What if I had stayed? I felt guilty just having that thought after what I have put my family through. I feel no guilt about my brief stay in 2099, that was beyond my control and I would never have chosen to leave my home and family to venture into the unknown future.

As I sat down for another attempt at writing my official report I felt a surprising emotional pull to those few weeks in that very different world. The memories were coming back to me more vividly as the weeks passed and the initial shock and trauma began to wear off. The quiet life in our ‘safe house’, a magnificent country mansion, was making my real life in a 2023 London suburb ever more remote.

The clear skies, wonderfully fresh air and sheer abundance of nature were what many urbanites dream of, though probably not the primitive, dangerous life of The Hunters in 2099. I couldn’t help yearning a little for the comforting scent of roasting spits and the simple life they led, completely at one with their environment, the only life they knew.

I wanted to explain this in my report, I had not typed a single word yet. By 2099 London and presumably the rest of planet Earth, had returned to nature and yet it was not as it should be. Human interference in every part of life for more than a century had resulted in nature recreating itself into a form that terrified the Bunker People, who cowered in the remains of subterranean London.

My status as the mythical Lauren of London meant that I was protected from the dangers that lay outside The Hunter’s large camp. I had persuaded them once to let me go out with the women, children and old men gathering wild fruits. That wasn’t sexist, there were women hunters as well, the tough ones, though every woman was pretty tough. I surmised that anyone with a family predisposition to poor health had not survived the catastrophic breakdown of society. Truly survival of the fittest, these hunters had survived against the odds, plunged back into a prehistoric life without the generations of folk lore to guide them.

The computer screen remained blank and I could hear my boys fighting just outside the library window, I wondered where their father was. I hadn’t got my old life back yet, but after much negotiating my family had been allowed to come and stay here during the school holidays. My poor husband was subject to counselling and scrutiny, sworn to secrecy and his phone confiscated, but the last thing he wanted was to talk to the press after they had treated him as a murder suspect when I was missing. The staff here had persuaded him to listen properly to what I had to say, but he was not totally convinced. He promised to support me if I wanted to admit I was a part of some terrible hoax.

Our sons believed me. When you are five and seven everything in the world is new and amazing. For youngsters obsessed with dinosaurs and fantasy in films and books, it was easy to believe their mother had been transported to the future and back again. They were mainly interested in the strange creatures that grazed and hunted over the grasslands and woods that had spread out from natural parklands and gardens. Amazing creatures have always inhabited the earth and even in our own time if you met an elephant for the first time you would be terrified. Now add in the selective breeding that had gone on for centuries and the more recent legal and illegal tampering with DNA; even a non-scientist like me could guess what had gone wrong when infrastructure broke down and animals made a bid for freedom from farms, zoos, safari parks and laboratories.

The hunters could not understand this evolution, they just knew what to hunt for food and which creatures to escape from and scare off with their burning torches and thunderous drums.

My sons suddenly came rushing up to the desk.

‘Mummy, Mummy tell us about the wild cat again and the giant bison and the huge ram that ran you all over and why did you have to go and lose your phone so you couldn’t take any pictures?’

‘A tabby cat bigger than a lion, with teeth like a sabre toothed tiger attacked me. The hunter on a strong stallion rescued me and we galloped safely away, but I dropped my handbag…’

That was as close as I could get to describing the most terrifying moment of my life, I did not want to give them nightmares, but during the day they lapped up the stories.

‘And what happened when you were picking fruit?’

‘We all stayed close together, the hunters on horseback circled around us all the time with their flaming torches and loud drums, the fierce camp guard dogs warned them as soon as they caught a scent of dangerous animals, even before they came into sight. The dogs started barking in a frenzy and suddenly a ram bigger than a bull came charging towards us. He was not interested in attacking people, he had just seen another ram trying to round up his sheep, like we saw on that farm visit, but these sheep were as big as cows.’

‘What did the ram look like Mummy?’

‘He had curling horns as large as roller coasters and he wanted to attack the other ram, we just happened to be in the way. We crowded together, the fruit gatherers knew what to do and pulled me with them down into a dip, hiding in a prickly thicket. The hunters circled us out of the way and the ram thundered past, trampling a dog and knocking a hunter off his horse.’

‘Was the hunter okay?’

 ‘Yes’ I lied, shuddering at the memory.

‘Why didn’t they kill the ram?’

‘The spears they had found in the ruins of the Tower of London would never penetrate his mega thick fleece.’

I wasn’t sure where the hunters got their weapons from, passed down from their fathers they said, so this seemed a likely explanation. As I looked at the mixture of fear and delight on the boys faces I was so thankful I had survived to come back to them. No, I would not have wanted to stay.