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weekend.
    In the middle of the night the terror woke her. It had not been a nightmare – she had come out of a safe and dreamless sleep into the knowledge thatlarge ants were crawling over her body and eating the skin away. She put on the lamp, disturbing Frances Lea, who turned over two or three times, muttering.
    There was nothing on her skin, but she inspected her arms and legs closely for any sign of bites or marks. When she lay down again she saw strange shapes behind her eyes, trees with branches that curled upwards and inwards and turned to ash and blood-covered beaches dotted with mounds of sand-covered snakes which stirred and coiled and uncoiled. Her own heart was beating extremely slowly and as it beat she felt it enlarging, swelling and filling out like a balloon inside her chest and stomach and finally growing up into her brain.
    She sat up and felt calmer and in the end remained sitting up for the whole of that night, and by morning, felt tired but calmer and entirely herself.
    The terror did not return for four days. Then, as she walked into the large lecture room, she saw that the seats were filling up not with other students but with white translucent shapes like boils which pulsated and began to exude thin trails of greenish pus. The pus ran down between the rows in a thin virulent stream widening as it moved and flowing towards her. She turned and ran down the corridor, down the great flight of stone stairs into the collegeentrance hall, but she knew that the stream was flowing behind her and gathering strength like a tide. She ran outside and through the gates and, dodging the people on the pavement, into a side street which led to the river. It was only when she was there, leaning on the Embankment wall looking at a huge barge going slowly past on the water, that she felt safe, for somehow the other tide had dried up and shrivelled back on meeting the great flowing Thames.
    A few nights later she woke to find herself in the corridor with Frances shaking her by the arm. ‘You scared me – you keep doing this, May, you keep on scaring me.’
    ‘Doing what?’
    But Frances shook her head, pushed her back into bed, then turned over.
    The next afternoon when she got in from lectures she was asked to the warden’s office.
    She was referred to a doctor who prescribed sleeping tablets, even though she had no trouble sleeping, only with terror, and she could not find words to speak about it. The tablets made her thick-headed in the mornings and she found it hard to focus on the Reformation and Frederick the Great and Mussolini’spolicy, but the terror continued to strike her without warning.
    Frances asked to change rooms.
    May was put into a small cubicle on the top floor with a window so high that it allowed her no view except of a grey dishcloth square of sky.
    She cried much of the time she was there and then the terror followed her down the escalator of the Underground station and onto the train. It took the form of extremely thin men without faces who walked sideways and could slide themselves into her body like cards into a pack and talk to her in obscene language. She got out at the next stop and ran, but of course it made no difference, by then they were in place.
    It was a beautiful spring, mild and sunny, and May walked through the parks and sat on benches and took her work to cafés where pigeons flocked onto her table for biscuit crumbs, but the pigeons had running sores and red gimlet eyes which saw into her soul and she was forced to cross to the other side of the city, miles and miles of walking to get away from them.
    Once a fortnight Bertha Prime wrote her a letter, on one side of the paper, asking questions rather than giving news of the Beacon, and as May could not answer truthfully she did not reply at all.
    *
    When the first-year examinations came she was very confident, because although she had failed as a human being living in London she had worked hard, the only short-lived trouble