And now here he was. He couldn’t work with handwritten text because to have needs and hurts and worries screamed in his face all day was intolerable. He also couldn’t write legibly, type at acceptable speed, or do anything requiring dexterity, because the doctors who’d promised his right hand would soon acquire the facility of his missing left had lied through their teeth. You should have been using your right hand all along, he’d been told several times, with an implication of Serves you right, you persistently left-handed wretch. As for manual labour, the clue was in the name and he’d never liked heavy lifting anyway. He thought he might be a good salesman, but that thought had occurred to a lot of men with physically incapacitating war wounds, and many of them were better spoken and better educated than him.

With a suitable prosthetic he might do a factory job, but he didn’t have any prospect of getting one. There were too many able-bodied men looking for work, and too many mutilated ones who already had the experience if they could find a workaround, and thousands upon thousands who lacked both usable skills and usable bodies and desperately needed support. And there was nothing like enough money to provide for them all: Joel had spent a year or more fighting to get the hook. The Ministry for Pensions had made things entirely clear in their literature at the end of the war. “You are going back to ordinary civil life,” the leaflet had said, “and it is up to you to make yourself as fit for that work as possible.” Which was not exactly in the spirit of the election promises about making Britain a fit country for heroes, but here they were.

Joel intended to make himself fit for civil life and work. He had a plan. But for that he needed money, and so he’d turned his talent to account. He could read character in handwriting: if you called it graphology, it sounded like something you could charge for. As such, he’d built up a bit of a reputation and a growing clientele, enough to afford this poxy little room all to himself and start to accumulate savings. He was a respectable member of society if you didn’t look too closely and Fowler’s disapproval was neither here nor there.

He had just one client this morning, a regular. She ran a secretarial agency and was sufficiently concerned about the morals of ‘her girls’ that she wanted all potential new recruits assessed for decency. Joel wasn’t surprised she couldn’t keep staff. He picked out three submissions he thought had enough force of character to stand up for themselves, and sent her on her way.

He was frying sausages for lunch when there was a knock at the door. For a moment he considered not answering. It was lunchtime, damn it, and he wasn’t expecting anyone.