I had been seventeen when it happened and my A-levels were a year in the future. But after the pylon I was ill for months. One thinks of people falling ill as the result of a shock or a traumatic event as something confined to characters in Victorian novels, but it really happens. I was in the hospital for four weeks and then in bed at home, feeling, I suppose, the way you do with a really bad flu, lethargic and hopeless and unable to do anything, scarcely able to move. More than that, though I had cried and cried, I felt the pressure of unshed tears, as if my head was full of saltwater. I wanted to tell Daniel about it, tell him how I felt. Strange, wasn’t it, longing to tell the dead person you’re grieving for how sad you are?

The counselor used to come to me because I couldn’t go to her, and when she was done with me, bringing about no change in my condition, the tutor came to coach me for my A-levels. In spite of that, I made a mess of them. Except in one subject I got poor results, and that exception was an A in physics. I only got that A because science was easy for me, logical and plain and undeniable, as I saw it, and I didn’t have to work at it. Considering the circumstances, eleven months after the pylon, in which I did those A-levels, it’s not surprising I got Ds in English literature and history. The three grades were quite good enough for the Grand Union Polytechnic, I may well have been the one student they had who had an A at A-level in anything, and my only difficulty was choosing between psychology and business studies and the other option, management and social sciences. I chose the former because at least I knew what one of the words meant.