But there had been other physical injuries too. The roadside bomb had burst my eardrums and had driven Afghan desert dust deep into my torn and bruised lungs, to say nothing of the blast damage and lacerations to the rest of my body. Pulmonary infection and then double pneumonia had almost finished off what the explosion failed to do.

The numbing shock that had initially suppressed any feeling of hurt had soon been replaced by a creeping agony in which every part of me seemed to be on fire. It was just as well that I remembered only a smattering of the full casualty-evacuation procedure. Heavy doses of morphine did more than inhibit the pain receptors in the brain-they slowed its very activity down to bare essentials, such as maintaining breathing and the pumping of the heart.

The human body, however, is a wondrous creation and has an amazing ability to mend itself. My ears recovered, the lacerations healed, and my white blood cells slowly won the war against my chest infection, with a little help and reinforcement from some high-powered intravenous antibiotics.

If only the body could grow a new foot.

The mental injuries, however, were proving less easy to spot and far more difficult to repair.

"Where in Hammersmith do you want?" Vicki asked, bringing me back to reality from my daydreaming.

"Anywhere will do," I said.

"But do you live in Hammersmith?"

"No," I said.

"So where do you live?"

Now that was a good question. I suppose that I was technically, and manifestly, homeless.

For the past fifteen years I had lived in army accommodations of one form or another: barracks, Sandhurst, officers' messes, tents and bivouacs, even in the backs of trucks or the cramped insides of Warrior armored cars. I had slept in, under and on top of Land Rovers, and more often than I cared to remember, I had slept where I sat or lay on the ground, half an ear open for the call of a sentry or the sound of an approaching enemy.