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secure core of falsehood.
    If Mum really wanted a child who couldn’t get away, I was much the better bet – not that I consented to any such transfer of her hopes, but I could see the truth of the situation. Audrey was already a lost cause. She was supremely well armed, with slyness and subterfuge. She exercised charm relatively late in any negotiation, just before the nuclear tantrum of last resort.
Ice cream and jellies all the way
    The diet for traumatised throats favoured by at least one of the matrons at Vulcan (a fanatical advocate of dry toast as a healing agent) hadn’t reached Wexham Park, or if it had the staff felt too guilty and embarrassed by my particular case to implement it. It was ice cream and jellies all the way, and I didn’t need to look toast in the face for weeks.
    It took me a week or two to recover from the assault on my throat – slow progress. Another day another dolor. I didn’t have all that much incentive to get better, not when I was only getting back to square one. Finally I was pronounced ready for a second go at being operated on. The operation to install the first McKee pin, referred to by others but not by me as my ‘op’.
    I rather resented the abbreviation. I felt that styling the coming ordeal was my privilege rather than anyone else’s. Others should follow my leadand say ‘operation’, unless and until I gave the signal to authorise the short form. They should defer to me in this matter, since it was the only little bit of surgery in my power.
    It wasn’t Jack Juggernaut but another nurse who shaved my groin when it became time again. Not that my pubic thatch had made much of a comeback in those weeks. It was still at the itchy stage. I wondered if the change of personnel showed that I was in disgrace for my excitement the last time I was shaved.
    The new nurse was the same delicious colour as Jack Juggernaut, and had a lovely faint smile playing about her lips while she went to work. I wasn’t worried – that is, I was mildly anxious about the operation but not about the shaving. Later I found out she was Jack’s sister. I wondered madly if they had compared notes about Tom Dooley, hardly likely in their culture but something which would nevertheless explain the smile. When she saw him, Tom was dozing even before the anæsthetist arrived with the gas. Naturally it was gas this time.
    Mum’s warning about how difficult it was to sew together three pieces of cloth – and therefore also of skin – had given me pause, but I wasn’t seriously bothered, even after the botch-up of the anaesthetic. I’d seen the excellence of Mum’s work as a seamstress. She rose to every challenge, and there was no reason to think that the surgeon was any less skilled. Mum wasn’t even a professional dressmaker, just a gifted amateur working for pin money, so it made sense that there should be many levels of expertise beyond hers, Himalayas beyond the foothills where she practised her useful domestic skills. A surgeon operating at a proper hospital must be more than just handy with the scissors and the pins and the needles, with basting and seams. He would be a scientist who was also an artist, a visionary thinker, a Leonardo of the surgical blade. Would my case even be distinctive enough to hold his interest? I hoped at least it would take his mind off the cryptic crossword he had been doing before he entered the sterile area. It would be sad to disappoint a person of such qualities.
    I wasn’t entirely wrong. The surgeon had skills. He wasn’t intrinsically a bodger. Maybe the problem was simply that we were treating the body as a machine, and if the body is a machine then pain is one of the things it produces. The surgeon who operated on me specialisedin arthroplasties, in McKee pins, metal on metal. He even had experience in performing them on patients with Still’s Disease. So he was a specialist within a specialism. It’s just that I turned out to be, once again, even more