was to give her silent support

But it seems to me Ruth believed, at some level, she was doing all this on behalf of us all. And my role, as her closest friend, was to give her silent support, as if I was in the front row of the audience when she was performing on stage. She was struggling to become someone else, and maybe felt the pressure more than the rest of us because, as I say, she'd somehow taken on the responsibility for all of us. In that case, then, the way I'd talked about her slap on the elbow thing could be seen as a betrayal, and she might well then have felt justified retaliating as she had. As I say, this explanation only occurred to me recently. At the time I didn't look at the larger picture or at my own part in it. I suppose, in general, I never appreciated in those days the sheer effort Ruth was making to move on, to grow up and leave Hailsham behind. Thinking about this now, I'm reminded of something she told me once, when I was caring for her in the recovery centre at Dover. We'd been sitting in her room, watching the sunset, as we so often did, enjoying the mineral water and biscuits I'd brought, and I'd been telling her how I still had most of my old Hailsham collection box safely stowed inside my pine chest in my bedsit. Then--I wasn't trying to lead onto anything, or make any kind of point--I just happened to say to her: "You never had a collection after Hailsham, did you?" Ruth, who was sitting up in bed, was quiet for a long time, the sunset falling over the tiled wall behind her. Then she said: "Remember the guardians, before we left, how they kept reminding us we could take our collections with us. So I'd taken everything out of my box and put it into this holdall bag. My plan was I'd find a really good wooden box for it all once I got to the Cottages. But when we got there, I could see none of the veterans had collections. It was only us, it wasn't normal. We must all have realised it, I wasn't the only one, but we didn't really talk about it, did we? So I didn't go looking for a new box. My things all stayed in the holdall bag for months, then in the end I threw them away." I stared at her. "You put your collection out with the rubbish?" Ruth shook her head, and for the next few moments seemed to be going through in her mind all the different items in her collection. Finally she said: "I put them all in a bin bag, but I couldn't stand the idea of putting them out with the rubbish.