Then a burning hot wall of wind, thick with sharpened grains of dust, slaps me to the ground in spite of the building that stands between me and the blast. The earth beneath me shunts up then down. The boom kicks me deep in the guts. The land and the sky volley the sound back and forth between them. Over the screech in my ears, I hear the lazy rain of glass shards and splintered timbers. And then the shouts. The screams.

For weeks, this dark fantasy has haunted my daydreams. Of being caught in the blast, of mistiming my exit. This is exactly as I’ve imagined it.

Foul-smelling smoke wraps round the building I’m hiding behind, threatening to engulf me. On elbows and knees, I crawl underneath the Portakabin, into the litter-strewn void that separates it from the ground. My face scrapes along the parched dirt; my shoulders strike the wooden joists above me. I draw my chin to my chest and tuck my hands beneath my torso.

Because I have nowhere left to run. And I have no plan.

3.17 p.m.

The panicked shouts, the feet that pound across the field to the scene, the snap of burning wood, they grow further from me. The first siren, and the second, the third; they get closer, yet never louder.

Something terrible has happened – a tragedy they’ll say, an atrocity, a terror attack maybe – but it is drifting away from me. Or I from it perhaps.

My weight, which drives my cheek and scalp into the rutted earth, begins to ease. I become suspended, as though I’m a metal fragment caught in the repelling magnets that are the wooden floor above me and the ground below. The dull all-over ache, that constant side effect of existing, dissolves.

I’m a million miles from here. I’m with Aunty Kaye. It’s one of those few vividly coloured memories of early childhood we all hold on to, a handful of snapshots that we extrapolate to cover the years, to assure ourselves that there was a time when everything was perfect. We’re parked a little way from a cliff. My five-year-old arms claw over the bumper to extract yesterday’s project from the boot. We grip one side each, keeping the kite turned from the wind. I hadn’t believed it would really fly as we’d built it from garden canes, greaseproof paper and twine. But, as it draws the two of us along towards the sea, the rainbow colour scheme we’d applied dazzling in the sun, I feel for the first time that joy of something made from a heap of bits functioning independently of its maker.