What was I meant to say to that? That my tears were a cocktail of shame and disgust at the sight of the disabled people around me. Of fear at being stuck in a wheelchair forever. Of anger at being lumped in with this freakshow. Of incomprehension at seeing them not in the least bit affected by their misfortune and here I was, bawling at the injustice . . . In short, it wasn’t very pretty, as only real human emotions can be sometimes. Picture yourself suddenly disabled, especially at sixteen. I can guarantee your spirit would falter. It’s not like playing at being armless, with one limb strapped behind your back, or being blind with a blindfold over your eyes; it has to do with feelings of impotence, being a tortoise on its back . . . Banishment.

I looked at her, wide-eyed. When you find yourself in this sort of situation, a few centimetres away from a person with Marfan syndrome with nails fixed into their head, who is asking you in all seriousness but why are you crying? – you’ve got no reference point, because situations like that never happen in real life.

She called the nurse to have me put back in the wheelchair and she pushed me to the dining hall. It was fish that day, a Friday. Once again she put me between two people suffering from myopathy, saying to one of them, ‘Come on, move your wheelchair,’ with the same brutality that your regular teen would use to another. Then she sat down next to me. They served us prawns as a starter and everybody started laughing when the plates arrived at the table. At first I didn’t understand why; then I realised that the quadriplegics, myopathy patients and amputees sitting around us couldn’t peel them because their hands were too awkward, or useless, or non-existent. ‘Make yourself useful!’ Hildegarde said to me, and I started shelling the prawns in silence, my nose buried in my fingers.

With her perpetual cheerfulness, her simple good humour and her constant wish to make people happy, she served as my guide in my new world and after a fortnight

I was mucking about with the Duchenne patients just as I used to with the kids back home on the island. She helped me tame my new body. More precisely, she taught me how to sweet-talk into action that old wreck of a jalopy which, from this point forward, I’d be using for my onward journey. And none other. Never any other.