It took two buses and a train ride to get to Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton.It’s an enormous place like the grandest of stately homes in beautiful parkland with huge trees: cedars and oaks with the daffodils in bloom beneath them. As I walked up the driveway there were catcalls from the men sitting on seats and in wheelchairs around the gardens, and I didn’t mind a bit. It made me smile to see them enjoying themselves in the first of the spring sunshine, after the troubles they’d surely been through. If it wasn’t for the reason they’re all here, I’d be a tiny bit envious of them. So I was in high spirits when I finally found Alfie, not in a long dreary hospital ward like the King George, but in a posh drawing room with beautiful carpets, chintz three piece suites and standard lamps with fringed lampshades all around. The other men were playing dominoes or cards, or reading the papers for all the world like well-bred gentlemen in a country club. But Alfie was sat apart from the rest in a wheelchair, in the new pyjamas and dressing gown we’d bought for him by pooling our rations.
