Then there seemed to be a breakthrough. On their third day of captivity, they as usual begged Hopkinson to let them go, promising that they wouldn't tell, and he suddenly agreed. He let them have their first bath since abducting them and gave them back their school uniforms (he had forced them to wear his own, stinking T-shirts) promising he would drive them somewhere and let them out. The children were euphoric.
What he actually had in mind was killing them. He drove to Beachy Head with them in the boot, then pulled them out to push them to their deaths. Charlene's memory of this is more vivid than Lisa's. She recalls him dangling her close to the edge. “He was laughing, looking right into my face,” Charlene says. “Then he just said: ‘No, I want you for one more day.'” Bizarrely, Hopkinson then put them back in the car and drove them to a fish and chip shop. He told them to wait in the back seat while he went in and bought them sausage and chips. Again they were too frightened to try to escape, not knowing where they were and having been a whisker away from being murdered.
But their rescue was near. The next day police, following up a separate complaint from parents living near by who claimed that Hopkinson had indecently assaulted their daughters, knocked on his door. After panicking for a few minutes, effing and blinding, he simply opened it and told the officers: “I've got the two missing girls in my front room.” They remember being carried out into the sunshine and later, incredibly, gave a photocall on the beach for the press, posing with two huge teddy bears. The public did not know at that point the horror that they had endured.
Hopkinson, a former Bank of England worker and a member of Mensa, had been jailed for seven years in 1991 for kidnapping and assaulting an 11-year-old girl. He had been offered psychiatric treatment as a condition of a two-month parole period before the end but declined it. Having grown up in Zimbabwe and served in the armed forces of the former Rhodesian regime, he apparently suffered a nervous breakdown in the 1980s, which triggered a personality change. His marriage failed and he lost his job. In a book he wrote as therapy while in prison he noted: “I found the only company I enjoyed was that of children.”
With Hopkinson in prison, the girls' task was to get on with their lives. They returned to school almost immediately, the teachers having ordered the other pupils never to mention the kidnap, but things were not easy. Both went into counselling, which they loathed. To this day, Charlene seems almost as distressed by the memory of “therapy” as she is by the abduction. “It was about the worst thing they could have put me through,” she says, with a visible shudder. “No one understands how horrible that was.” When all she wanted to do was play with her friends, the therapy made her relive an experience that she wanted to forget. Lisa hated it too, so her father let her stop the sessions after four months. Charlene's father, however, wanted her to carry on and she attended for 18 months.
This was the catalyst for the girls' friendship breaking down. “In my head it felt like Lisa had got over it and I hadn't,” Charlene says. “That whole year and a half counselling ... my head was messed up and I just ended up hating her.” Charlene had already suffered turbulent years before the abduction. Her mother had died when she was young and she was placed in foster care for a time. Her father had brought her to Hastings from London to start a new life together. Her way of coping after the abduction was to put on an act of confidence, while Lisa's was to withdraw.
“When I was younger, I couldn't bear to be around Lisa,” Charlene says. “I put on an act and then I'd look at her and remember what really had happened. I hate the fact I used to hate her.” She admits that in a way she bullied Lisa, trying to get people not to like her. Then, when they were 16 and had left school, a mutual friend was killed in a car crash. Charlene telephoned Lisa to talk about the tragedy and apologised for everything she had done. Since then they have been inseparable again and say the only therapy they need is talking to each other. Not that they do this very often these days. They have, they say, moved on. Lisa has a partner and an 18-month-old son; Charlene, who trained in childcare, was in a relationship until recently. Their ordeal, they say, has not made them unable to have relationships with boys, though they cannot, understandably, imagine being with an older man.
And then they say something that may astonish many people. They say that in some ways what happened has had a positive effect on their lives. Both seem vaguely surprised that anyone would want to interview them about it because it is “not that amazing” but, in a climate in which missing girls such as Madeleine McCann dominate the news, they want to urge people never to give up searching because “children can come back”.
Do they not think that it robbed them of much of their childhood? Charlene says no. “What happened - it's not half my life; it's not even that,” she says, clicking her fingers. “It's not the worst thing that has happened to me.” Then she says that a part of her doesn't even regret it happening. “If someone said you can take it back, I wouldn't take it back. It has made me so much stronger. It hasn't brought bad out, it has brought out good. It has made me appreciate things.”
Does Lisa think the incident has devastated her life? “No, not really. I dunno,” she says. “I just feel normal, like nothing's happened really. I don't think I'd be who I am today [without it]. Sometimes I feel selfish; people expect us to be crying in an interview like this because it's getting to us. Sometimes I feel people are thinking: ‘Why aren't you more emotional about this? Why didn't it affect you so badly?'” Both say their parents have been more affected by it than them. But their philosophy, says Lisa, is: “You can either go one way and [think] everything's ruined or you can go the other and put it behind you. That's what we did.”
They know that there has been damage. Charlene cannot walk on the streets on her own and hates being alone in the house (she lives with her father). Lisa suffered nightmares for many months. Neither claims to feel anything for Hopkinson, except that he is a sad, dirty old man who failed to destroy them. Hating him would empower him and make them victims who are defined by his crime.
But their quite breathtaking lack of self-pity and belief that such terrible experiences do not have to be catastrophic is remarkable. Of course, we do not know whether they will still feel like this in future and whether their courage is partly teenage buoyancy. But for parents horrified by the crimes that paedophiles commit, for now it is comforting to see it as an example of the incredible resilience of children.
The Girls Who Were Found Alive,Channel 4, Thursday, February 28, 9pm.
