaking to strangers. It was on her paper round she first met the soldier.

She delivered papers to houses along the streets around where she lived, including a copy to her own house. Her dad joked, in fact, that she would not get a Christmas box from him. In the spring and summer delivering papers seemed no chore at all and she could be back indoors completing her school work before mum got home from work. After the clocks went back and the evenings drew in it was different. No matter how hard she tried she could never get back from school soon enough to begin her round much before ten to four. If the weather was poor she would be finishing her round in the dark.

It was one such evening that Catherine first met the soldier although at the time she did not realise he was a soldier. It had been damp and misty all day and by the time she began her deliveries the streets were shrouded in a clinging damp that threatened to soak the newspapers in the yellow day-glo sack in which she carried them. But neither the weather nor the dark worried her: her route was around well lit streets that she had known all her life.

She had just pushed the newspaper through the letter box of the house two doors from her own when as she turn to leave she was startled to be confronted by a figure coming down the pathway. It was too dark, despite the street lamp back on the road, to make out much of him until he stepped into the light thrown by the security lamp high on the wall behind Catherine.

'Evening,' he said, 'foul weather. You must be Eileen's little girl?' He was not tall, shorter perhaps than her dad. He had fair hair cut so short that it was barely visible beneath the black beret that was pulled tight over his head. A dark heavy coat with shining buttons reached below his knees the collar was turned up against the weather.

'No,' replied Catherine as she edged passed him, 'My mum's called Joan and we live at number 32. Good night.' The air had suddenly gone very cold.

She saw him again many times that winter, but only in an evening when she delivered to number 28. It was odd. His conversation never got far beyond the basics and more than once he again mistook her for 'Eillien's little girl'. Sometimes his coat was undone to reveal a brown uniform beneath and it was always cold down the side of number 28.

Funnily enough it was school that first tipped her off that he must have been a soldier. It was during a history lesson. They were watching a video about World War Two and soldiers were seen getting ready to go into action or parading and she recognised the heavy coat he wore and the beret. She guessed that army clothing must have changed over the 50 years since the war and that maybe he had bought the coat and the beret at one of the many places, the stall in the market for instance, that sold surplus army equipment.

She carried on with her paper round right through her last two years at school despite her mother's worry that it might interfere with her GCSE work. It was never time consuming and even when she got the chance of two rounds when someone else went sick she could still get home with plenty of time to tackle her school work. And she said hello to the soldier regularly throughout that two years though she noticed that she saw him less as the evenings got lighter and not at all after April.

Catherine mentioned him to her dad. 'Soldier? I don't think there's any one in the army living there. Mind you. he'd be away most of the time. A young couple live there don't they? Could be a brother I suppose.'

Her school work obviously never suffered because she did well enough at GCSEs to gain entrance to the local Sixth Form College to begin A-Levels. She had even began to think about her career: journalism was what she wanted to do.

As well as their principle subjects, students were offered the chance to undertake a general studies course if they wanted to. As she had ambitions to work in current affairs she eagerly opted to take the course. It was just her sort of thing - looking at world events using TV programmes and discussing the issues. One week, just before the Christmas break the tutor, Mr Wilkins, came in with something a bit different.

'Hey Catherine, you're interested in journalism aren't you? There's a bit of a story here.' He brandished a video cassette. It seemed his wife worked in the Local Studies Library and for as long as she could remember in the corner of the stock room had sat a box of film cans. On the box it had simply said the name of the town and the name 'Councillor Rigby'. There were no projection facilities so the box and its contents had been ignored. Then over the last ten years or so, technical changes had made it possible to cheaply convert cine film into video so that it could easily be viewed on an ordinary television. Many companies advertised this facility. One operated locally and library staff had been able to persuade them to tackle the box of film for not much more than cost.

'At what's more,' Mr Wilkins added, 'a lot of it is about your village. Councillor Rigby was from Cressington. That's where you live isn't it, Catherine?'

So they sat and watched the compilation of what were in effect bits of a home movie, edited badly, or perhaps not at all and strung together with no sense of proper order. Some bits were colour, others black and white. There was no sound but there were sometimes home made title frames to explain scenes. Some of it was scenes from domestic life - kids playing in a garden that Catherine recognised as belonging to one of the big houses two streets from her own. Sometimes there was film of council meetings or school sports days.