I went to the cinema in town the other night with Gordon, a couple of other men from the ward and two of the volunteer nurses (the two who fainted a few weeks ago, including the one who I’d seen with her knickers down not long after!) We watched the Pathe newsreel of bombers taking off and Hurricanes and Spitfires turning and wheeling in the sky. I looked across at Gordon to see how he was responding to this, worried that it might bring back painful memories, but he looked enthralled by the footage, his eyes shining brightly in rapt concentration as the frames flashed and flickered across his irises. As I was watching him, I felt a sudden pang of terror. I could see that he wanted to fly again – of course he does! – and I worried about what would happen the next time he got in a plane. Afterwards, we went and ate dinner at the Whitehall restaurant and I was quiet while everyone else laughed and drank and smoked as though there wasn’t even a war happening, as though trucks full of weapons and soldiers weren’t passing by outside, London wasn’t being bombed or people being killed at all.

The next day Gordon talked to me about his hands, which the Maestro was hoping to operate on very soon.

‘If I’m going to fly again, I’ll need two hands that work properly,’ he said.

‘But I’d like to see a hand operation first so that I can understand more about how they will be mended.’

The Maestro was enthusiastic for him to join the viewing gallery high above the operating theatre later that day when he was doing a similar operation on another patient. I was assisting in the theatre and as I walked in I looked up through the glass screen at the viewing area above where Gordon was sitting. The patient was already on the table. The Maestro, with his own stumpy fingers – strong and determined rather than graceful and elegant – took away the bandages and revealed a clenched hand where much of the new, pink skin had webbed across two of the digits, turning them into a single solid-looking lump. He separated the fingers from one another with a scalpel and took a thin layer of skin from the patient’s upper arm, wedged it between the two divided fingers and sewed it all up with neat, black silk stitches. Then the patient’s hand was wrapped in gauze, dipped in orange emulsion and covered by more gauze, also coloured with disinfectant, and finally held in place by an elastic crepe bandage.

It still seems amazing to me that this procedure can restore function to fingers that had previously been little more than claws, but I’ve already seen it work a number of times. It means that with the successful operations, these men will at least be able to live independent lives, but not many of them will be able to fly again. Often all that they’re able to do with this new hand of theirs is the most basic of motor tasks like grasping a knife and a fork. Gordon, though, is desperate to fly; I wonder whether he will and, terribly, some part of me wishes that he won’t.