My mother stared at the question for a long time. She had had months to prepare for this moment and yet she still struggled.

You’ve lost your hearing.
I know that. Why?
You’ve lost your eardrums.
What are they?
They help you hear.
How did I lose them?
A bomb, in the car park.
Which car park?
In London. On your birthday.

I lay back, tired, my hand aching. I remembered a glimmer of why I had been carrying bottle of lemonade, why it had been dark outside. The pain receded a little more. That’s how it is — the brain orders and makes sense of even the inconceivable, and pain’s power to confuse diminishes. A while later, when I could, I wrote again.

Can we find them?

Find what?

My eardrums?

What was my mother supposed to write? What could she say? How could she begin to guess how much hope there was in my mutilated body?

No. They got broken too badly.

I closed my eyes. I had travelled across the south of England, as a grey dawn seeped over hedgerows, heading for London, wasting my time worrying about my heart breaking? Just how many parts of my body could break?

How long have we been here?

Four months.

What month is it?

March.

When?

1972.

What happened to your face?

I got cut by glass but it’s OK now.

Will it get better?

Maybe.

The next day when my mother came in, she wasn’t alone. A small blonde woman dressed in a white coat came with her. She took out a pad and wrote on it, tore the sheet off and handed it to me.

My name is Miss Handel. I am here to help you, to help you get up and start moving about.

I read this and panicked. I wanted to stay in that room for ever, with my mother. Just the two of us, safe and clean, the door closed. I shook my head, looked at my mother, who began to write as well.

John — I know this is hard but enough time has passed. You have to get up, begin to move, or you never will.

I shook my head and began to whimper. Miss Handel glanced at my mother and wrote another note.

John — TU come back tomorrow. Think about it for a while.

I tried to scrunch the single piece of paper, failed and dropped it on to my bed as Miss Handel left. All day my mother wrote, explaining how I could be normal again, that life wasn’t over, my skin had healed, my bones had set. She wrote pages of notes, explaining that she knew I was scared, that I was frightened of everything, that she would be there … on and on. The next day Miss Handel came back and I whimpered again, and for days after that.

But of course there was an end to it. I’d always loved to move, to swim, to dive, run and, of course, to fight. The dream of doing these things again had been planted in my now ever-cautious mind. Eventually I let Miss Handel handle my legs and arms, move my joints, but only after I had written,