The next month or so was pretty rotten. If your mouth is all wired together, you see, you can’t brush your teeth and if you also catch a cold, as I did, the whole situation becomes squalid beyond belief. Moreover, they had fitted a beastly tube into one nostril and down into my gullet, and it was through this that they fed me nameless, though probably nourishing, pap. Worse, every book I started to read seemed to carry, on the third or fourth page, wonderfully vivid descriptions of gravy soup, oysters, roasted partridges and steak-and-kidney puddings. Whenever I quaked with lust for food, the little thin nurse would clip a bottle on to my nose-tube and fill my poor stomach with the costive pap, at the same time trying to slip an icy bed-pan under my bottom. Naturally, I never put up with this latter indignity: I used to stride – or perhaps totter – to the loo under my own steam, festooned with protesting nurses and with gruel streaming from my nosetube: an awesome sight I dare say.

When I had me strength. I found out where Johanna was and used to creep out and visit her. She was pale and looked much older. I couldn’t talk and she didn’t want to. I would sit on the side of her bed and pat her hand a bit. She would pat mine a bit and we would wink at each other in a wan sort of way. It helped. I arranged through Jock for flowers and grapes and things to be sent to her at frequent intervals and she arranged, through Jock, for me to receive boxes of Sullivan’s cigarettes and things like that. The night nurse, who was fat and saucy, contrived to fiddle a straw into my mouth through a gap where a tooth is missing behind my upper left canine; thereafter I was able, each evening, to drink half a bottle of Burgundy, which blunted the edge of misery a little.

The doctors were pleased with my jaw, they said it was mending well but my ear went bad and they had to cut some of it off, and then the rest of it. That was why Johanna was discharged quite a bit earlier than I was.

My homecoming was not jolly; Johanna had known about the ear but she was a bit taken aback when she saw me without it (I’d discharged myself the moment they took the bandages off) and she burst into tears – a thing I’d never seen her do before. I made a few jests about how she had never thought much of my looks anyway and the lop-sided effect might grow on her but she was inconsolable. I shall never understand women. You probably think you do but you’re wrong, you know. They’re not a bit like us.