He could see it: a child lost in his imagination, succouring fantasies, playing solitary games around the married quarters at Tidworth, Catterick, Larkhall or Colchester… Father was the Northern Ireland expert and always there; mother, a deserter from a nursing career, full-time unpaid organizer of other ranks' wives clubs and counsellor of teenage brides on credit-card debt and trying to keep together a hopeless partnership. Walter and Araminta Kitchen had been too consumed with the job and the good deeds to notice that their lone child was isolated. He remembered coming into the kitchen with homework, arithmetic that he couldn't do, unaware that his father had learned that afternoon he was not sailing with the Task Force to the South Atlantic, and getting a volley of abuse over a gin glass for thinking homework counted in the scale of things, and running. Sent to boarding-school in Somerset. Short visits from his mother, and an aloof one from his father to see the school play. Worst day ever at school was his father's visit a year after his retirement as brigadier, with full dress and medals, to inspect the Combined Cadet Force. Not an unhappy childhood, compared to what some at the school put up with, but remote from love.

Of course he would join the army: his small act of rebellion, and it had taken bottle, was to decide – himself – when and where. And then the puce-faced, spluttering reaction of his father when he announced that he'd enlisted, that afternoon, and been passed through by a Birmingham recruitment office, to be a private soldier and bottom of the heap. 'Silly little bugger,' Walter had called him, and Araminta had said quietly to her husband, 'Not to worry, darling. It never lasts when middle-class boys go slumming it.'

All the sounds, that evening, of the estate had wafted up to his room: music and screams, the wail of the sirens, then the intermittent flashes of blue emergency lights.