‘She looks like a woman with a past, doesn’t she?  

Most pretty women do.  But there is a fashion in pasts just as there is a fashion in frocks.  Perhaps Mrs Chevely’s past is merely a slightly décolleté one, but they are extremely popular nowadays.’    

So is she a clever but dangerous woman who lacks any scruples to get what she wants, an adventurer, a dangerous seductress, a victim?  

‘Oh I should fancy Mrs Chevely is one of those very modern women who find a new scandal as becoming as a new bonnet, and air them both in the park every afternoon at five-thirty.’ 

Bored, frustrated and manipulative, her intelligence and sexuality are but instruments in a game of power and influence.  She seems so far into it that she has forgotten how to feel. 

‘She wore far too much rouge last night, and not enough clothes. That is always a sign of desperation in a woman.’  

She blackmails Sir Robert Chiltern into protecting her investments by threatening to expose him.  She has in her possession a letter proving that His Majesty’s Foreign Secretary kick started his career by selling secret government plans to a speculator. 

‘I think that in life, in practical life, there is something about success, actual success, that is a little unscrupulous; something about ambition that is always unscrupulous.’   

But Sir Robert’s young wife, as beautiful as she is uncompromising, has put her husband on the fourth plinth, making it perfectly clear that her love for him is purely a projective identification of one with perfect morality. 

‘I remember having read somewhere that when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.’

In so doing, her principles damage Sir Robert far more then the bribery and manipulation of Mrs Chevely could ever do.  

‘And is Lady Chiltern as perfect as all that?  What a pity!’

Sir Robert cannot face telling his wife the truth.  He knows it would destroy their marriage. Mrs Chevely knows this and is prepared to destroy both his career and his marriage.    

The fact is we all have our dark sides, the things we are ashamed of.  It never does to have such high principles (one wonders what is being defended). 

‘Well, the English can’t stand a man who is always saying he is in the right, but they are very fond of a man who admits he has been in the wrong. It is one of the best things in them.’

Lord Goring is the catalyst in Oscar Wilde’s wittily observed play (The Ideal Husband).  He’s rather like Falstaff or the wise court jester, but in this case it is the dandy philosopher, brilliantly played by Eliot Cowan.   He enters as a louche and dissolute character, but he understands the flaws of human nature; everybody is capable of doing wrong. 

‘Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing.  Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.’

Idealisation is a very fragile basis for marriage.  Acceptance and forgiveness are more important.  As Sir Robert complains:  

‘Why can’t you women love us, faults and all?  Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals?  We all have feet of clay; men as well as women, but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more for that reason. It the imperfect, not the perfect who have need of love.’

But is it that gender specific? 

An Ideal Husband, probably Oscar Wilde’s best play, is currently at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand and stars Samantha Bond, Rachel Stirling and Eliot Cowan.  It doesn’t deserve a half empty house.  

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We spent the first hour grumbling about how our regulated society was stifling research, inhibiting education, undermining government, taking away the art and enjoyment of life, but risk aversion was part of a cycle.   In medicine, it was probably triggered by the dreadful revelations about Dr Harold Shipman; in economics,  by the greed of the bankers.    

A nervous society finds its ways of getting rid of those who will not conform to its stringent regulations.  We are both reading The Hemlock Cup by Bettany Hughes.   It’s about Socrates’ life, but takes as its starting point, his death.  Accused of being a free thinker and corrupting the youth by speaking against the Gods, Socrates was condemned to take his own death by drinking a cup of hemlock.   My old friend, Maurice, was incarcerated in a mental institution last year on the grounds that he was a danger to society.  Always resentful of authority,  Maurice was targeted by the police and neutralised.  Even the spurious interpretation of a brain scan using nuclear magnetic resonance was used to reinforce the case against him.    

David and I have reached an appropriate stage of seniority when we can with impunity comment on what we see as the failings of the medical establishment.  But this privilege has been hard won.  We are both first born and have both shouldered the burden of our parents’ ambitions for most of our lives.  David commented that it was not until the age of fifty that he escaped the straitjacket imposed by a reputation in medical research and felt free to indulge his interest in philosophy.  At around the same time, he became aware of his parents not just as projections of himself, mum and dad, but more objectively in the context of their own lives.  My trajectory ran parallel to his.  At 49, I started to retrain as a psychoanalytical psychotherapist and at 53 I retired and began writing my book.  Perhaps this was our age of reflection,  the time that we could at last be ourselves,  rail about the restrictions bequeathed to us by our parents indulge in a more liberal intellectual life. 

Does late middle age constitute a similar age of reflection for others besides the eldest sons of ambitious parents?

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Shocking, intense and bleak, the poem is a minutely observed encounter between two middle-aged one-time lovers.  She is bright, kind and sensitive, but she can afford to be.  She has moved on, married a successful author, she has made something of her life.  He has not.  In the fifteen years since they last met, his soul has been corroded by disappointment and bitterness.  He remembers their affair with a desperate longing, but he is too vulnerable to show it.  Instead he affects a vacant sarcasm, pretends he doesn’t care and gets drunk.  He can’t bear to engage with the ghost.  She understands and reaches out to help him and there is a moment when you imagine they will leave and go to bed. No, that would be too much to bear.  He looks away, stares at the waitress’s bottom and drinks more wine.  He tries to pour some for her but she places her hand over her glass.  

You wonder why he wrote suggesting they meet for lunch, why she accepted, why they met here of all places.  Was it just that he wanted to rekindle a spark of life in the ashes of his existence, to rediscover the meaning he had lost?   Did she want to witness his capitulation, his final degradation? 

He gets up to go to the toilet but falls asleep on the roof.  She pays and goes.  But later as he leaves the empty restaurant, he sees a tired old man eating alone in the corner.   Massimo, the owner, one-time life and soul of an everlasting party, promoter of dreams, is now just a grey shadow. 

The Song of Lunch was broadcast on BBC 2 at 9pm on October 8th.

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I try to gain her attention.  ‘Hello mum.  Nice to see you.’  There is no response, then like a beast in a field, she gradually turns her head and stares into my eyes, a look of slow reproach tinged with confusion as if she knows she knows me but can’t quite work it out.  It’s like her slow memory of me doesn’t quite fit.  She has gone to another place; a place that I had put her, a place where I can’t follow. 

 With infinite sadness, she moves her head across, leans her head into the gap between my shoulder and neck.  I stroke her hair, silky grey,  washed and combed that morning.  She pulls away, looks at me for longer  – mum was always good at the long looks.  I meet her gaze, hold it, will myself to energise the connection  -   but her battery is low, the circuits  slow, faltering, missing.  Then a glimmer in the hooded eyes, a recognition.  A flash of panic.  ‘Too much, too much.  She looks down, puts a hand up to her face as if to weep, but buries her nose in it instead,  as if hiding from an intolerable reality.   After a while, she looks up again, makes as if to speak.  Perhaps, even now, there will be a meaningful comment, something I can console myself with, when her body has gone and the formalities complete.  I put my ear to her lips. 

‘I want to go to the toilet.’

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I went through to the bedroom.  Mum was half lying, half sitting on pillows, wild eyed, without teeth, without hearing aids or glasses.  I was shocked.  I put her teeth and hearing aids in, put her glasses on and asked Rosina to help me get her up.  She looked scared and refused.  ‘I’m not allowed.’  So I manoeuvred mum out of bed onto the wheelchair and wheeled her into the sitting room and danced with her onto the sofa,  where we settled down and thumbed through old photos of Bristol.  When the next carer arrived, I asked if they would change her pad.  Rosina looked doubtful but Joanne said ‘of course.’    Afterwards, as she was going, Rosina told me there was faeces in it and they weren’t allowed to deal with solids. 

Later,  Cheryl rang from the office and told me she had talked to the rapid response dementia team, the district nurse, the physiotherapist and they were all of the opinion that mum had to go into hospital.  ‘It takes two carers to help Doris onto the commode or to change a pad.  And they cannot deal with solid matter’. 

I sighed, ‘Health and safety.’ 

‘Nick you would not believe how many regulations there are these days.’ 

‘I would, Cheryl, I would.  But the bottom line is that if mum goes into hospital, she will die, and I don’t want her to go like that.’ 

I had visions of her waiting around behind a curtain in Casualty for hours and then being going  to a crowded and noisy admissions ward.  So I announced: ‘Why don’t I be on call, Cheryl.  I can call in twice a day to lift her.’  

‘But, Nick, you will need to be in all the time –  even through the night.  You will not get any sleep.  And how are you going to deal with her if she is incontinent of faeces?’

‘Well, I will just have to be less squeamish.  Can’t we at least try it?’ 

Mum had rallied with me there that afternoon and I didn’t want to abandon her now.

‘No Nick, I really think we have come to the end of the line.’

It had all started after the fall.  The carer had left her alone in the bathroom and gone into the kitchen to make breakfast when she heard a crash.  The doctor decided she hadn’t broken anything, but thought she had a chest infection.  He prescribed oral morphine, which I withheld because I felt it would hasten a slide into hospital. 

But now there seemed no alternative, so I telephoned the GP and arranged for mum to be admitted to a private hospital over the weekend.  Four hours later and the ambulance still hadn’t arrived.  ‘Oh, it’s Friday night and they will be out on 999 calls.’  Mum was exhausted and sinking, so I dialled  999. 

‘Oh no, squire’, said the paramedic, who was built like a rugby player.  ’Our rules are we have to take her to casualty at the Northern General and then they can take her to St Benedict’s after that.’ 

‘But she’s already got a bed in St Benedict’s.’ 

Eventually he agreed as a favour, but explained how much trouble he would get into if his supervisors knew.  ‘It’s not me squire.  It’s the regulations. You’ve just got to be so careful these days. But she’ll like it here.  They’ve got shower gel!    

St Benedict’s was quiet and peaceful.  Mum settled into a comfortable bed and went to sleep. 

The next day, they phoned me at 8.30am and requested a deposit of £2500.  I gave my credit card details and then asked to be put through to the ward. I was connected to the consultant, who explained with great grace that they had taken an Xray and would begin to mobilise her if there was not a fracture. 

But when I arrived, she was fast asleep and unresponsive.   They had not got her out of bed.  She had been incontinent overnight and she was not swallowing water.  

I talked to the sister. ‘We’re a busy ward.  There are surgical patients and children.  Your mum needs a lot of attention and it’s the weekend. I don’t have the staff.’ 

Can nobody help care for mum?  I have encouraged them to put up a drip and give IV fluids, they have catheterised her.  I know when meal times are and will go and try to get some of that delicious cottage pie down her. 

I suspect their attitude is to let her die with dignity.  That’s fine, but although she is 94,  mum’s heart is healthy and she is physically quite strong.  She needs the kind of 24 hour one on one attention the carers were giving her at home, but she will never get that in hospital.    In the meantime, they give her lovely food but she can’t feed herself,  they provide drink but she won’t drink it,  they prescribe mobilisation but the physio looks after the whole ward and doesn’t have the time to get her up on her feet and mum is too frightened. 

She’s now been in St Benedict’s for three days and there’s a change.  It’s like she has lost hold of her life.  When I arrived yesterday, she was slumped in a chair, desperate, pleading, ‘Oh please, oh, please Nick, pulling at the sheets on the bed, plucking at her drip, trying to sit up.  I put her hearing aid in and tried to communicate but when she responded, it was with half a sentence.  ‘I want to go …. Get me out ….. Nurses…… Toilet’ .   She recognised me, stared at me desperately before her eyes seemed to cloud and look away. 

I phoned the consultant.  ‘It will be a long haul to get her back to where she was before she came in, if she ever gets back.  Over the next few days, we will get her over the infection and try to encourage her to feed herself and walk, but I suspect this will take more time than we have got.   You will need to get her in to a nursing home.  

I guess mum had been on the brink for some time,  kept going by the constant round the clock attention of her carers.  It would only take a moment’s neglect; a fall plus the rigid application of  regulations and she was suddenly in a place where they couldn’t help.   I sense her terror.  I hold her and she quietens a little but as soon as I let go, she’s back in her own version of hell.   And what now?  She certainly can’t go back.  She will go to a nursing home.  They will keep her body alive , they will feed her, give her drinks, turn her, manage pressure sores.  I can only pray that her mind has  long gone by then,  she has released her fierce grip on life and resigned to oblivion.  

People say that the British have the best care system in the world.  It’s not true.  The boost in NHS funds may have enhanced the efficiency of health provision, but it has not improved care.  Care requires flexibility and compassion.  It takes human understanding to know how to work within the rules to provide what a patient needs.  All too often regulations lead to restriction and a withholding of care.    

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So much human expression is defensive posturing.  It feels so dangerous to reveal our needs and desires.  We need love so much, yet are terrified of its power to subsume all the meaning in our lives and potentially destroy us.’ If we ever doubted love’s affect on the human psyche, just look at these faces. Strangely, it is the men not the women who seemed more vulnerable and frightened.  Perhaps they have more to lose.      

‘Emportez moi’ (Sweep me off my feet), at the MecVal Centre in Paris, is a brave and powerful  evocation of the power of passion to bewitch and destroy, to throw us off balance into the white waters of emotion in ways both wonderful and painful, always at the risk of losing ourselves. 

The works include videos on the interplay of harmonised gazes and movements, the tenderness of a caress, the passion of a kiss, the ecstacy of multiple orgasm, the spontaneous lament of lonely men in a late night bar (crying over you), even the poignant tableau of the two parakeets, who died for their love.  As mediums for longing,  impulses, illusions and abandonments, they  express sorrow and solitude as much as they do hope, expectation and ecstacy.    

As the programme for the exhibition points out,  ‘perhaps the true subject here is the deeply human appetite for encounter; the search, the desire, transport and the vertiginous sensation of possibility.’

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And in love, what is the real thing?   Stoppard is a much greater teacher on the mysteries of love than any of the psychoanalysts; he shows us what it is like.  Henry is arch Stoppard,  graded, defended, cynical, witty, prompting Annie’s comment  ‘You want to wait until it all goes wrong and then you will decide you were right all along.’

The script fizzes with insight and emotion.  Hannah Morahan as Annie captures the barely contained lust, a dangerous impulsiveness, as she goads Henry on to take the risk that will prove he truly loves her.   ‘Touch me!  Anywhere!  I dare you to.  Do it now on the floor. Let them find us.’  And when she returns with the dips and gives him her finger to suck, the look on Henry’s face reveals just where that finger has been.  It’s raw stuff.  The shift from the thrill, the excitement to the most dreadful pain is expressed so well.   So is there something about the thrill that just captivated Henry.   ‘Once you have loved, can you ever do without it?’

There is a dreadful compulsion about an affair, the awful conflict,  the compulsive danger of playing with fire, ‘All that lying.’ ‘Happiness expressed in banality and lust.’, passion fuelled by the fear and jealousy.  ‘Why aren’t you jealous?’ It bothers me that you are never bothered’  Annie complains.  Of course, if Henry were jealous, it would demonstrate the power she has over him.  Exclusive love is colonisation’.  And isn’t that the source of the excitement, the thrill of it all?   Annie wants Henry to prove she is loved, is loveable; she is so insecure,  she can only exist in her lover’s gaze. ‘The exclusive voracity of love.’ 

Henry eloquently explains being in love as colonisation, I write just for you.  I write just to be worth your love.  It has taken him over, subsumed all of the meaning in his life.  He lives with Annie in their own bubble of happiness.  ‘Love is knowing and being known’  So is being in love an enhanced image of self, air brushed and in soft focus.  Aren’t  lovers really in love with themselves, as seen through the gaze of the other.   ‘When its there, you are happy and nice to know, but when its gone, you count for nothing and all you have is pain.   So Henry is dependant, even though he fights it.  They both are.  They have given each other power over their lives, the power to destroy each other. Anything you think is right; what you want is right. This is the extent of the dependency.    But human relationships cannot be confined as Annie says when she admits her infidelity – this is not a commitment,  just a bargain – a deal and it gets complicated when you have an affair and enter into a deal with two people.  Maybe being in love becomes a performance, an obligation that you have to act out, because the threat of loss is so great.  It’s better to destroy the hope than to live a love that gives false joy. 

As  Annie says, ‘I have to chose whom I hurt more’  You are stronger, you can take it.  But I love you, I’m yours.  Henry finds it demeaning to be suspicious and jealous; he struggles to respond in what Stoppard calls ‘dignified cuckoldry’.   The unwritten rule of a relationship seems to be to respect the other’s privacy.  You must not trespass behind the make believe.  You must not try to discover the real thing; the ambivalent attachment of most human relationships. ‘What free love is free of is love!’   

The Real Thing was written in 1985 and has been playing at The Old Vic with Toby Stephens and Hannah Morahan as Henry and Annie.  Stoppard tackles an intense and important topic with insight, wit and style.  

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These men had devoted the majority of their lives to an idea encompassed by a position of power and influence.  It had become their identity and meaning.  Without it, life had no purpose.  How could anything replace it?   Something that was all consuming was no longer there.  The sense of grief must have been overwhelming; it would be difficult to know how to carry on.   

This doesn’t just apply to politics, of course, or indeed any job.  It is found after the loss of anything or anybody, who had occupied so much meaning in one’s life.  It’s the loss of meaning that’s the thing.  People in the armed forces during the war found it difficult to cope with peacetime.  Those who fall in love and lose it can grieve for years.  It may not be  the person they miss, but what they meant, the way that relationship had transformed their lives.  It’s the same kind of thing that married couples experience when one of them dies, the same thing when a child dies; all that investment and hope in a future suddenly taken away.  

Gordon has two lovely blonde- haired little boys.  He is a fun dad.  It’s to be hoped that Sarah and the family will restore the meaning.

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And the people seem robust and healthy, the trimmed physique of the men carries not an ounce of fat, their teeth are intact, their skin not infected with sores. The women are strong and bear healthy infants at their hips. 

The children are infinitely curious, open and engaging.  They want to know about everything and are fascinated by my equipment; camera, glasses, binoculars, books, pencils and especially postcards.  I show them how to draw and how to play noughts and crosses.  They pick up the idea very quickly. They go to school in the village until they are about 11 and then help in the fields.  Some girls, who couldn’t have been more 12 pass with baskets on their back and machetes on their belts, heading for the creek.  An hour later they return, their burden of firewood supported by the wooden yoke across their shoulders and a band of rattan around their foreheads.

But Northern Laos is a land in transition. Even in this village, one of two young men have a moto, a small fifty cc motorcycle, there is a rusty satellite dish outside one house servicing the village’s sole television that is powered by car batteries, and there are two solar panels outside another house, from which emanates as from some magic cave, the multicoloured winking lights of mobile phone chargers. A UN team is doing a survey to work out how they might build a proper latrine and pipe in water from a reservoir in the hills.     

This village is lucky.  The changes that have taken place have not changed the basic structure and function of the community.  The community is still run by a committee of village elders.  The government has had little impact, yet!  

Elsewhere, the changes are more drastic.  The communist government has devised a  policy of moving rural villages to the main roads. The new houses are based on a traditional design, but more are made of wood and brick instead of bamboo and rattan. They have lost their soul; their identity. People work in the new rubber plantations that have grown up along the deforested hillsides. Others take a moto or tuk-tuk to work in town.  Community is being eroded; individual expression is more the rule.  Under one house, a toddler was careering around in a fancy baby walker,  in brand new pink baby suit and flashing new trainers.  And the Chinese are coming.     

There is a big school in the roadside village. The children gather from miles around and play on ‘the green’, the big area of hard dirt in the centre of the village. It was like a painting by Pieter Bruegel. There were home-made whipping tops, a hopping game of tag, a game where children took it in turns to hop down a track balancing a bean on their free foot. There was a game of skittles played with big beans that skimmed along the concrete floor outside the classrooms, there was a skipping game where the rope was held very high and the girls had to reach up and pull the rope down with their foot. Older boys played boules and a few kicked a football about.  Sinoy, one of the local guides, made a small square shuttlecock by weaving strips of banana leaf together into a box and inserting a stick topped with a leaf or a bit of plastic in the top. It flew perfectly and we played endlessly batting it to each with hands, feet, knees and forehead. It was great fun! Games reinforce companionship and community and are all the more important at a time of such rapid change.  

But people seem less open and friendly, the nearer the village is to the road.  Maybe they sense danger.  Strangers stop and buy food from stalls set up at the roadside.  It’s easy to see they might soon be stopping for sex; perhaps they already do.  The proprietor of the guest house is the local Mr Big, a swaggering, obese young man dressed in a bright red top emblazoned with the Manchester United logo, long French football shorts and brand new trainers. The children eat sweets and have pot bellies and a permanent dribble. Every young person has a moto and a mobile phone; it’s obligatory. There are more satellite dishes and most houses are supplied with electricity. This was not just a village in transition; the whole culture is in transition; in fact the whole developing world is changing, fast.  Traditional ways of life are disappearing or retained as window dressing for the tourists. Eco-tourism is big up here, only don’t look too carefully.  The cultural reality of it is disappearing before your eyes, managed by fat boys in designer gear who marshal groups of ethnics for photographs.

Of course, it does not do to romanticise this too much.  The forest can only support a small number of people and there are nutritional and infective risks if population levels increase.  An expanding population is going to need more intensive farming and access to town.   

In Hanoi, a wonderful Museum of Ethnography has been created for people to understand their vanished ethnic heritage. It feels infinitely sad that it is necessary to create a museum of a way of life was quite viable and wondrous in its diversity.  Yes, progress cannot really be halted but progress is a kind of meaningless unification.  Piped water, electricity, television, motos and other labour saving services and devices may make life easier, but what they take away is invaluable; the identity and meaning of a culture that has evolved over thousands of years.           

Most exploit the change, of course; they have to, but it doesn’t always bring happiness.  Our guide, Pon, is a sharp young man caught between cultures.  He clearly loves trekking through the jungle and knows ‘everybody’, bring medicines for the shaman’s stomach ache, cigarettes for his male friends, smiles and love songs for his girl friends and the occasional T shirt for the children. He enjoys his role as envoy between cultures.  But when we visited him in his home with his lovely wife and cute son, it was clear that he is  not happy. He has been exposed to a western way of life that he can never have. He has the expectations of western lifestyle, but his salary as a guide is limited and he is too dependent on meaningless charm to exact additional large tips from his clients.  His wife does not speak English.  They live with her parents. He can’t travel, see the world, he can only look at the television.  He is trapped!

The same dichotomy was all too apparent on the coach that took us from the sprawling dust of Phnom Penh to The Cardamom Hills along the highway built by the Thais in 2008.  The video played endlessly showing images of young men in sharp suits, driving long shiny black sports cars (sometimes a sports car is just a sports car but often it’s not), and picking up pretty young girls, whom they transport to a moonlit lake to sing their songs of romantic love. The story is always the same; if you want the doe-eyed girl of your fantasies, don’t be a loser and work in the fields, but get yourself sharp clothes and a smart car. Cambodia is still dreadfully poor, but these videos purvey an impossible dream, a dream that makes every young person feel like a loser. London was never paved with gold and Cambodia can never be Beverley Hills! That’s the reality.

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It was like a metronome, every second.  Simon worked out that at this rate, she would say oh dear, 3600 times an hour,  up to 50,000 times a day,  15 million times a year.  But the mantra had some more intense variations;  ‘oh no,  oh no, oh no’ or just ‘no, no, no no’, and worse still, ‘oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please’ and then ‘oh Nick, oh Nick, oh Nick’  Anybody listening to this would be bound to think, ‘Whatever is he doing to that poor woman?’ 

Every so often she would stop and ask where we were going.

‘We going to Chatsworth mum. You know to my cottage’ and I’d make a motion with my hand as if to open the latch. 

‘Chatsworth.’, she’d say puzzled and then she would get it.

‘They brought the lambs in.’ 

‘Yes that’s right.’

‘What are we going there for?’

‘We’re going to have tea; turkey sandwiches, Christmas cake, mince pies.’

‘You going to leave me there.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘We’ll have tea and then take you back home.’

‘Home?’

‘Yes, to your flat.’

‘My flat?’

‘Yes, number 9 the Woodlands, Shore Lane.’

‘Do I live there?

‘Yes.’

‘And then you’re going to leave me to walk?’

‘No!’

And the litany would all start again, ‘oh no, oh no, please, oh please’.

It is all very tiring.  Although I am not doing anything awful to her, it feels like it.  The reality is that her life is dreadful. She has lost her identity.  She cannot remember anything from one moment to the next and so everything is alien to her, confusing. She  doesn’t know where she is or what is happening. 

And so a pleasant drive in the country is torture to her.  She has been taken out of her environment along roads she can barely remember to an unknown destination for no clear purpose.  And because she has never really been able to trust that things will be allright, she fears she will be abandoned and never find her way back.  It must be terrifying. 

When the Red Army invaded East Prussia in the winter of 1945, millions of people were forced by fear of murder and rape to flee their homes and join the columns of refugees escaping in sub zero temperatures towards the west.  That was their dreadful reality.  They didn’t know where they were going or why and many died on the way. Mum’s world must seem just as threatening.  She does not know where she is, she has no home and she sees confusion and danger everywhere.  Sometimes when I have to repeat the same facts to her for the twentieth time, it is important to realize that this an anchor point, however ephemeral, in a devastated world.

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