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and saw me lying there, I heard her draw in her breath sharply, then run out of the room and down the stairs. She must have gone outside to call an ambulance from the public telephone box in the street because the next thing I knew, a man was lifting me over his shoulder and carrying me down the stairs.
    I was taken to a large hospital, where I was put in a steel cot. When the nurses tried to hold me down I struggled like a wildcat, so they had to tie my arms to the bars of the cot with bandages so they could dress my sores. Being tied up meant only one thing to me, so I punched and fought to get away, convinced I was going to get a beating.
    Eventually, one of the nurses managed to soothe me. I looked into her soft brown eyes and felt my terror ebbing away.
    The next day they took me into surgery and made cuts in my neck and arms and inserted tubes to help drain the big lump below my ear. One of them was threaded all the way down to my stomach. When I came to, I was back in the steel cot, covered from head to toe with bandages, and my arms tied to the bars again. I must have slept through the rest of that day and the next night, but don’t remember anything.
    On the second night, as I lay in my steel cot, arms tied and face covered, balaclava-like, with bandages, I tried to pierce the darkness with my eyes. I could hear the other children’s breathing and occasionally they would moan or say something in their sleep. But there was also another noise, which sounded sinister, as if something ghostly was roaming the room: swish, swish, swish, pause, then swish, swish, swish again. I felt like a fly trapped in a web waiting for a hairy, black spider to come and eat me. Swish, swish, swish. The noise was very close now, just the other side of my cot. Then I saw a face looking down at me and realized with relief that what I’d heard was simply the nurse’s starched uniform swishing against her legs as she patrolled the ward, pausing to check on her patients as she went.
    When I was well enough to look around, I saw that I was in a big square room with white walls and a brown lino floor. The sun was streaming in through two tall windows, and along one wall was a row of four steel cots. Facing them were four beds for the older children. In the middle of the ward was a blue table and eight small chairs.
    The gentle nurse I remembered from the night they brought me in was talking to me. ‘I know you’ll like being here between Christening and Lemon.’ She pointed at the kids in the cots on either side of me. What daft names, I thought. It was only later when another nurse came along to change my dressings that I realized that the children were in fact called Christine and Leonard. It was hard to hear anything clearly with my right ear.
    Having my dressings changed was horrible. Only the gentle nurse removed them slowly and carefully. The others all assured me in their no-nonsense way that it was much less painful if they ripped them off really fast.
    ‘There, that wasn’t too bad, was it?’ I hated that false chirpiness and the fact that they clearly didn’t want an answer from me.
    My first meal was a bowl of disgusting brown liquid that looked like dirty water. It must have been beef broth, or something similar, but tasted of nothing. The nursespooned it into my mouth. ‘Come on, just a few more mouthfuls and then you can have jelly and custard.’ The spoon was very painful as my lips had cuts on them, so she brought a straw and I sucked up the lukewarm liquid with that. I really wanted the jelly and custard so I sucked away at the foul stuff until it was finished.
    Four or five times a day a nurse would put each of us little ones on our potties. I’d be lifted out of my cot, still attached to all my tubes. A few days after I’d arrived, the nurse on duty forgot about me half way through her potty rounds. She’d been distracted by one of the other kids, a naughty red-headed boy who was often in trouble, and had