Nearly two decades ago a 10-year-old schoolgirl penned a message in a bottle and launched it into the sea off Sheppey during a family holiday.

Susie Hampton was enjoying a week-long break visiting her father Cliff’s friends John and Marion.

The letter was addressed to “whoever picks up this bottle”, and read: “Hi my name is Susie Hampton. I’m 10 years old.

“I put this bottle in the water on 25/8/97. Can you write and tell me where you found it and when?”

She included an address for Kings Road, Minster, where her father’s friends lived.

Susie, who grew up in Slough, forgot about it and in the intervening years met and married Chris Gander. The couple live in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.

But on Monday, March 27, the bottle washed up 216 miles away in the Netherlands.

It was found in Vlieland, by Pieter Schaper, from conservation agency Staatsbosbeheer, during a beach clean-up.

He contacted the Times Guardian in an attempt to track Susie down and, in less than a week, she was located.

Susie, now Mrs Gander, 30, said: “I saw the appeal when it first went online.

“I thought the handwriting looked like mine, but I kept thinking it can’t be me as I’ve never lived in Kent.

“I got a phone call on Monday night from my dad, telling me it was me and he told me all about the holiday – now I can remember it, it’s all come back to me.”

She yelped when she realised it was her message, adding: “I was so excited, it was just a bit surreal. When you do something like that as a child, you don’t actually expect it to come back to you.”

Mrs Gander, a personal assistant for a telecommunications company, said the news was very touching.

“Me and my husband have had a very difficult couple of years. I was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in December 2014.

“I have beaten the cancer now; I’ve been in remission since May 2015 and now this has fallen around the same time as my last check up, so it’s all good news.”

Mrs Gander is writing an autobiographical comic strip about overcoming cancer, called Perry Winkle.

It will be out in October and she hopes to raise money for Cancer Research UK.

She drew the sketches during chemotherapy, adding: “I’m not very good at talking. Drawing was a way for me to get things out of my head and on to paper, like therapy.”

More at www.perrywinklecomic.com