‘I’d always been the spoilt baby of the family, indulged and teased and protected by my older brothers, and adored and pampered by my parents. I had a blissful home in the country, with ponies and dogs and much love and laughter; I was popular at school and was used to being told I was pretty – goodness, I must have been insufferable! – but my world had always been a sunny place where there was someone ready to kiss me better if the smallest thing went wrong. I felt inviolable – and when I got sick I had no stratagems for coping with ordinary difficulties let alone real misfortune and I very nearly gave up on everything.

‘Then on my seventeenth birthday a friend of one of my brothers, who was a bit older than me, found a fledgling tawny owl at the side of the road that had been hit by a car. He knew a lot about birds, especially raptors – he had a Harris hawk that he’d trained himself – so he realised that he shouldn’t try to pick it up in his hands and that it could easily either die of shock or damage itself even more if it struggled, so he managed to gather it up, very carefully, in an old dog towel he’d got in the back of his car, and put it in a cardboard box and take it home. He’d always been brilliant at mending things and he managed to super-glue its obviously smashed beak together, but he didn’t dare examine it more closely. He was on his way to the vet with it, when he suddenly thought it might interest me because, before I got ill, he sometimes used to take me out hawking with him. Anyway, he stopped at our house to show it to me. It was in an awful state, wet and filthy and injured and it only had half its feathers. I looked in that box and thought we were two of a kind because I only had half my feathers too. Adam – the friend – asked me if I’d like to go to the vet with him and I said I would, which was quite a decision for me because I hadn’t come to terms with my mothy hair then and couldn’t bear anyone to see me. Also I wasn’t supposed to go anywhere where I might pick up an infection, but to my mother’s great credit she encouraged me to go. I think she knew something important had happened. So I got in Adam’s car with the box on my knee and we drove off to the vet.