‘What a madhouse,’ my mother muttered, as we pulled, at last, into the ugly concrete box of the car park. The man on the radio announced it was eleven o’clock and the two minutes’ silence began, during which we were to remember the war dead. I saw people stop in the streets and lower their heads; even London itself seemed to quieten a little. We collected a ticket from the machine and the bar rattled upwards. She was about to turn up the concrete spiral to the next storey when I spotted a car pulling out a couple of lanes down on the ground floor. I flapped my hand. ‘There, there.’

‘Oh, well spotted, pumpkin!’ and my mother smiled her wonderful smile.

I remember every word of this inane exchange because it was the last I ever heard. Hardly Homeric. Every day I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t seen that car pulling out of that space. We’d have been moving upwards, moving away, climbing the spiral. I wonder what would have happened if my mother hadn’t missed the turn over Battersea Bridge. Because the manner of living seconds and minutes mattered, although we didn’t know it then.

My mother pulled into the vacant space and stretched, rolling her head on her neck. My heart thumped as I pictured the shops on King’s Road in which, somewhere, there was a pair of Levi’s waiting for me. I opened the car door, climbed out and stretched. My mother was rootling in her handbag looking for her brass, circular compact. She found it and began to dab at her upper lip in the rear-view mirror as music burst out again on the radio, the two-minute silence at an end.

The curious fact about bombs is that your experience of them is over before the sound waves hit you. No matter how close you are — and I was close — the blast of them is the last thing you experience. Must have been the last sound I ever heard and yet I have no memory of it. My eardrums caved in like the wooden coastal shacks of Japan in the path of a tsunami; they folded and fragmented, floated away down my middle ear, sleek and thin as onion skin. Another curious fact is that your mind and your brain don’t know what to do with the information they’re receiving about this event — an event so violent, so unexpected. It has no referents, no previous experiences of same. When the world shunted and blew apart, as I thought of Levi’s jeans, I didn’t know what was happening. I was thirteen years old exactly - what did I know of Sinn Fein? Of Orangemen? What did I know of the barbed wire circling Belfast and the British soldiers crawling, helmeted and fearful, within it? The Celts and the Picts still at it.

I was hurled against the car, which was turning, crumpling in the same direction as I was travelling, slamming my face into jagged metal. Mortar and concrete blocks showered down. A vast, solid section of the ceiling fell and landed on the overturned car, saving us from the cascade of mortar, the Catherine wheel of concrete. I was wedged in the space beneath the ceiling, pressed against the chassis, and the exhaust pipe burned the skin on my arm as I lay there, deaf, bewildered and thirteen. My mother was apparently mewing like a kitten, the mirror of the compact embedded in her hand, the glass of the windshield embedded in her face.