When Nurse Tucker has been helping administer ECT her eyes are wide and her hands tremble. This is her very first job and she is in shock herself. She has not been in the army or the mines. She has too much will and imagination left for this.

I believe my treatment is twice a week, but the days are so thin-edged I may be mistaken. The fear of it seeps into every moment of the week.

The treatment is performed in the basement where there are tiny cells along the dark corridor. At one end are the isolation cells, but the doors are iron-clad and so thick that any sounds from inside are tiny and muffled.

We are herded, unfed, down the steps, about thirty of us, where we meet with an icy draft of air when we are already frozen with dread. The walls have a lick of ancient whitewash and above our heads snake the metallic intestines of the hospital, pipes stretching off into the gloom of the passage. There are no windows down here. We are alive, but already entombed under the soundproof earth, in the smell of rubber and urine and the sour stench of fear.

We stand in a line hearing the animal distress of those who go before us. I am already mute with fear. What we feel does not matter to them and I have learned it is not worth protesting. Once I appealed to the doctor, put on my best voice: ‘I’m afraid of what it’ll do to my mind.’

He gave a half smile, actually sincere. ‘Don’t worry. I don’t suppose you’ll be needing it.’

In the cell I lie on a trolley. Their faces are a ring round me, quiet, as if they’re waiting for a seance to begin. Then one jokes into the silence. ‘We’ll break our record this morning,’ he says, rushing the machine to my head. I wish I had something to hold on to: a bead, a stone, a strand of hair, anything to call mine.

In seconds I taste rubber, still saliva-coated from the last mouth. The gag is thick and hard and punctured with holes for our sharp breaths to hiss through. There is cold jelly on my temples and immediately they are across my body, three of them lying on me as the current is applied and everything of me is seized by it, burns and blackens and I am no longer conscious to know of the wet coursing from my body adding to the vapour of urine in the room.

Return to the seeping grey light is a process of despair, in a recovery room filling with thirty bodies writhing in the incalculable dread of consciousness.

Will this be my life now, waiting for this to be done to me?

It is during the second course of treatment, while my body is in spasm, that they break my arm forcing me down.

* * *

By the time I climbed into a compartment of the train at Leamington Spa after my visit to Arden, I felt completely wrung out. My legs were weak and I was unsteady with shock at what Olivia had told me. It was as if a window had opened on a whirlwind. I understood. A baby. Olivia had had a baby. Finally I knew what it was the Kemps had kept strapped down tight all this time. A tiny, new person, the explanation for all this.