During the next weeks, as I drove through central London, I noticed the same thoughtful gaze in the people who gathered at street accidents, as if the secret formulas of their lives were exposed by these random collisions. Office workers on their way to lunch, drivers unloading delivery vans stared at the damaged cars that materialised out of the passing traffic in a fanfare of ringing metal and sounding horns. An attentive audience would invariably form, calmly inspecting the stricken vehicles.

Often I stopped my car and walked through the crowds, struck by the spectators’ quiet and measured response. Only ten years earlier everyone would have been pulling with their bare hands at the broken bodywork and crushed roofs, trying to free the injured occupants. Born out of an ecology of violence, acts of numbing brutality now ruled the imaginative spaces of their lives, leaching away all feeling and emotion. Perhaps, in their thoughtful communion with the crashed car, they were trying to come to terms with the televised disasters and assassinations that enfolded their minds and doing what they could to restore a lost compassion.

Where this perverse logic might lead I grasped for the first time when Sally drove me to the opening of the Arts Laboratory at its new premises in Camden Town. Usually I was wary of being a passenger in Sally’s spirited but erratic MG and always found an excuse to prevent her driving the children. On this evening, however, she was surprisingly sedate, driving well within the speed limit and keeping a steady eye on the rearview mirror. Anxious for her, I wondered if she was still recovering from the collision after the air show.

“I didn’t feel a thing,” she told me, clearly disappointed. “I didn’t even see it happen. Suddenly we were sitting there with all this glass and these huge policemen. Not even a scratch—I really feel cheated.”

“You could have gone through the windshield.”

“Jim, it was a bump! You would have enjoyed it. David pulled the wheel over without thinking.”

“I can’t believe that…” At the foot of Chertsey Bridge the Japanese stewardesses had stood blinking in the sunlight like hostages tied to a target. “I bet he knew exactly what he was doing.”

“No, that’s David. He felt like a shunt. I don’t know why the Japanese were there.”

“Sally, he’ll kill you.”

“Great! I might like that…” We had stopped on the Westway flyover, and the traffic lights flared across Sally’s sallow face and its wild smile. Seeing that she had shocked me, she pressed my hand to the steering wheel. “Don’t worry, David wants to get himself killed, he isn’t interested in me. He’s always trying to hit other cars. Every shunt reminds him of something—the war, I guess. You never talked about your camp, Jim. Did he have a bad time physically?”

“Physically, nothing happened to him at all.”