I heard the news on the radio: my parents and sister had died in a helicopter crash. How would I survive their sudden loss?

"I am lying in bed listening to the radio at my boarding school as my roommate is getting dressed. As she walks out of the door she says, See you at breakfast don't be late. I'm about to get up when the early morning news comes on the radio, and I hear the announcer saying my parents' names. By the time my roommate arrives at breakfast, everyone has heard."

"My friends run to be with me. The housemaster and his wife stand in the corridor outside my bedroom, not allowing anyone in. All they can hear are my screams and the smashing of furniture. It is beyond comprehension, but then everything from now on is beyond comprehension. On this sunny May bank holiday in 1978, my mother, father and sister had flown to Le Touquet in France for lunch, a journey my father had made many times, piloting his helicopter."

"A few weeks before it happened, a girlfriend and I had tied our sheets together and used them to shimmy out of our bedroom window, meet our boyfriends and go up to London for the night. The head girl reported us, but the teachers had no proof of what we had done, so we denied it and avoided being expelled. If I had been, I would have been with my parents and I would not be here today."

On a sunny May bank holiday in 1978, the narrator's mother, father and sister flew to Le Touquet for lunch and disappeared when air traffic control lost contact over the Channel; they were presumed dead. The narrator hears her parents' names on the early morning radio at boarding school and immediately collapses into shock, screaming and smashing furniture. Friends gather while the housemaster and his wife guard the bedroom. Aunt Bunny and the family driver Isaac arrive; Isaac sobs uncontrollably. The drive back to the family home in Harpenden unfolds in slow motion as the narrator sits alone in the back, stunned.

Read at www.theguardian.com