Old photographs, and the way they turn up when one least expects it.

This one fell out of a book I was reading (Bladderwrack's "Tomb of Reason", if you're interested) and I immediately forgot the matter at hand.

Caroline Vickers was her name. "Vick" to her pals. Started as a service pilot, I think; ferrying the big four-engine jobs to stations all over the south-east. Somehow or other she fetched up in Trollenberg, after the wind-up, when we and all the other scientific units were scurrying about trying to get our hands on anything and everything before our (former and until very recently) "allies" could get their greedy paws on it.

She stayed attached after we brought a shipload of rocket parts in varying stages of completion or disintegration back to Penda's Fen, from where we could shoot off a few of them across the flatlands without disturbing the locals overmuch.

Lovely girl. She's buried on the moon.