‘I can’t… my fingers won’t work.’ Netta’s mouth was dry and her lips would barely move. Her head buzzed with the electric shock treatment. Everything was in slow motion.

‘Let’s just start simply then, stuffing these teddies with old rags and kapok. No needles or sewing for you yet. Let’s get those hands moving again… See, Lizzie is showing you how.’ Lizzie lived in the same house block. She grinned and nodded. This was work for hands, not minds, Netta registered but her mind seemed far away from her body.

She did notice that the teddies looked bare without a scarf or bow tie so she asked for some scraps to shape into mufflers. Her eyes never left the baby dolls. If she couldn’t have her own baby she’d make herself one for company.

Her first attempt was misshapen and lumpy and she threw it on the floor in disgust. Once long ago, in a distant time, she had made a wedding dress. Why were her fingers so disobedient and her head so full of fluff now?

She looked at the creature on the floor and tears welled into a fit of weeping. You shouldn’t throw babies down, they might get damaged, so Netta gathered it up into her arms and hugged it tightly, putting it in her pinafore pocket for safekeeping. It was the first-born of many babies.

Bumpy went everywhere with her after that: into the gardens for walks; to the canteen to show the other girls. He sat on her bed at night and she cuddled him in her arms, crying for the little boy in the picture who was out there somewhere, crying for herself, so obviously abandoned; crying for Rae to come and rescue her. And still nobody came.

The stuffed babies lost their appeal and the lure of materials for dolls’ dressmaking was her next venture. It was like being a child all over again, choosing offcuts of shiny plain sheeting and net curtaining to make dolly brides with veils. Colours, especially bright colours, dazzled her eyes so her outfits were palest pinks and ice blues, creamy whites and beiges.

Netta could not face the adult dressmaking classes – the rows of machinery, the responsibility of not wasting precious cloth, terrified her and she fled down the corridors. The door was open in the art department and the smell of paints and oils wafted up her nostrils. Here a mixed group of students, soldiers, men and women, were working quietly, bent over their boards. It was a peaceful scene until one soldier, who was scribbling furiously all over his paper with chalks, began to chunter to himself aloud.

Netta paused behind him, quietly examining the tiny cartoonlike figures squiggled all over the scene. The officer’s hands were shaking: hands strangely mottled brown and white like a piebald pony. He turned round. ‘What are you staring at, young lady?’