The two of them stayed with me all day as I screamed. Neither of them was working, they’d come in because my mother had asked them to, and they listened to me screaming for hours. One of them went home to eat and change and the other sat by my bed, trying to hold my hands, trying to calm me, and then they would switch. Hours passed and, exhausted, I slept. I woke up screaming. A doctor came in and gave me an injection and I slept. I woke up screaming. Hyacinth lasted a day and half, Harry three. And I screamed. I could feel in my throat that I was making no sound by the third day.

It is hard to understand this if you haven’t spent a long, long time in hospital. At first it is a blur, it doesn’t matter where you are because of the pain. And then it’s a prison, boring and endless, punctuated by the mundane. Gradually it becomes a comfort, the mundane becomes the anticipated, the manageable. It encompasses the patient and the patient embraces it. Finally it becomes a prison of a different kind — the bars on the windows, over the door, are of the patient’s making. Food, comfort, routine, warmth, baths, companionship - all are to be found there. But outside the hospital doors? Who knows? The bomb? The big bad wolf? The Father?

I screamed because the routine of my days had been shattered. I screamed because my wish — that my mother not leave me — had been ignored. I screamed because I couldn’t stop the world changing.

The night that Dr Laws phoned and Sonja told him that I wanted to have the operation, we lay on the settee and both silently acknowledged exactly what that meant. It wasn’t a pardon but it was a reprieve. And that night, for the first time in months, Sonja and I made what she describes as smoky love, as opposed to pistachio love. I can’t explain it but I know what she means. Twenty years is a long time to share in someone.

I woke the next morning, early as ever, watching my face turn red, but instead of hauling my body from the iron bed to escape that image I lay there staring at the ceiling. Sonja was asleep, smelling, as always, of sweet toffee. My mind drifted and, unleashed, it recalled a night many years before when we had gone to a gig in London.