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its lack. Nor would he talk about the past, never spoke of his former comrades, or his wartime experience. When he first came to England Hélène had been left behind in France, in the soup kitchen queue that stretched from Calais to Paris, and it was a year before she was allowed to join him. His squadron had been billeted outside Seston, at the asylum – the same building where almost ten years later she was to become a permanent patient. The irony and oddity of the hospital being sometime home to both his parents did not escape Luke. The irony could not escape him, but it was his home, too.
    You may come to me or Mr Whiteson before half-term regarding your applications, which are in a special box in alphabetical order in Miss Higson’s office. Don’t forget to collect, please. And don’t slack off now, boys, it isn’t the time.
    He had gleaned only the numbers of his mother’s life. One son; one husband; one stillbirth; two miscarriages; two suicide attempts . . . His birth had been fierce proof to her of unquenchable life, she said, and she had given him a name to span three countries. Lucas. Lucasz. Luke. She had named him for luck and light, but he could not see beyond the present. His invalid parents. The tiny house. The labyrinthine hospital; he was made up of these parts. Tomasz would not visit his mother and she had nobody else but Luke.
    He stood listening to his thoughts and then he nodded, because he had told himself he wouldn’t be going to university, and smiled, because it was sort of funny that he had ever thought he might.
     
    So Luke chose the paper mill over the colliery and his childhood ended.
    He was a junior assistant clerk making £2/10 shillings a week. He worked from 8.30 until 5.30 and visited Hélène every other day.
    At school he had been punished for his energy, set to do sports and extra work, and had embraced it as a distraction and challenge. The exercise had helped him sleep. Now he was older the night-times were vaguer and darker but the world was too dark a place already, and agony easily come by, and so he would put the light on and write. He had no axe to grind, no wound to pick at; he found, had always found, an intense joy in blissful escape. He was a scientist of the imagination; he could travel. He wrote poems and plays, hiding them under his bed from his own critical eyes, kept a diary and learned to play a second-hand EKO guitar. He read newspapers, the NME and Melody Maker , all the way through and through again, even the ads at the back, and stored them, with the poems, under his bed.
    He had a shilling pay rise.
    He obsessed about chord changes, key changes, rhyme schemes and Shakespeare; reading three or four books a week, exhausting the library’s parochial shelves. He enjoyed the librarian’s girlish thrill at the arrival of the new Agatha Christie or James Bond, and chatted to her about the characters and plot-twists. He read Plato, Proust – to see what the fuss was all about – and The Collector , three times. Raise High the Roof Beam , over and over. A Clockwork Orange , twice. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner . He read anything, everything, and then his Shakespeare again. And again.
    He was promoted to assistant clerk.
    Believing he had grown out of religion but fascinated by what he saw as the Catholic fetish of suffering, he built a crucifix in the middle of his bedroom out of broken glass from the bottles his father threw away. He used the pieces of glass with the labels for the Christ figure and in his youth thought himself ironic.
    He went to the pictures every week, in Seston or on the bus to Lincoln – Bonnie and Clyde , Blow-Up , Belle de Jour , Cul-de-sac – films that were like visitations from exotic gods; shocking, beautiful glimpses of other minds, and evidence that it wasn’t just his eye that was a distorted, highly coloured lens. He sat through them three and four times, until he lost the narrative and just counted the beats of