One thing, for the story I wrote the evening I got to Max’s house, I underplayed the feelings I had about the underground. I made it look as if being in it, its passages, its escalators, and above all its trains, wasn’t so bad, just a bit unpleasant but something I could control. In fact, it was very different from that. I went down into it without knowing what it was, having had no experience of it since I was a small child, and found the very heart of terror. If you’ve ever read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, you’ll remember the torture of Winston Smith with the things he fears more than any others, the objects of his phobia. In his case it was white rats; in mine it would be tunnels. I have never been in the underground since that afternoon. I shall never forget it.

These days I can manage below ground level. I’ve had to, I’ve had to work in basements and cellars, and I don’t like it, but it was either that or pick another trade. Airline pilot? Steeplejack? Bungee-jumping instructor? I’ve dealt with my problem by telling myself it was the only obstacle I had to surmount once I had begun on the one thing I really wanted to do. The course itself wasn’t difficult, perhaps because I loved it, the math wasn’t a problem for long, and when I started on the practical work I was in my element. All right, a pun was intended there. So I disciplined myself when I had to work underground and I did it by concentrating on the work and the work only, doing my best not to look around me, not to see the walls, the lack of windows, not to feel the ceiling dipping down to crush me. Sometimes I could even teach myself to imagine different surroundings while I was down there, a high-up airy glass roof (rather like Liv’s), wide-open doors, and through them all the bright blue and white sky. But mostly I applied myself to the microcosm of the cables in front of me, the new point I was putting in, the small immediate area of intricate but precise wiring. Guy Wharton once told me that in the sweatshops of the East End women employees were preferred for the French polishing because their fingers were smaller and more delicate than men’s. And that’s one of the reasons women make good electricians. I think I perfected the technique of using my small (I don’t know about delicate) fingers accurately and fast down in those subterranean places because I seldom looked elsewhere but at what those fingers were doing, and never paused or got up to stretch or to smoke a cigarette until the job was done and I was out of there.