I said, ‘Sorry?’ And he said, ‘A lot of the ladies with lady partners are interested.’

I said, ‘Oh, it’s not for me!’ I didn’t tell him who it was for because I knew what kind of reaction I’d get, like: oh, how cruel!

That wasn’t how Mark reacted. When I went home and explained the concept to him, he got it straightaway. He said, ‘Oh yeah, I heard you can amputate a finger like that,’ though he was absolutely useless in terms of helping me. So squeamish! But I had no problems. I mean, a couple of the kids resisted it. They didn’t like their tongues being messed around with, same as anyone, but that’s what you learn when you’re a nurse, you’ve just got to get on with what’s got to be done, whether it’s giving somebody a needle or taking out stitches, you can’t afford to have them pulling and pushing away from you and screaming, you’ve got to get it done.

The ones in the beds, the ones who didn’t have much motor control, they were pretty easy. I eventually got fishing line into their tongues and tied it around, horizontal, not vertical, and over time the tips just came off.

Just the tips, that’s all.

People have gone off their heads about it – people like you, the media I mean – but to this day I’ll argue that those kids were better off for having it done. The only problem was, their tongues would keep growing, and sometimes we’d have to do it a second or a third time. It was just our bad luck that we were in the middle of one of those sessions when the raid happened. And when I tried to explain to the woman who was freaking out what it actually was that I was doing – ‘The fishing line helps bring the tip off . . . it’s gradual, it’s not too painful’ – she looked at me like I was doing something evil, and it would be against her ethics. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was behind all the stories that leaked out.

I mean, ‘They Cut Out Their Tongues!’ It was ridiculous. And that wasn’t even the worst of it because the stories kept coming. One day the Telegraph, or whatever that tabloid rag is called, would say, ‘They cut out their tongues!’ and the next day it would be: ‘And they crippled them!’ Or it would be: ‘Nil by mouth! Children force-fed by tube in House of Horrors!’

Honestly, reading some of that, I thought, ‘Are you people serious?’ They made it sound like we were picking the kids up and breaking their legs or something. I’ve tried a hundred times to explain what we were doing: some of those kids had spastic hands. Anyone who has ever worked with disabled kids will know about spastic hands. It’s when the fingers curl up into the palms, and the fingernails cut into the palms and you have to try to wrench them open, but when they’re seriously spastic, it’s hard to break the lock on the hand. You have to sit for hours and massage the hands to try to get them open. But how were we supposed to manage that with the number of kids we had?