Owl, compass and rose on an upper arm

Eighty-odd years back there was a girl called Edith Marl who kept an owl in a biscuit tin behind the chapel at Thornbury. Not a pet, mind. It came when it pleased, and it sat on the chapel wall at dusk watching the sea as if the sea owed it money. Her father charted for the coast boats, and he had given her a brass compass the size of a pocket watch. Its needle never settled when she was cross, which was often, and the owl always seemed to know which way it would swing.

The trouble began the summer the rose by the gate died in a single night. Everyone blamed frost. Edith knew it was not frost, because the owl had sat on the dead stems all morning and would not say why. So she took the compass, a bread knife and the tin, and walked the cliff path until the needle shivered and pointed at a hollow thick with wild roses that smelt of old pennies.

In the hollow she found a boy's cap gone green, a bottle with a curl of paper inside, and a lamp that was still faintly warm. The paper was in her own handwriting, though she had never written it. It said only: come back the way you went out, and mind the needle. The owl dropped onto her shoulder then, light as a glove, and the compass swung true to the north.

She walked home without looking back, and the rose by the gate came up pink the following spring. I have never been sure whether she wandered or was found. That's the thing about compasses, children. They tell you the way. They never tell you whether you were lost.