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some innocent-looking Afghan teenager. Leaving a rifle unattended could be a court-martial offense. Everything and anything would “walk” if not tied down or guarded.
    The Taliban have described the British soldier as a ferocious fighter but one who moves very slowly. Well, Mr. Taliban, you try running around with seven stone of equipment on your back. It was like carrying your grandmother into battle, but without the benefits.
    I wondered where my Bergen had gone. For that matter, I wondered where my uniform had gone, and everything else too. Thanks largely to the dedicated and magnificent volunteers of the CCAST, the Critical Care Air Support Teams, I had arrived back in England not only alive but less than thirty hours after the explosion. But I’d woken up in the Birmingham hospital, naked and without a foot, with not even a toothbrush, just a pair of metal dog tags around my neck, embossed with my name and army service number, an age-old and trusted method of identifying the living, and the dead.
    There had been a letter to my mother in the breast pocket of my uniform, to be posted in the event of my death. I wondered where that was too. My mother obviously hadn’t received it. But there again, I hadn’t died. Not quite.
     
     
    E ventually, it was the cold that drove me inside.
    I went slowly and quietly through the house so as not to disturb those sleeping upstairs. In the past I would have removed my shoes and padded around silently in bare feet, but now, as I could have only one bare foot, I kept my shoes on.
    Good as it was, my new right leg had an annoying habit of making a metallic clinking noise every time I put it down, even when I moved slowly. I didn’t sound quite like a clanking old truck engine, but an enemy sentry would still have heard me coming from more than a hundred paces on a still night. I would have to do something about that, on top of everything else, if I was ever to convince the MOD major.
    I went up the stairs to my old bedroom. My childhood things were long gone, packed up by my mother and either sent to the charity shop or to the council tip just as soon as I had announced I wasn’t coming back.
    However, the bed looked the same, and the chest of drawers in the corner definitely was, the end now repainted where I had once stuck up bubble-gum cards of army regimental crests.
    This wasn’t the first night I had been back in this bed. There had been other occasional visits, all started with good intentions but invariably ending in argument and recrimination. To be fair, I was as much, if not more, to blame than my mother and stepfather. There was just something about the three of us together that caused the ire in us to rise inexorably to the point of mutual explosion. And none of us were very good firemen. Rather, we would fan the flames and pour petrol on them in gay abandon. And not one of us was ever prepared to back down or apologize. Nearly always I would end up leaving in anger, vowing never to return.
    My most recent visit, five years previously, had been optimistically expected to last five days. I had arrived on Christmas Eve all smiles, with bags of presents and good intent, and I’d left before lunch on Christmas morning, sent on my way by a tirade of abuse. And the silly thing was, I couldn’t now remember why we had argued. We didn’t seem to need a reason, not a big one anyway.
    Perhaps tomorrow would be better. I hoped so, but I doubted it. The lesson of experience over expectation was one I had finally begun to learn.
    Maybe I shouldn’t have come, but somehow I had needed to. This place was where I’d grown up, and in some odd way it still represented safety and security. And in spite of the shouting, the arguments and the fights, it was the only home I’d ever had.
    I lay on the bed and looked up at the familiar ceiling with its decorative molding around the light fixture. It reminded me so much of the hours I had spent lying in exactly the same way as a spotty