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shook my head.

      ‘He’s having significant problems controlling his legs. We’ll just have to keep an eye on it all. Meanwhile, I see no reason why you can’t take him home for the weekend. With your nursing background, you should be able to care for him.’

      ‘Are you sure?’ I asked, feeling hopeful. Surely he couldn’t be too bad if they were letting him out?

      ‘Why not? Just bring him back on Monday morning and he can see a consultant then. Have a nice family weekend together.’

      The doctor smiled and I felt reassured. Everything was going to be all right. They wouldn’t let him home otherwise, would they?

      A nurse and I helped Allen to get dressed and walk down to the car. On the way back to the house, I drove slowly and cautiously. I did all the talking, telling him about Valerie’s funeral and the children and everything that had been happening, but I got no response at all. He closed his eyes and I couldn’t even tell if he was listening, so after a while I stopped and drove in silence.

      As we pulled into our street, I said, ‘The kids are really excited about seeing you. They’re at Julie’s but I said I’d go and get them as soon as we arrived.’ Julie was my wonderful next-door neighbour who had four kids of her own but was always happy to look after my two as well. ‘Two more don’t make any difference at all,’ she’d laugh.

      Allen turned to look at me and I couldn’t read the expression in his eyes but he didn’t seem enthusiastic about seeing the kids. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well enough.

      ‘Why don’t we go in and get settled first?’ I suggested, and he nodded. He’d hardly spoken throughout the journey, and when he did his speech was very slow and indistinct and he was often lost for the most basic words.

      We pulled into the driveway and I walked into the house behind him, noticing that he had an odd, rolling gait. He picked his right foot up high and flopped it down then pulled the other one through. It reminded me of the way the actor John Thaw walked. He’d had polio as a child and would pick his foot up and put it down with a strange precision. As a nurse, I’d always noticed that about him.

      Allen plonked himself down on the sofa and sat looking around him.

      ‘Do you want something to drink?’ I asked.

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘Do you want tea or coffee?’

      He screwed up his face, unable to think. ‘The stuff that comes in bags,’ he slurred.

      Tea, then.

      At that moment there was a burst of squealing and running feet and the children erupted into the house.

      ‘Daddy!’ they shrieked, over the moon to see him. Zoe leaped on to his knee and Liam snuggled on to the sofa beside him.

      ‘Get off me!’ he snapped loudly as he pushed Zoe away. The look of bewilderment on her little face was heartbreaking.

      ‘Kids, Daddy’s not feeling very well. Don’t climb all over him.’

      ‘I’ve got a new train, Daddy,’ Liam said excitedly. They used to play together with his Playmobil train set.

      ‘And I’ve started ballet,’ Zoe joined in, not wanting to be left out. ‘And I’ve got a new dolly as well.’

      ‘Go away!’ Allen snarled, putting his hands over his ears.

      They were devastated. Whenever Allen had come back from postings in the past, he’d burst in the door bringing them presents, swinging them in the air and tickling them. They just didn’t have a clue what had happened.

      ‘Daddy’s got a bad headache,’ I said gently. ‘You know what it’s like when your head hurts. Just leave him in peace for a little while and maybe he’ll play later.’

      I sent them over to Julie’s for the afternoon, just telling her briefly that Allen wasn’t very well. When I got back, he was examining two tubes of cream he’d been given on prescription. He had a nasty rash on his feet and another one on his groin and they’d given him a different cream for each rash, but he couldn’t remember which was which. There was nothing written on the boxes and he was very anxious about it.

      ‘Which cream is which?’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t know.’

      The old Allen would have made a joke out of it. He’d have said, ‘I’ll start by putting them on my feet because if my feet fall off that will be fine, but I don’t want the other bits to fall off.’

      But he was incapable of joking now.

      ‘I’ll go to the pharmacy and ask them,’ I offered. ‘Let me just get your tea first.’

      Two minutes later, as if I hadn’t spoken, Allen asked, ‘What about this cream for my feet? What am I going to do?’

      It was like being with an old person who had Alzheimer’s. When I worked in a nursing home, some of the residents would ask the same question over and over again – usually: ‘When is my daughter coming? Why’s she not here yet?’ That weekend Allen asked me about his creams at least twenty times a day and he never seemed to hear the answers I gave.

      I showed him the photos I’d had developed from a holiday we’d had in Singapore and Penang just a couple of months earlier, but there was no spark of recognition. He didn’t seem to remember us being there and I thought that was very worrying. He just looked at each one and handed it back to me without comment.

      He didn’t seem to remember where anything was in the house either. I had to show him where his clothes were kept, where his shaving stuff was and how to turn on the shower. My sense of alarm grew stronger by the minute.

      It was a sunny weekend so I set up a chair for him in the back garden and he just sat there twitching and rubbing at his rash and fretting about his creams, and a knot tightened in my stomach. This wasn’t my Allen. It was as if a stranger had taken over Allen’s body. How long would this last? When could I have my intelligent, loving husband back?

      I couldn’t wait to get him to Haslar on the Monday morning so that they could start treating him. Despite all my nursing training, I felt utterly helpless. I had no idea what I could do to help him. Whatever it took, I would do it – but I didn’t have a clue where to even start.

       CHAPTER THREE Allen

      Over the days and weeks after the accident, I realized that I had lost a huge chunk of my memory. Doctors reassured me that it was a common side effect of head injuries and was often just temporary but I sat obsessively trying to work out what I could and couldn’t remember. In particular my entire childhood was a blank, so I asked Sandra to tell me what she knew about it.

      She said that when I was a kid I lived in a council house in Haslemere, Surrey, with my mum and my sister Suzanne. Mum and Dad split up when I was two years old and we lost contact with Dad, which must have been really tough for Mum. She struggled to cope financially and we didn’t have lots of toys or fancy bikes, parties or trips to the zoo, but there was always food on the table and clothes on our backs. In my teens, I got a boarding-school place paid for by the council and that helped to ease the burden.

      My gran lived in London where she used to work for Sir Samuel Hood, the Sixth Viscount Hood, who came from a family long associated with the Navy. At Christmas time, Lord Hood used to let us come up to London and stay with my gran in his house in Eaton Square while he and the family were out at their estate in the country, and seemingly I was in awe of the place. There were huge oil paintings on the walls, of battleships at Trafalgar and great storms at sea, and all kinds of naval memorabilia like sextants and charts and telescopes. Sandra says I told her I used to love just standing in front of them staring and pretending I was on deck, clinging to the rails as huge waves lashed the sides. Much of his collection is now housed in the Royal Naval Museum in Greenwich,

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