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more dramatic than most. I would scream for quite a while without stopping, and I couldn’t bear for my knee to be touched. Mum gave me aspirin, so many that once I saw two Mums coming into the room.
    The fever played hide-and-seek with doctors. Mum would take me to the local surgery, but by then I was fine again, running around merrily, impatient to be read Beatrix Potter, to start fires, to eat dirt when I could get it. The doctor may have wondered if this was an obsessive mother making too much of things. He said, if you’re really sure, call me out the next time it happens. If you’re really sure.
    We didn’t have a car, but we did have a phone. Not everybody did, but we did, though it didn’t get much use in daily life. So the next time it happened she phoned him, her heart pounding as much from her own daring at disturbing a doctor’s sleep as from the screams of her first-born. When he came he could see for himself how inflamed it was, how much pain it gave.
    It was beyond him. I needed to be seen at a hospital, where they would do tests. I’m taking you to a nice hospital, Mum told me. What’s that? A place where they stop you being ill. But I’m not ill. I’m a good soldier. I’ve only got a sore knee sometimes.
    I was taken to a place called Manor Hospital, where they prodded and poked. It wasn’t a nice sort of place at all. When we arrived, I asked if my mum could stay as well. Because I asked that, it was put into my notes – as she later saw – that I had ‘an unnatural attachment’ to my mother. What would have counted as a natural attachment, in a three-year-old full of pain being left to be poked and prodded by strangers?
    Mum came with me to the ward, but the moment I was put in bed she left, not saying a word. I watched her grief-stricken as she walked away. Her shoes made a sharp clopping noise on the floor, and the tight skirt of the period required her to take short steps, so that she seemed to take ages to abandon me. She didn’t even turn round at the last moment to give me a little wave, as love would have compelled her to do.
    I felt deserted by her, and aggrieved by the hospital’s ways of doing things. They had put me in a bed with sides, a hospital cot. Did they think I was a baby? And now Mum who could have explained it all to me had gone away.
    She came to visit the next day, and when I sulked and wouldn’t speak to her she cried, explaining that she was only doing what she had been told to do. The hospital said it was for the best to leave without saying good-bye. Mum had trained as a nurse, which may have made it harder to argue with hospital rules. She had no training in how to be the mother of a patient.

Spiritual carbon monoxide
     
    A clean break was prescribed as the least distressing procedure. It avoided the heart-ache of protracted leave-takings – tears, pleading. It prevented Scenes, and Scenes never did anyone any good. Better for the children in the other beds, certainly, if Mum walked off without a word, as if she couldn’t wait to be shot of me.
    There are things, though, which clean-break theory ignores. A child who imagines himself delivered into the hands of cruel strangers, for no fixed term, has an altered body chemistry. In his sleep he breathes out dismal vapour – spiritual carbon monoxide. Better for my ward-mates to have witnessed a scene of squalid sorrow, with me howling and begging Mum to stay, than to have taken into their lungs the low fog of desolation and abandonment which I exhaled that first night.
    Mum tried to cheer me up. Did I like it here? No I didn’t. I wanted to go home. Children cried in the night. I didn’t like the cereal. There was only Corn Flakes for breakfast and fried bread, which I hated. Why couldn’t I go home, where there was Weetabix?
    The third day she brought along some Weetabix, to give me a taste of home. A little bit of continuity between my new life and the old. When she asked a nurse for a bowl and some milk