He was a local boy, not much older than me. Nineteen. He’d lived two villages away in Barrington. I’d written to his parents, the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write, saying how deeply sorry I was, but I hadn’t got a response. He’d been on a technical training course, learning to be a bricklayer, and eventually, a builder like his father. He was their only son, although I believe there was a daughter. I say I believe, I know. For a while I became obsessed with the family, wanting to know everything I could about them. But later I found I couldn’t maintain what had become a self-imposed determination not to forget him. A penance. It brought me too low. I became dangerously introverted and quiet. I recognized it myself, without going to a therapist or anything, so I took action. Went the other way. I threw myself into university life, parties, and made new friends, good friends actually, and at more of a remove than my school friends, so it was easier.

Boyfriends I found difficult, though. I dated one or two people, but when it came to the more intimate, confiding nature of the relationship, I came unstuck. When one boy told me, slightly teary-eyed in bed one night, that he’d never got on with his father ever since he discovered he’d had a long affair, that it compromised all his childhood memories, I knew that was my moment. Knew I should reciprocate with a confidence of my own. An admission. But even though it hadn’t been my fault, I still found the magnitude of ending someone’s life, of taking someone’s child, leaving such a hole in a family of four (like mine) of such breathtaking enormity, that if I struggled to comprehend it, how could I expect anyone else to? Also, I knew it would define me. Change me into the girl who’d killed someone, with that aura of pity and fascination around her. And so I broke it off, the relationship. An avoidance technique I would use repeatedly.

I was reading Modern History at York, and whilst most of my girlfriends on the course majored on feminist subjects, like patriarchy and female oppression, the suffragette movement, the rise of political empowerment for women, I concentrated on the survivors of the battle of the Somme. On why they never spoke of the horrors of war. I wrote about PTSD, and why men were subjugated and marginalized in that they were ordered to take lives, whereas women weren’t. I championed for men’s rights, in a way, and for their voices never heard. I got a first.