Now, for much the same reasons I’d not been able to talk openly to Ruth about what I’d done to her over the Sales Register business, she of course wasn’t able to thank me for the way I’d intervened with Midge. But it was obvious from her manner towards me, not just over the next few days, but over the weeks that followed, how pleased she was with me. And having recently been in much the same position, it was easy to recognise the signs of her looking around for some opportunity to do something nice, something really special for me. It was a good feeling, and I remember even thinking once or twice how it would be better if she didn’t get a chance for ages, just so the good feeling between us could go on and on. As it was, an opportunity did come along for her, about a month after the Midge episode, the time I lost my favourite tape.

I still have a copy of that tape and until recently I’d listen to it occasionally driving out in the open country on a drizzly day. But now the tape machine in my car’s got so dodgy, I don’t dare play it in that. And there never seems enough time to play it when I’m back in my bedsit. Even so, it’s one of my most precious possessions. Maybe come the end of the year, when I’m no longer a carer, I’ll be able to listen to it more often.

The album’s called Songs After Dark and it’s by Judy Bridgewater. What I’ve got today isn’t the actual cassette, the one I had back then at Hailsham, the one I lost. It’s the one Tommy and I found in Norfolk years afterwards—but that’s another story I’ll come to later. What I want to talk about is the first tape, the one that disappeared.

I should explain before I go any further this whole thing we had in those days about Norfolk. We kept it going for years and years—it became a sort of in-joke, I suppose—and it all started from one particular lesson we had when we were pretty young.

It was Miss Emily herself who taught us about the different counties of England. She’d pin up a big map over the blackboard, and next to it, set up an easel. And if she was talking about, say, Oxfordshire, she’d place on the easel a large calendar with photos of the county. She had quite a collection of these picture calendars, and we got through most of the counties this way. She’d tap a spot on the map with her pointer, turn to the easel and reveal another picture. There’d be little villages with streams going through them, white monuments on hillsides, old churches beside fields; if she was telling us about a coastal place, there’d be beaches crowded with people, cliffs with seagulls. I suppose she wanted us to have a grasp of what was out there surrounding us, and it’s amazing, even now, after all these miles I’ve covered as a carer, the extent to which my idea of the various counties is still set by these pictures Miss Emily put up on her easel. I’d be driving through Derbyshire, say, and catch myself looking for a particular village green with a mock-Tudor pub and a war memorial—and realise it’s the image Miss Emily showed us the first time I ever heard of Derbyshire.

Anyway, the point is, there was a gap in Miss Emily’s calendar collection: none of them had a single picture of Norfolk. We had these same lectures repeated a number of times, and I’d always wonder if this time she’d found a picture of Norfolk, but it was always the same. She’d wave her pointer over the map and say, as a sort of afterthought: “And over here, we’ve got Norfolk. Very nice there.”

Then, that particular time, I remember how she paused and drifted off into thought, maybe because she hadn’t planned what should happen next instead of a picture. Eventually she came out of her dream and tapped the map again.

“You see, because it’s stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it’s not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south”—she moved the pointer up and down—“they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it’s a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it’s also something of a lost corner.”

A lost corner. That’s what she called it, and that was what started it. Because at Hailsham, we had our own “Lost Corner” up on the third floor, where the lost property was kept; if you lost or found anything, that’s where you went. Someone—I can’t remember who it was—claimed after the lesson that what Miss Emily had said was that Norfolk was England’s “lost corner,” where all the lost property found in the country ended up. Somehow this idea caught on and soon had become accepted fact virtually throughout our entire year.

Not long ago, when Tommy and I were reminiscing about all of this, he thought we’d never really believed in the notion, that it was a joke right from the start. But I’m pretty certain he was wrong there. Sure enough, by the time we were twelve or thirteen, the Norfolk thing had become a big joke. But my memory of it—and Ruth remembered it the same way—is that at the beginning, we believed in Norfolk in the most literal way; that just as lorries came to Hailsham with our food and stuff for our Sales, there was some similar operation going on, except on a grander scale, with vehicles moving all over England, delivering anything left behind in fields and trains to this place called Norfolk. The fact that we’d never seen a picture of the place only added to its mystique.

This might all sound daft, but you have to remember that to us, at that stage in our lives, any place beyond Hailsham was like a fantasy land; we had only the haziest notions of the world outside and about what was and wasn’t possible there. Besides, we never bothered to examine our Norfolk theory in any detail. What was important to us, as Ruth said one evening when we were sitting in that tiled room in Dover, looking out at the sunset, was that “when we lost something precious, and we’d looked and looked and still couldn’t find it, then we didn’t have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel around the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.”

I’m sure Ruth was right about that. Norfolk came to be a real source of comfort for us, probably much more than we admitted at the time, and that was why we were still talking about it—albeit as a sort of joke—when we were much older. And that’s why, years and years later, that day Tommy and I found another copy of that lost tape of mine in a town on the Norfolk coast, we didn’t just think it pretty funny; we both felt deep down some tug, some old wish to believe again in something that was once close to our hearts.

But I wanted to talk about my tape, Songs After Dark by Judy Bridgewater. I suppose it was originally an LP—the recording date’s 1956—but what I had was the cassette, and the cover picture was what must have been a scaled-down version of the record sleeve. Judy Bridgewater is wearing a purple satin dress, one of those off-the-shoulder ones popular in those days, and you can see her from just above the waist because she’s sitting on a bar-stool. I think it’s supposed to be South America, because there are palms behind her and swarthy waiters in white tuxedos. You’re looking at Judy from exactly where the barman would be when he’s serving her drinks. She’s looking back in a friendly, not too sexy way, like she might be flirting just a tiny bit, but you’re someone she knows from way back. Now the other thing about this cover is that Judy’s got her elbows up on the bar and there’s a cigarette burning in her hand. And it was because of this cigarette that I got so secretive about the tape, right from the moment I found it at the Sale.