I felt my clothes tear. Felt my shins rubbing raw on the nails and the crumbled roof joists. There was barely an inch between the top of my head and the boards of the floor above. I had no way of knowing which direction to take. I kept pushing out with my hand, pawing at the air, not sure whether I wanted to feel nothing or something. I wanted to turn back but there was no way to turn around and the thought of slithering back through the hole was worse than keeping going. It was a kind of madness, I think. All these years later I can’t really believe I did it. I could never have done it before or after that moment, I know that. But desperation and temper can make you do strange things and I think it was having my mind so full of the grandson that really pushed me up and into that horrible little space. I’d known true grief in my life and I wasn’t ready to inflict that kind of feeling on anybody I cared about, let alone my only son and his little lad. I had a duty, didn’t I? A duty to at least try. And all I’d heard about Britain and America and those far-flung places we were turning our back on – it had all got under my skin. I was annoyed with myself. It was guilt, now I think on it, though it weren’t guilt about what my country had done or not done. It was guilt at not asking more questions. Guilt at just plodding on with my little life when horrible things were happening to decent folk. Folk like me, maybe. Aye, that’s it, right enough. I think it was what Sera said about her little village; her people out in the wilderness, left to their quiet little lives, celebrating their Christmas, raising their families. They weren’t that different from me really, were they? And if my friends and family were being rounded up and slaughtered, I think I’d feel a bit sore at the people who paid for the guns and trained the killers. I might even expect them to do something about it. I couldn’t do much other than find a way out. I had no plan other than getting as far away from that house as I could. Whatever came next was up to somebody else, but in that moment, half crushed between the ceiling and the floor, I had just enough courage to keep moving forward.