Perhaps being born into a world war, the grandson of a spy and the son of a mother who flew for the RAF would have spawned an unusual imagination; but it was an eternally brief but terrifying captivity in a cellar as an English-speaking child that turned my imagination escapist. With my father dying on the landing above and my grandfather beginning that slow fall with his now empty revolver, this became my infant introduction into a violent anti-life of intimate death - my indoctrination as an English-speaking child into the language I must now learn of my enemy. "Sensing back" in disjointed f...