Dimanche Diller

Dimanche was three years old when Polly Pugh arrived at Hilton Hall, the house her parents had lived in before they were lost at sea when she was just a baby. And let me tell you right now, this is not one of those stories in which the missing parents turn up at the end. You must just take it from me that every now and then fate deals someone a cruel blow. It dealt Dimanche Diller several, and the first and the worst of them was the loss of her mother and father. This is how it happened.

Sailing in their yacht Hippolytus among the rocky islands of the Cyclades, the Dillers were set upon by one of those storms that seem to come from nowhere. In a matter of seconds the sea had turned from blue to purple, and billows of black cloud had blotted out the summer sky.

“Cut loose sheets, Dolores! We’re carrying too much sail,” Darcy shouted above the sound of creaking wood and snapping canvas. “Batten down the hatches! You and Dimanche man the lifeboat.”

Dimanche’s mother was nothing if not thorough, and it was her thoroughness, even in the face of mortal danger, that saved her baby daughter’s life. She bundled Dimanche into her tiny lifejacket, wrapped her in a blanket and tied her securely to the thwart. She kissed her, and turned towards her husband.

“Don’t wait for me,” he shouted. “I must belay the mizzen! You get in with Dimanche.”

At that very moment, a monster of a wave, as strong as steel, rose high above the little boat, hung for a moment like a cliff of glass, and crashed on to the deck. It cracked the boat from stem to stern, splintered the mast, ripped through the sails, and tore baby Dimanche from her mother’s arms, casting the lifeboat and its precious cargo adrift upon the sea.

Dimanche cried and struggled as the storm drove her fragile boat far to the south and west. All night the great waves surged, tossing the lifeboat like a cork. Salt sea spray soaked Dimanche’s blanket, and an east wind turned her tiny face and hands to ice.

At dawn the next day, a fisherman from Kithira saw what he thought must be an empty lifeboat, rising and falling on the steady swell. He pulled in his net, and rowed across to take a look, hauling the battered lifeboat alongside with a boathook. Imagine his surprise when, looking in, he saw Dimanche, lying in a tangle of blanket in the bottom!

“Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Beauty,” he whispered, “who floated in her scallop shell past this very island, was not more beautiful than this child.” Tearing off his jumper, he wrapped the baby in it and rowed for home, marvelling as he did so at the birthmark on the baby’s wrist: it was just the shape of his own island of Kithira.

He and his wife were sorely tempted to keep the child, and how different this story would have been if they had done so. But they were parents themselves, and they could imagine all too well the frightful misery of this child’s mother and father, if they were still alive. Sadly they gave her to the village priest, whose job it was to care for foundlings.

The priest took Dimanche by plane to Athens, on the mainland, and handed her over to the police. By this time the wreckage of the Hippolytus had been discovered, washed up on the coast of Milos. Helicopters were searching every square mile of sea from Samos down to Crete and northwards to the Sporades but neither Darcy nor Dolores was ever found.

The Greek police handed Dimanche over to someone from the Red Cross, who flew her back to London and placed her in the loving care of the Sisters of Small Mercies. In due course the following advertisement appeared in the personal column of The Times:

FOUND DRIFTING IN THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA, it said, DIMANCHE DILLER, BABY DAUGHTER OF DARCY AND DOLORES DILLER, BOTH BELIEVED LOST AT SEA.

There was a number to ring and an address to write to.

If you are wondering how the nuns knew Dimanche’s name, it was because her mother Dolores was so very thorough. She had sewn tiny embroidered name tapes into every one of Dimanche’s clothes: her babygrow, her vest, her nappy, even her plastic pants, all bore her name in letters of pink silk. How did they know that Darcy and Dolores were the names of her late parents? The Greek Rescue Service had found the lost yacht’s log book, sealed in polythene and washed ashore with the wreckage. It gave them details of her course, and the names of the three people who had sailed in her. So far as anybody knew, it was all that remained to Dimanche of her dear parents.