I walked out of his room, nodded to Harry and Hyacinth, and moved away from him. His screams filled the space around me, filled the ward, filled the world. I heard the door close behind Harry but the sound was not diminished. I walked stiff-legged down the corridor to the lifts, my handbag crushed under my arm. I saw nurses and patients, orderlies and visitors all turning, amazed, towards the sound and yet I walked on. A matron who knew me, knew John, who realised the source of the screams, moved towards me and I looked at her, shook my head slightly and kept walking. I’ll never know how I did that. How I walked away from the sound of John shattering his voice like glass, so bereft that I knew his throat was tearing, bleeding. I knew that he was locked in a silent world and I had left him alone in it. The lift came and I dropped down, bag still clenched. I walked out of the building to my car, turned on the engine and began to drive out of London. I made it as far as Batter sea before I stopped the car by a phone box and called Tommy’s, called the ward to speak to Harry, and I knew, even as they went to fetch Harry to the phone, that John was screaming still. I could hear him five miles away down the phone line.

I’m sixty-five years old. I was thirty-six when the bomb blew and yet I still think of John’s high-pitched baying in the hospital, still think of him screaming and twisting as his flesh was seared and melted like wax, lying under the rubble. People say that enough time has passed, that I should forget. But they don’t realise that sound can play endlessly; I know that there is always a part of me listening for that scream, imagining it almost. Others say that only a scent, a smell, could transport me back to the memory of that day; that the olfactory is more immediate, somehow magically adept at peeling back the years. To those people I might reply that if you have smelled your son’s arm burning, the odours of life lose their appeal. Not only that — I am, shall we say? unlikely to encounter the smell again.

Another sound I can conjure up is the soft, almost inaudible groan that escaped John as he turned his back on me when he first saw my face. My face — a slopping of whisky in the glass. My face. Twenty-eight years it’s been and it still looks back at me from the mirror.

Will it get better?

Maybe.

I know why John turned his back to me when I was first allowed to visit him. It wasn’t because I was in a wheelchair, it wasn’t because he was tired, nor was it because he was in pain and couldn’t be bothered to talk. He turned away from me because he was horrified.