‘We should’ve expected it from the drive in. When we were on the motorway, we saw these fields full of dead bodies, like they’d been dumped there and bulldozed into piles. You couldn’t believe how many there were, rotting away, rubbish tips of bones and skulls and mangled flesh. The sky above was thick with birds, crows and seagulls, and there were great clouds of flies. The mounds were crawling with rats and dogs. We kept the windows wound up tight. It was like passing through hell, and when we got to Slough …

‘You know how some places, even now, they look normal, untouched, just like they always must’ve done? Maybe some weeds have grown up, grass and that, but otherwise they look fine. Ascot and most of Windsor are like that. But Slough was a wreck. It was like everyone who lived there, everyone who hated the place, had finally found an excuse to trash it. Shops were smashed in, houses burnt-out, cars as well; there was rubbish and litter and rubble everywhere. Dead bodies piled up, skeletons and rotten corpses, half-eaten children, pets. Flies everywhere. So many flies, like they’d taken over the town. It stank something awful.

‘We lived in the Castleview area. As Slough goes, it was one of the nicer parts – not any more. Looked like there’d been a hurricane through there. It took me a while to even find our house because I didn’t recognize the place and, of course, by the time we got there I wasn’t expecting to find anything. This was all just bad news.

‘In the end I found the house and we stopped outside – we only just made it because the car was nearly out of petrol. You see when a little kid draws a house? With a red pointy roof and square windows, a tiny front garden, a garage, chimneys? A typical English house? That’s what our house looked like. Semi-detached. Another Muslim family lived in the other half. The street was all the same. All these boring houses. And now we’d got here I didn’t really want to go in. I mean, what was I going to find in there?

‘It was Andy who persuaded me. Said if I didn’t go in, it would be a waste of time and that Susannah would’ve died for nothing. I didn’t want to say anything, but, let’s face it, she had really, hadn’t she? Whatever I found inside. So we all three of us got out of the car, and Henry helped me get Andy into his wheelchair.