Working sixteen or eighteen hours a day without proper food took a toll on all of us. Many of my fellow students succumbed to tuberculosis and were granted leave-the only reason the hospital would let you interrupt your training and come back, as a matter of fact, even though some took more than a year to recover. The new antibiotics were starting to come in, but they cost the earth and weren’t yet widely available. When my turn came and I went to the Registrar, explaining that a family friend had a cottage in Somerset where I could recuperate, she nodded bleakly: we were already down five in my class, but she signed the forms for me and told me to write monthly. She stressed that she would hope to see me in under a year.

In fact, I was gone eight months. I’d wanted to return sooner, but Claire-Claire Tallmadge, who was a senior houseman by then, with a consultancy all but certain-persuaded me I wasn’t strong enough, although I was aching to get back.

When I returned to the Royal Free it felt-oh, so good. The hospital routine, my studies, they were like a balm, healing me. The Registrar actually called me into her office to warn me to slow down; they didn’t want me to suffer a relapse.

She didn’t understand that work was my only salvation. I suppose it had already become my second skin. It’s a narcotic, the oblivion overwork can bring you. Arbeit macht frei-that was an obscene parody the Nazis thought up, but it is possible Arbeit macht betäubt-what? Oh, sorry, I forgot you don’t speak German. They had 1984-type slogans over the entrance to all their camps, and that was what they put over Auschwitz: work will make you free. That slogan was a bestial parody, but work can numb you. If you stop working even for a moment, everything inside you starts evaporating; soon you are so shapeless you can’t move at all. At least, that was my fear.

When I first heard about my family, I became utterly without any grounding at all. I was supposed to be preparing for my higher-school certificate-the diploma we took in those days when we finished high school-the results determined your university entrance-but the exams lost the meaning they’d had for me all during the war. Every time I sat down to read I felt as though my insides were being sucked away by a giant vacuum cleaner.