At four in the morning there was the sound of our front door being kicked in, and I realised I wouldn’t be going to London on the early morning flight after all.

First fear paralyses you, and then it makes you move twice as fast. I went into Phyllis’s room and shook her awake. I said: ‘They’re here to take me. Put your dressing gown on and get back into bed. Don’t worry, they’ll leave you alone.’ She was mumbling something, waking up, but I couldn’t make out the words.

Then I opened the window in her room: it was a long drop from there into the backyard. If I pushed myself out and dangled down off the windowsill I would be all right. I could hear one of them shouting, ‘Where are you, you wee bastard?’ as the thump of boots came up the stairs. There was no time. I was leaning out the window, getting ready to climb, when I looked down below me and saw two other men with black balaclavas waiting in our yard. I wanted to be sick.

They were looking back up at me and encouraging me to jump. One of them had a baseball bat, and was standing tapping it off his leg. The other one shouted out, crooning, ‘Go on, Jacky boy, come into our arms.’ His balaclava was more of a hood, a black bag with eye-holes in it, like some medieval executioner’s. I was flooded then with the feeling of despair. If there had been a way to kill myself, I would have taken it. If I jumped, I jumped to them. If I ran back, I ran back to them. I could see Phyllis on the bed, her mouth slack and her face turned the grey of cold ashes and dead people’s skin.

I left the windowsill and picked up a lamp. Two more men, both wearing masks, came in the bedroom door, and with all my strength I threw the lamp at the one nearest me. It glanced off his shoulder and shattered on the floor into jagged china clumps. He kept on coming towards me, even angrier. The lamp had been the last thing between me and them. Now I had nothing.

My arms and legs liquefied with fear. It is an awful thing to feel yourself utterly powerless. It takes you into a place where very few people ever get to go, and it is difficult ever to come back fully from there. It is a place where nothing you can say, nothing you think, nothing you can do matters any more. Something terrible is going to happen to you, you know it is, and there is nothing you can do to change it.