I didn’t let myself linger there. The headstones were teeth, waiting to take a bite out of a part of me that was starting to come back to life. I quickened my pace. Up past the big old houses. Slender trees to my right; an inadequate fence for the miles and miles of green that stretched away to my right. Up to the hospital. The locals still called it that. It had been a convalescent home for nigh-on twenty years but during the war it had been taken on by the authorities as a safe haven where expectant mothers from bigger cities in the north east could come and give birth without fear of any bombs dropping. Close to 5,000 women did just that. Those that didn’t survive were buried, quietly, in the grounds of the new church: another layer on the endless strata of bones and blood upon which the whole vale seemed to have been constructed.

Work was going on at the spa. There was talk of it becoming a hotel. It was certainly a splendid old building; a colossal white edifice that would have looked more at home on the seafront at Brighton or Scarborough than in that little wooded area by the river. I barely looked up as I passed. I slouched my way down into the damp woods and slithered down the muddy footpath; the smell of the sulphurous water mingling with the scent of churned mud and mulched leaves. The river was raging. It took an effort of will to force myself over the bridge, placing my feet carefully on the wooden slats. Rain splattered hard and heavy on the few leaves that the autumn had not stolen and I squinted in almost total blackness as I dragged myself up the footpath on the far bank towards home. Was I afraid? I don’t think I was, no. The worst thing I could imagine had already happened to me. There was nothing more fearsome in the darkness of the wood than there was within the shadows of myself.