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The nursing staff at the hospital were kind, but they were busy and had little time to stop and chat. The other patients in my ward were mainly elderly and mostly asleep in between meal times. I could have been in a coma for fifty years and woken up in an old people’s home. Only the woman in the bed next to mine was lively enough to be sociable. She chattered for a while, telling me how she had fractured her shoulder and assuring me she would be leaving soon. Eventually she paused for long enough to hear why I was there.
‘I fell down some stairs and landed on my wrist, but it’s sprained not broken, and I’ve fractured a rib,’ I told her.
That was easier than explaining how I had been imprisoned in a disused bomb shelter by a lunatic.
‘You were lucky,’ she said. ‘It could have been
