‘Why on earth did you keep it all?’ I asked.

‘Well, as you can see,’ Mummy said stiffly, ‘you never know when it might come in handy.’ Of course she couldn’t express the fact that she simply couldn’t bear to part with these things.

I went to Granny’s room to tell her the news. ‘I’ve had a simply marvellous day!’ I was glowing with it all. I plonked myself on a chair beside her. Her cheek was pushed out by a sweet she was eating.

I told her about the surgery and the visits to the houses.

‘It was all so interesting, seeing all those people. And Daddy was so different from how he is at home.’ Granny was listening attentively. ‘D’you think I could do something like that when I grow up?’

‘With a family like yours,’ she said serenely, holding out a little white paper bag, ‘I should think it would be almost a foregone conclusion. Bullseye?’

Sid Blakeley stayed in our house for only four days before Babs Keenan called at the surgery to say she was ready to take him home. But for a short time he turned our house upside down. Though he couldn’t speak, he was able to express himself, his needs and his joy with a directness of which no one else in the house was any longer capable. His small body and nose-wrinkling grin softened the lines of my mother’s face and pulled unusual smiles from my father. I even found William now and then chasing him about the room, both of them on their hands and knees. As for me, I was besotted. And I took secret pleasure in reciting to myself the new words I’d learned out on the rounds that day: diphtheria, puerperal, buggered.

Chapter 6

Birmingham, 1936

A humid night in August. There was no breeze to stir the curtains at my open window, and I was lying restless, under a sheet. The sound of the front doorbell startled me out of my half sleep. It sounded twice, long and hard. For a few seconds I lay listening, trying to guess the time. It was already dark and felt like the middle of the night. A door opened downstairs. Daddy and Mummy must still be up.

Out on the landing I saw my mother moving quickly down the stairs, still dressed but with her hair pinned up for bed. The old wooden cased clock on the shelves by the stairs said ten past eleven. I peeped round the banisters into the hall.

They opened the door to Elizabeth Kemp, her face very white, eyes like huge dark wounds against her skin. She had on a cotton dress with a white shawl half covering it. Her pale hair was loose at her shoulders like a young girl’s and in her agitation she had evidently not thought to put on a hat. I watched, absolutely still.

‘I’m sorry. You’ve got to help me.’ Her voice was low and hoarse. ‘I shouldn’t have come here. I know you’re not my doctor, but I don’t know where else to turn.’