* * *

When I left St Thomas’ Hospital, early one freezing morning in December 1972, I was fourteen. My limp was noticeable but improving and I could nearly straighten my right arm. The scars on my scalp were covered by a shock of jet-black hair but the weals on my face were bare. The maze of cuts and stitches, the patches of borrowed skin on my legs were covered by jeans, those on my back by a jumper and duffel coat. It was a tin-cup of a day, hard and hollow, frost still on the ground. Harry came with my mother and me to the car — not a Morris Minor but a brand-new, emeraldgreen Triumph 2000. Harry fielded the few photographers there, come out of curiosity to see the wreck of the boy who had been hidden for thirteen months. They must have been disappointed, for apart from the madness in my eyes and the mashing of my jaw, there was nothing to see. The deepest and most damaging scars were invisible.

At the car I turned to Harry and hugged him, speechless. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what I would do without him. It was then that I noticed I was taller than he was, by many inches. I looked at his thinning crown of hair and wondered what I was going to do, what was going to happen to me. What was I going to do now? I drew away, got into the car and sat staring straight ahead as my mother and Harry hugged, exchanged goodbyes. In my hands were the two things I took from my Aladdin’s cave — the picture of the dwarfed surfing men and the black and gold poster, ‘John Player Special — for when you want the best’. I unrolled them and looked at them in my lap.

As my mother started the car and pulled away, the automatic doors of the hospital lobby flew open and Hyacinth came tumbling down the steps. I wound down the window and waved as she jumped up and down, flesh jiggling, blowing me kisses with both hands.

My mother touched my arm. ‘Do you want to go back?’ she mouthed.

I shook my head. I never wanted to go back there again.

JOAN

11 April 1999

If I was asked which sound rings undimmed, unchanging in my ears over years, I would have to sit for a while and sift through my memories before deciding. The sea has always whispered to me, all down my life it’s been there. And with that endless restlessness come other sounds - seagulls shrieking and mast wires clinking as boats shift; pebbles turning and waves tapping sea-worn rocks. Or there’s the creaking wrought-iron gate outside my grandmother’s house in Southdown Road in Plymouth, which rang out a three-note chord of rust and neglect whenever it was opened; she refused to oil it, saying that the sound had become a friend, and I can hear that iron shriek now. Nearly sixty years ago that gate was blasted from its hinges and thrown hundreds of feet but I can still hear it. I remember, too, the sound of the sirens, whooping and blatting across miles, and the memory makes my heart race, makes my limbs jump and think of death. And, of course, there is the dripping of buildings. But I know that if someone were to ask me to name a sound that rings undimmed, unchanging in my ears over years, I would say -having considered oceans, bombs and sirens — it is the sound of John screaming when I left him in hospital.