RESCUE

Lying in the darkest dark, torn from my children by my eyes, I get to know the woman in the other bed. She is old and wise and she has seen the firestorms of Dresden. Her voice saves me as we tell each other stories through the night. We cannot read, we must not move, we may have no visitors. By the weekend, when her son comes to collect her, we know each other well.

Ludwigshafen has little to commend it. There is the unmistakable smell of metal and sulphur, chemicals drifting into the hospital over from the BASF – the Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik, which made dyes, munitions and fat men's fortunes.

As she speaks of her escape, her young son on her knee, riding on a tractor away from a phosphorus hell where thousands die in cellar refuges, I smell the burning. Behind my bandages I see the sky catch light.

She too is sightless these few days. Her son arrives: a cultured, lovely man he's grown to be. He is the conductor of Ludwigshafen's City Orchestra and brings the family car to rescue her. His music's one good thing about that soulless city. The other is the firenight rider of the storm.