1

Clouds ahead. Some were snowy mountains looming over me. Others lay across the sky like long, sleeping giants. I moved the controls so gently that when the plane tilted down and to the left it seemed to respond not to command but by instinct. Then, ahead of me, the horizon straightened. It is a strange friend: always there, glimmering between sky and land, unapproachable, untouchable.

Beneath were the North Downs, their gentle curves bearing an odd similarity to the rise and fall of the human body. Now they were sliced cleanly through by the motorway. Cars chased each other along its deep cut. They gleamed like tiny fish. Then the M4 was gone and the earth was falling away towards water, a river knitted with a complexity of tributaries.

And here a town, its centre robust, red-hearted, radiating roads lined by paler, more modern buildings.

I swallowed.

The town was disintegrating.

I blinked.

An earthquake?

The town’s colours waved. Its buildings were pebbles on a riverbed, viewed through the distorting lens of flowing water.

Extraordinary air currents?

No. Because the town waved in time with something inside me, something like nausea. But more ominous.

I blinked harder and my hand tightened on the plane’s controls as if I could correct this feeling by correcting altitude or direction. But it came from deep inside me, forcing its way up through my body with a physical power that left me breathless.

I am a practical, sensible man. I looked for practical, sensible explanations. What had I eaten for breakfast? Toast? Harmless enough and offering no explanation for the sudden intensity of this sickness. And if it wasn’t exactly nausea, then what? Its chief component was an inexplicable sense of unhappiness, and … yes, dread. A sense that something terrible was about to happen. Even … an urge to make it happen.

A ludicrous, irrational thought crossed my mind. What if I got out of the aeroplane?

I struggled with myself to remain seated, to keep breathing, to control the plane, to blink. To be normal again.

And then I glanced at the GPS. And read: Hungerford.

Red, older houses at the centre. Hungerford. On its peripheries, grey streets and playing fields. Hungerford.

And then it was gone, replaced by Savernake Forest, a vast green cushion of vegetation. Gradually the great forest brought me relief, as if I were a foot-traveller enjoying its leafy shade. If my heart rate was still raised the cause was retrospective horror. What had happened to me back there?

I am in my sixties. As a forensic pathologist, I have performed more than 20,000 post-mortems. But this recent experience was the first time in my entire career that I suspected my job, which has introduced me to the human body in death after illness, decomposition, crime, massacre, explosion, burial and pulverizing mass disasters, might have emotional repercussions.

Let’s not call it a panic attack. But it shocked me into asking myself questions. Should I see a psychologist? Or even a psychiatrist? And, more worryingly, did I want to stop doing this work?