LITMIR.BIZ

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walls that I couldn’t bypass.

      A doctor had explained to me that after it’s been damaged the brain favours some types of memories over others. The ‘favoured areas’ are different for everyone. Some might keep their love of music, or sporting prowess, or the ability to do complex mathematical calculations. As for me, I think I retained a lot of my technical knowledge, because I could remember precise details about the weapons systems I’d worked on in my various postings for the Navy, but I’d lost all my memories of the people in my life.

      The problem is that memories are the basis for emotions, and love is based on shared history, and because I couldn’t remember any of our history I no longer felt any ‘love’ for Sandra and the kids. I’d woken up and found myself living in the middle of a life that didn’t feel like mine. It didn’t feel right. It was as though I was visiting strangers and I didn’t feel well enough to be polite or friendly to them.

      I couldn’t actually remember what ‘love’ felt like. How did you know when you loved someone? I knew nothing about the woman and the two children who were trying to get through to me. They were strangers. It’s maybe a bit like watching a man in his eighties who has dementia and is being cruel to his partner because he can’t remember who she is. I had a sort of reverse dementia and I just felt emotionally blank, like an empty shell.

      Sandra’s nursing experience may have meant that the staff at Haslar let her take me home, but after observing me close up for a couple of days she realized that I wasn’t fit to be there. I needed specialist help that she couldn’t give me. She took me back to Haslar on the Monday morning and had a chat with the staff and before long I was being transferred to Headley Court rehabilitation centre near Epsom in Surrey for assessment. And that’s where I stayed on and off for the next year, just coming back to visit Sandra and the children at weekends.

      Originally an Elizabethan farmhouse, Headley Court was converted into a huge mansion by Lord Cunliffe, governor of the Bank of England, in the early twentieth century. During the Second World War, Canadian forces were based there, and the grounds were used for army training exercises, then after the war money was raised to convert it into a rehab centre. They have doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, a cognitive therapist, and several hydrotherapy pools and gymnasiums, as well as workshops where they make artificial limbs.

      ‘Right!’ I thought when they showed me around. ‘Let’s get started.’

      An orderly handed me a newspaper. ‘Here you go, Allen,’ he said brightly. ‘Just have a read through and pick out a story that interests you. Any little nugget will do. When I ask you later, you have to try and remember what it was you picked out. OK?’

      I grunted and opened the newspaper: the Sun. Every morning in Headley Court they brought you a paper and asked you to memorize a single item. The Sun had little square boxes of two-line stories: simple things, like amazing animal feats, or vicars who streak through their churchyards. I picked one of these and repeated and repeated it in my head, over and over again.

      The other patients were sitting round the day room scanning their own papers but I tried not to look at them, focusing hard on remembering my news item. I ignored the other voices and the general chatter about the day’s news, and I tried not to look at anyone else.

      Then the orderly turned to me and asked, ‘What was your story today, Allen?’

      I opened my mouth – and it was gone. Just a blank space where the words had been minutes before. I shrugged, furious with myself, and turned to glare out of the window.

      ‘Not to worry. Maybe tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Now, who can go round the room and tell me everyone’s names? Do you want to have a go, Dave?’

      Dave would love to. He always got it right. He pointed at each person and said their name, and when it came to me he said, ‘Dolly Parton,’ which was my nickname in the Navy.

      And I hated Dave at that moment. I was full of rage that he could do something I couldn’t. We both had severe head injuries and were struggling with a range of disabilities, but his short-term memory for facts seemed better than mine and his speech was certainly a lot better, and I didn’t think that was fair.

      Dave was an RAF instructor and had been injured in France. He’d been cycling all the way from Catterick, North Yorkshire, to Gibraltar, when he was knocked over in a hit and run. At Headley Court, Dave could always remember his news item in the morning and he could remember everyone’s names and the latest football scores, but on Sunday evenings he’d ask: ‘Has my mum been to visit me this weekend?’ even though it was only an hour or so since she’d left. He couldn’t remember that. They got him a little notebook that he kept by his bed, and he was supposed to write down everything that happened in it so he could keep track.

      ‘Look at your book,’ someone would say whenever he asked about his mum.

      Dave was in a bad way so I should have been more charitable but I really hated him when he did better than me at those memory games. It wound me up that we had to do them every morning and I always failed.

      I often thought that if you had to have a brain injury, it would be better to have a more catastrophic one so that you no longer retained any awareness of your state. The worst thing was that I knew I wasn’t stupid. I could remember that I’d had a very high-powered job designing weapons systems for the Navy. I had flashes of complete memories, but they were like tiny islands in a vast dark sea. I couldn’t put them in order or get them to join up, but I knew that I used to have a lot of people working under me, and that thousands of colleagues relied on my expertise every time they went to sea. I’d worked my way up through the ranks, serving in Northern Ireland, in the Falklands, and then in the Gulf War. I’d passed my boards to become an officer so I’d had a glittering career ahead of me with good pay and prospects. But now I couldn’t remember one paltry item in a newspaper for half an hour. It drove me nuts.

      After the newspapers and the ‘naming game’, the orderlies handed out boxes of Lego along with pictures of things we were to try and build. I’d loved Lego when I was a boy. I think it had just been brought out then, and I got one of the first-ever sets. I also liked Airfix models and model railways – anything technical, basically. In Headley Court, they gave us a two-dimensional picture of the three-dimensional object we were supposed to make with the Lego, along with some instructions, and it was supposed to stimulate your cognitive powers. I could never follow the instructions, though. I had to do it my own way, figuring it out for myself, often working backwards, and usually I’d get there in the end, even if my model wasn’t 100 per cent perfect.

      As I struggled with Lego blocks, memories would come back to me of sophisticated weapons systems I’d used and helped to develop. For example, in the Falklands War in 1982 we’d been testing an anti-submarine torpedo system. A huge missile was fired from a ship and when it reached the point where it detected a submarine, the torpedo was dropped with a parachute attached, and it searched the area until it found its target. We fired a practice one at an American submarine from a range of 150 miles, and it was so accurate it dropped directly into the conning tower and they couldn’t get their hatch open. It had special telemetry so that we could see what had happened during the flight, whether any equipment had been damaged during take-off and so forth – it was quite an impressive piece of machinery.

      I peered at the picture of a Lego ship I’d been given, trying to work out how to make a mast, and the irony made me feel very bitter. From someone who was in charge of high-tech weaponry, I was now back in my second childhood, dependent on carers and struggling with the most basic tasks.

      ‘Bollocks!’ I muttered as part of the prow broke off and fell to the floor beyond my reach. I swore a lot, and that was the word that seemed to come out most often.

      Most days we had some kind of workshop. If it wasn’t Lego it might be twisting a bit of wire to make a metal coat hanger. They handed out the wire, the instructions and the finished product, but I found I could never follow the written instructions. I got the lefts and rights and back and front muddled and it just hung loosely apart, no use to anyone. However, when I examined the finished product and

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