Question

Essay on my five year old cousin has been lost

Answer 1

She'd gone in the blink of an eye. One moment my five-year-old daughter was playing beside me in the sand on a Sussex beach. The next she was gone.

I was distracted for something like ten seconds by an angry wasp, and when I looked up Katya had disappeared, lost in a crowd of 800 people on Camber Sands on a lovely summer's day.

The first moments of panic are horrendous: bewilderment, mad swivelling of the head, a tightness in the throat, then chest pains and the ghastly realisation that there was water everywhere. 

I thought of Madeleine McCann, of vile and loathsome paedophiles and of Lord knows what else.

Where is she? Where is she? Had Katya been snatched? Had she run into the water and was she, by now, already struggling to stay afloat? And if she had simply wandered off, which way did she go and how long would it take to find her?

In front of me was the sea, behind me sand dunes and behind that the road. And on the beach, to the right and left, lots of people. Strangers.