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residents’ rooms – dormitories, doubles and singles. We followed her into sitting rooms, common rooms and
bathrooms. All was impeccably clean and tidy and there was an atmosphere of peace.
    In one common room I found Peggy Langley, who as a young woman, as Peggy van Lier, was a member of the Second World War’s most famous escape route, the ‘Comet line’, which had
rescued Allied servicemen from occupied Belgium, Peggy’s country. I was friends with her daughter at boarding school, and used to stay in their house in Suffolk. Peggy became a good friend of
my mother, who admired her bravery – she had been awarded the Belgian Croix de Guerre, an MBE and the Resistance Cross. My mother also liked the romance of Peggy having met her husband
– a British Guards officer who had lost his arm at Dunkirk and then become an important member of MI19 – during that time.
    I remembered Peggy as just a wife and mother, limping round her Suffolk kitchen – I suppose she had rheumatism – cooking for her husband and four sons. Only her daughter was expected
to help. I remembered how Peggy loved music, and that she had seemed not to fit in among her English menfolk, who liked shooting, and I remembered also how sweet she was. Now, I saw that she was
almost bald, a tiny frail woman with a plaintive, slightly hurt expression. I bent down and introduced myself, using just my Christian name, and I reminded her that I was a friend of her daughter.
Recognition, sadness, then a flicker of hope crossed her face. Perhaps it was fanciful, but at that moment I felt that her soul was going out to me. Then, a few moments later, she realised that I
was leaving and her face closed off. I, like her daughter, was not staying with her and she would be alone again with all the other women who had lost their minds.
    I did not like to think of my mother, who might not have recognised Peggy now, coming down the staircase here, bewildered like that woman we had seen earlier, wishing to be back in her own
house.
    Nearby was the sister home, which was more secure. The patients could not walk out of the building. At first it seemed grander and there was more Catholic paraphernalia – statues of the
Virgin Mary and Jesus with his Sacred Heart exposed. (I was used to this from my own upbringing, instigated by my Catholic father, but my mother, after collecting me from a catechism class he had
arranged in our local Sussex town, told me that she was revolted by the picture in the hall of Jesus with his exposed bleeding Sacred Heart – ‘like something at the
butcher’s’.)
    Out of the window was a formal garden with wallflowers and great sweeping lawns. A busy little red-haired Irish nun with alert grey-green eyes, whom I liked at once – she told us merrily
that she was born in the Chinese Year of the Rat, and she did seem busy and alert like a rat – came to meet us. She led us upstairs and introduced us to another, older, nun in charge of the
unit.
    I couldn’t help noticing a patient walking up the corridor very fast, her whole body tilting sideways. With a shock I recognised her – it was Veronica, the wife of the former vicar
of the village near Knowle. Although I had seen Veronica many times since – her husband was vicar there for over fifteen years – and I recalled my father’s irritation at her
skittishness, my very first memory of her came back to me, the evening after Raymond was drowned, when she came to my bedroom at Knowle to kiss me good night. I felt grateful to her now, for having
realised that I, a small child, needed comfort.
    I could see that Veronica was in a similar state of anxiety to my mother, who often walked up and down repeating: ‘I want to go home!’, although my mother was still in her own house.
The nun in charge said that Veronica walked so much that she feared for her heart. I approached her, saying my grandmother’s name, then my own. She did not seem to understand, though she was
very