There is the time when you can hardly bear to go out, so heavy is the weight of shame that you cringe against walls and creep through the streets. Then you start to behave more normally but develop Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder (PTED). The affliction trails you everywhere, whining like an anxious dog. It pees in every corner and gets in your lap any time you have a drink. It barks at kind people trying to help you or licks their hands slavishly. You mustn’t feed it but you do. Sometimes fate hands it a bone. When two friends removed my name from the acknowledgments pages of their prize-winning books, my PTED howled until the neighbors woke up.

You have to get away from it. You have to get on. This year, I toughened up, got off the chair I had been cowering in for all these years, and painted my study yellow. The BBC reached out to interview me for a podcast. I didn’t wince; I am probably a good test case to talk about the culture wars. And then I was asked to take part on a panel, to do a couple of school workshops. I started to feel a little like my old self.

Along with the podcast, which was broadcast this week, I received an apology from my publishers, Pan Macmillan. I didn’t expect that, but I somehow found myself able to sit on my only faintly growling PTED and receive that apology calmly. I genuinely think Joanna Prior, the new CEO, is right to put what happened to me in the past. My grudges must somehow be put there too, or the PTED will dog me for life. What I needed, I have said, is a freer, saner discussion of the past.

So I’m starting again, here in UnHerd with another visit to my sensitivity readers. They seem to be rather fading from public consciousness. In 2021, they were a very hot topic and often all anyone asked me about the furore: writers genuinely feared a new board of censorship. Besides, the essay I wrote back then felt like the last good thing I wrote before I went into darkness. That was the last time I made a lot of people laugh.

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Though perhaps even that was unfair of me, a little cheap. The sensitivity readers were poorly paid freelancers and also sitting ducks. They had been set up with Pan Macmillan to solve a problem for them. Having apologized for the “emotional anguish” caused by my book, Macmillan then considered recalling and pulping all the copies in bookshops and giving the proceeds to anti-racism charities. When this seemed too drastic, they settled instead on a new edition of the book, one with the “harm”, that word of 2021, removed. No one in the firm had read the book, though, so they recruited experts to find the harm: sensitivity readers who specialized in racism, ableism and the Middle Eastern diaspora.

It was a huge assignment because it was retrospective. The three readers had to justify the internet response: find something in the book to equal the many claims of eugenics, racism and ableism. They also had to demonstrate their own worth and the point of their new profession. They set off on their journey keenly enough with many scornful points on the first few pages of the manuscript. Then they found themselves in a book which was not only essentially liberal but also absolutely mined, sentence by sentence, anecdote by anecdote, with irony.

Of course, the results were comical. Hyperbole was the only place to go. All praise had to be “fetishizing”; all criticism “demonization”. To compare a small child climbing a tree to a koala had to be “explicit animalization of the other”. Harm had to be found somewhere so one reader decided it was “harmful” for me to call myself a “soft target” because “this state of being a “target” is a real issue that minorities face daily, and being used so flippantly by a white person can wash the importance of that”. Another decided it was “harmful” to say that Scottish children are better than London children at spelling “wh” sounds — where, what — because of their accent. Even at the time the reasoning made me smile.

“The author states outright that… she is indeed comparing the two groups of pupils to assess who is ‘better’… Having it laid out in black and white that yes, your teachers do judge you, and yes, they find you lacking in comparison to others, can really hit people in the gut.”

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Lines such as those were, I thought (pace dear sensitivity readers), soft targets for me, fun for my essay. I believed the underlying ideas of the reads — that words could harm, that books must educate — were temporary notions that would pass and so worth attacking for those reasons.

Reading them now, though, I don’t find it all so funny. I am struck, rather, by the loneliness the reads express, the shadow of the pandemic over them all. Silence, in their view, is better than the wrong person joining the conversation. Stories should be confined to the therapy room, only spoken by one teller, never recounted, never adopted or adapted. Thoughts are types of mental illnesses — a savior complex, an identity crisis. No one can bear to read even the glimmer of a contrary argument. Malign prejudice is everywhere. Those are bleak as well as silly ideas, and yet how strongly they have stuck.

The readers, too, seem anxious to me now, rather than nasty. Or rather, nasty because they are anxious. They had been set an absurd task and were failing at it. The frustration shows in the way one reader becomes increasingly unmoored and incoherent as she progresses through the text, and abandons it halfway through.

Only a single reader made it all the way through the last chapter of my book. There he finds a series of infractions about the repeated use of the word “small” in relation to a Syrian child who has written a very grown-up sounding poem about war. Belittling stereotypes, he finds, “infantilizing” and “animalizing”. Granulation is so easy and shame so cheap. Why not read the poem, just once, and wonder? Besides, “small” is one of the glories of the English language, a word for “little” that we use for knobbly, close, personal things, a word infused with the tenderness we feel for pets and children but which can never be confused with lesser, or petty, a word that never carries scorn. Not to understand that — or to have put up barriers in the mind so you cannot hear it — seems so sad.

I wonder whether that reader still has a job. It’s certainly hard to believe anyone still employs him to write sheets of comments like:

“After initially stating that the radio debate spoke of compulsorary adoption, the end of the passage then, from the author’s voices, ponders whether compulsorary adoption is a tenable answer. (Thus I am merely flagging that this, abhorrent-to-some, mooted step is given potential credence by the author here)” (Sic)

Not because it is nonsense, or even because of the vibe shift, but because, since the advent of ChatGPT, no one writes like that. Which is both better and worse, because daft judgments may be combined with smooth, authoritative prose.

For example, last year, my student B, 25 and ridiculously gifted, sent his first novel off to a literary agent. A few weeks later, he received a surprisingly aggressive rejection letter accompanied by a reader’s report. His novel, the agent said angrily, represented women denigratingly. They all had low career aspirations and bad jobs. After so many years of supporting women in publishing, she wouldn’t be promoting that sort of stuff!

B was distraught. He felt, as he put it, that he was not just a bad writer but a bad person. He was also, justly, bewildered. His novel, set in a poor, post-industrial village, like the one he grew up in, did indeed center on women doing badly paid jobs. But they are not scorned: B’s delicate, ironical, deceptively flat prose opens up a whole landscape of their complex feelings. How can that element — the writing — have been missed? The reader had spent plenty of time on the book — that was evidenced by her lengthy summary. Then we tried putting the novel through ChatGPT and came up with exactly the same lengthy summary.

That was in 2024. AI had already learned to summarize, and the agent’s reader, very possibly a recent graduate, knew how to shame. Maybe by now the operations are combined. Who knows how many of the plethora of AI-powered test readers, which promise to “clean up your creative writing in minutes” and turn it into “a professional text”, have also absorbed sensitivity principles? I’m sure AI now could readily search a book and give certain phrases offense ratings. It would miss context and satire, but so did my sensitivity readers, every time.

Maybe, even now, texts are being morally improved and rewritten by one app and then read and rejected by another on even more delicate moral grounds without any human reading them at all. Maybe that’s what the British literary establishment will spend its last hours doing as their handsome Edwardian edifices burn to the ground and the episode of “Some Kids versus the Sensitivity Three” becomes a tiny footnote in the story of The End of the Book. Not reading but shaming. I wouldn’t be surprised. Except that I believe in B. He is a good writer. His images sing, his every observation and phrase is spry, jolting and surprising. AI will never recognize that, but humans will. B is also a poet, and I sometimes quote him Auden, lines from In Memory of WB Yeats (1939) which the poet, capricious in old age, later removed. They are about Time, which “worships language” and has no morals at all.

Time, that with this strange excuse,
Pardons Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

I can imagine only too easily what my sensitivity readers would have said about that.

I don’t know what Time will make of my writing yet. I’m not as confident as I am for B. I hope soon I’ll be able to inspire him with confidence in the wholehearted way I used to. Not yet, because I am too stiff and too lacking in confidence myself. I think this is the last stage of cancellation: it’s something like scar tissue, numbness with threads of pain.

As time wore on, and first my mother passed my grandmother in age, then I did, my mother told the birth story less and the death story more. As they entered their eighties, both with chronic illnesses, she and my father spoke often of the easy morphine shot and the effortless, paternalistic, shouldering of responsibility of the doctor who administered it. It seemed more outlandish and yet more enviable with each year. “That Dr Shipman,” my father would say, sighing gustily. “Caused all sorts of problems.”

“Dr Shipman did murder rather a lot of his patients,” I’d remind my dad. And it wasn’t just the subsequent regulation of doctors and their bags which discouraged people from dying at home. Preferring hospital as a place of death has been a trend for more than century: my grandmother, in 1967, was already a bit of an outlier. Hospital seemed — was — safer, cleaner, the right place to be. Until, that is, the pandemic. Deaths at home in the UK spiked immediately in lockdown, as you might expect. And they haven’t fallen since. Almost 90 more people than usual died at home every day last year, a fifth higher than in a typical year. That constitutes, as Cambridge statistics professor Sir David Spiegelhalter put it, “a major change” in national habit.

But, Spiegelhalter went on, we don’t know why this change is happening as it “hasn’t been studied sufficiently”. We keep no records of why someone died at home. It might be by choice — most people will, like my parents, state a preference for dying at home when asked — but relatively few individuals set out their wishes in a formal Advanced Decision.  Even when they do — my parents had three each, including one in a pot in the fridge — there is no national protocol for dealing with them.

Looking at causes of death does not help much, either. Most people take Covid to hospital. A little of the increase, we are beginning to learn, comes from the ambulance not arriving on time, but not much. The great majority of deaths at home derive from the same sort of slow, chronic conditions that end most lives in hospitals: heart disease, cancer, old age. The leading causes are dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, with diabetes being the most common contributing factor. There is no special reason, there, for a sudden and lasting change in behaviour.

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Perhaps we should be looking elsewhere, not with the patient but with the carer. Anyone dying of dementia at home needs an especially dedicated one. And diabetes — imagine, as my mother would have said, the washing. (Domestic work was always on my mother’s agenda. I never did it to her satisfaction.) Think, my mother would say, and my mother always had a point, of the sheets. Think of the woman washing the sheets.

The sheets matter because it may well be the carer rather than the patient who decides the place of death. They are the ones who call the final ambulance, whatever their loved one or their Advanced Decision may say. They may do it because they hope to give their loved one more time, or a pain-free death, but they may also do it to relieve the unspeakable strain on themselves, and to love, not just care, for someone in their last days. It’s not just the sheets. Modern, post-Shipman, deaths are more prolonged than my grandmother’s. Without that morphine shot, longer and more demanding nursing might have been required.

If a carer can’t cope with that though, there is now often little alternative to hospital. “It’s always been the National Hospital Service, really,” my mother would say, meaning that emergency and high-tech medicine had always taken precedence over social care from the inception of the NHS. Almost in step with her aging, she had seen first the doctor with the black bag disappear, then the remnants of the cottage hospitals and district nursing system. In her ever more frequent stays in hospital, she had seen the bed-blocking results; she had been, to her rage and sorrow, a bed-blocker herself. Here life was saved in hospital by high-tech medicine, but she also experienced loneliness and loss of agency which made her never want to go back. That was what the Advanced Decisions chilling in the fridge in 2020 said: no resuscitation, no interventions, and above all, please, no hospital.

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But how were we to achieve this? More particularly, how was I, isolated with my parents by lockdown, to achieve it? In 2020 there seemed to be nothing at all between an isolated, high-tech death surrounded by people in space suits, and one at home with — what? Only horrified, squeamish, cack-handed me? Surely not. I tried not to think about it, but my parents did, most days. I promised, often, to try my best.

But when my mother’s health went into crisis in January, at the very height of the 2021 Covid spike, the GP called an ambulance and I put her in it. My mother consented on the grounds she was only going to have her heart checked in the day ward. I consented because I was too scared not to. It wasn’t just that I was far out of my depth with the nursing — and the sheets. I wanted a hospital not for her but for me: a place where the responsibility, moral and practical, would be taken from me, where people more expert than I would know the right thing to do.

My mother never came home. Separated from us, her documents, and her own mind as she floated off in an infection, she was subjected to everything she had stipulated against — operation, ventilation, feeding tubes — before contracting Covid and dying alone. We saw her once more, on a visit during which my father also contracted Covid. It was the very opposite of what she had wanted: a death in your own bed with your daughter downstairs talking to the doctor, your daughter making the tea, your daughter managing, for once, the sheets.

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Hundreds of thousands of people died in similar fashion that year: in hospital, alone, relatives at best on an i-pad; an unknown, gloved hand to hold. Their families suffered, according to a thoughtful study by the Marie Curie Trust in 2021, “complicated grief”: trauma, degradation, loss of agency and connection, guilt. Complicated grief is a good phrase. I don’t have one of my own. At the time, I experienced extreme helplessness, while my father talked of my mother’s departure as the “kidnapping”.

But perhaps complicated grief could also be called iron in the soul: when my father, a few days after my mother’s death, collapsed with what I now know was myocarditis, I was able to refuse hospital care. I had his exquisitely clear Advanced Decision in my hand; I’d talked it through with him many times, but it may have been my mother’s experience which actually stopped me. I still wanted to call the merciful hospital, but my complicated grief told me it no longer existed. My complicated grief steeled me instead to do the work, practical and emotional, of letting someone die at home.

There must be hundreds of thousands of us in the UK with complicated grief, an epidemic of it. I wonder, even, if there are enough of us to be causing the change of national habit that Sir David Spiegelhalter spoke about; if experience of post-lockdown hospital is making 90 extra people a day unable to surrender their relatives to the hospital. I think it’s possible. I’d join the Marie Curie Trust though, in thinking we should examine the increase in deaths at home rather than hospital. It’s a choice we all come to, and we shouldn’t be making it in despair.

The pens are new in the transparent pencil cases; the pencils sharp. They won’t stay that way. Many students will endure 30 hours of exams, spread over six weeks, all the way through the hay fever season, into flaming June. The pressure is tangible. The scribbling students have been harangued about these exams since Year 7. Or maybe even before then, when they toured the local secondary schools with their parents, for GCSEs are the public measure of schools. For state schools in particular, they are still the most important part of their reputation.

Since then, there have been many assemblies, reams of mock exams, and much money spent: an average school will have paid the examination boards about as much as a senior teacher’s salary just to get the papers marked. If their school is going through a process of improvement, there may have been even more: summer schools, bribes, gimmicks, posters in corridors, school heroes and villains. At the end of all this there will be results and tears and league tables. Parents will look at those as they chose a school, and then the whole cycle will start again.

But what will the pupils themselves get out of it? There will be learning, of course, in this intense communal effort and focus. But there will be considerable narrowing too. Many academy chains, despite the campaigning of Ofsted, still prefer to have students pick their GCSEs in Year 8, when they are 12 or 13, all the better to double down and narrow in. Within these subjects, new learning will have stopped last Christmas: since then, it’s all been revision. Despite all this, nearly a fifth of the students in the room will come away with Grade 4s, the lowest pass possible. Around 10% of them will get a 1 or 2, and they probably know it. Someone in the building will probably crack under all this: our exam system is surely one reason 15-year-olds have such poor mental health. 

Afterwards, there will be proms, hugs, shirt-signing, tears: the rites of passage of leaving. But they aren’t leaving. All of them, by law, are supposed to stay in education or training till they are 18. So what were the GCSEs for? Mostly, 16-year-olds are too busy to ask. Even the luckiest third, the ones who have taken the whole course at a decent canter, hopped over all the jumps with the minimum upset (good health and a supportive, consistent home are a vast help at GCSE), have no resits to do, a decent hand of 7-9s in a range of subjects, an eye on university and a place in their own school sixth form, are preoccupied. They have to choose their A Levels.

Another narrowing, a sudden one: from 11 limited subjects to 3 in academic depth. Here is a loss even for the most academic students: they must prefer sciences over arts, drop humanities or languages, decisions which affect their entire lives. And nothing to be done about it because in England there is no longer an intermediate Higher or AS level.

The student with 6 and 7s across the board, able in most things but specialising in none, good in school but not studying much at home, needs that intermediate level even more. None of the narrow, difficult A levels may really be for him; and there is no leeway to experiment. Disproportionately, such students come from non-middle-class homes. Annually, they make choices which sound practical but which will disadvantage them later: Law over French, Media Studies over History.

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Once chosen, many will find the A Level a leap. GCSE is an end point, it acts as a block to advanced learning. In languages, for example, teachers are under pressure to skip out blocks of grammar: the emphasis is on vocabulary; a pass can be had without it. English GCSE may be passed without independent reading of long texts, Biology without much Maths. But A Level will ask for skills in all these things, and established habits of study and a place to work too. Long hours of paid work and commutes take a toll on all that: it’s not surprising that the drop-out rate among disadvantaged students is nearly 15%. Nationally, fewer than half of our students end up with 2 A Levels.

None of this is anything, though, to the sufferings of that failing 35%. They will enter the underfunded, undervalued and confusing world of English vocational learning, often at a lower academic level than they have already attained. The courses available are truncated by the insistence of GCSE at 16. There are very many — EAL learners, disadvantaged students — who simply need a little more time to succeed at GCSE level. But a three-year course, say, in Electrical Engineering, with Higher Maths and GCSE English, all assessed in a single baccalaureate at 18, does not exist in England.

There are options like that in Germany. Across Europe, 16-year-olds are mostly a year or more into such courses, vocational or academic. Finns manage to move from school to technical or academic colleges at 16 on a minimal set of teacher assessments and standardised computer tests, and yet emerge much higher up the PISA rankings: better educated at nearly every level. Even the French, surely as obsessed with hierarchical education and competitive exams as any nation could be, only examine once, at 18. No other country sets a vast bank of exams two years before leaving school.

But other countries in Europe don’t wear acrylic blazers to school, either. The GCSE shares a mythic root. Once there were O Levels and CSEs, and grammar schools and secondary moderns, and gyms with wooden floors and hymns in assembly, and this, against all historical evidence, believe the Tory Party, the Daily Mail and my granny, was Better.

Though the Tories abolished the O Level, in fact. It went in 1987, just before Kenneth Baker’s Great Education Reform Bill, or Gerbil. GCSE joined up O Level and CSE: a qualification for everyone. Unfortunately, its invention coincided with those of the excel sheet, the internet, and the Gerbil’s worst innovation: competition between schools as policy. By 2013, a school’s pass rate at GCSE was being surveyed in a thousand public data sets and, inevitably, monstrously gamed. Coursework elements meanwhile were being destroyed by internet plagiarism, and the AS Level had been invented, turning the final three years of school into a maze of elaborate examinations. It would have been a fine moment to abolish the GCSEs and tackle the problem of vocational education. Michael Gove, the new Education Secretary, had the ambition and drive to do it.

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But Gove was also, and more profoundly, a populist. Instead, of abolition, he tried to make the GCSE as much like an O Level as possible, abolishing coursework, doubling down on handwriting and rote learning, and entrenching failure by introducing grading by proportion. Gavin Williamson had another excellent chance at major reform during the pandemic; sadly, he was far too dim. Nadim Zahawi is much cleverer, but his White Paper indicates little interest.

Why would it, and why would he? GCSE is such an entrenched part of school experience that people inside schools and out accept it like the weather. Deep reform of the sky will never be as popular as selling umbrellas. It would take a truly radical, dedicated politician to push it forward, and we’re short of those. It would help though, if the electorate could even think about a world without GCSE. Dear reader, can we start there? 

Nina Jankowicz’s trenchant short book How to Be a Woman Online is packed with similar examples of misogyny blooming on the internet, drawn not just from her personal experience but from her academic research. “To be a woman online,” she demonstrates, “is an inherently dangerous act.”

It would be easy to stop there. Instead, Jankowicz supplies a whole toolkit of ideas for protection. Get cyber secure. Invest in a password manager. Use governance. Employ ‘blocktivism’. Find the mute key. Establish a network of women allies. Amplify them. Be intersectional. Mentor. Be Mentored. Above all, get back out there. The internet is a public forum to which women ought to have equal access. It’s the job of any thinking woman to keep claiming it.

Nina Jankowicz is a committed, North American, second-wave feminist. She quotes Madeline Albright. Her examples are women “with a public presence online”, blue-tick Tweeters, up-and-out-there bloggers, leaners-in. Her enemies, by and large, are men: ‘reply guys’, @ProfessorEsq, @LazyLogan, @TrojanHorace. Her arguments centre on possession of the public sphere: authority, property, occupying space. Correspondingly, the inner sphere is of less interest: psychology is for solving individual pain. Getting out there, Jankowicz acknowledges, will hurt. Own it. Tell your family. Get a therapist.

It’s all admirable stuff: solidly researched, informative, grounded, gritty, practical; as is Jankowicz and the women she knows and champions. But staring at the Twitter feed in front of me, and my long unused account, I find it hard to apply her advice. My feed is of a particular sort: literary, lefty, education-heavy, and disproportionally written by people who also write the news. It’s not that there’s a shortage of misogyny or bullying on show: on the contrary, other than the odd picture of a sunlit cat, it is a cavalcade of images of women and dissections of power plays. But rather than the outer sphere, it seems mostly concerned with perceptions, identity, feelings and psychology. To put it another way, Twitter seems lately to be a psychodrama, much of it about itself.

Take, for example, the story of Sarah Moulds, a woman who kicked a horse on video in late 2021. A deluge of tweets rapidly ensured she lost her job and reputation and would be prosecuted by the RSPCA. There was unquestionably, too, a gendered element to her demonisation: a male hunter with a whip would have been treated to different metaphors. But Moulds’s persecutors weren’t male trolls or reply guys. Many of them were privileged, educated, middle-aged, and female: Jankowitz’s victims rather than persecutors.

They hated, though, with all the vigour of Van Badham’s pursuers. The condemnation went on for days after it became clear that Moulds had young children and had gone into hiding; that she had been punished up to and beyond our usual limits and must be in danger of her life. It went on with particular, almost religious righteousness. One user with “hates bullies” on their bio vowed to “keep hunting for her like she did foxes”. They would not be remonstrated with. “You’d think you’d be safe, wouldn’t you,” tweeted a member of the caring professions, “criticising someone for hitting and kicking an animal but app not”. ‘Safe’ in that sentence has evolved well past Jankowicz’s cyber security tips. Its means something uniquely Twitter.

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Twitter evolves. Part of the brilliance of its model is that it mirrors the dynamics of sexual reproduction. A popular tweet doesn’t just acquire likes and retweets exponentially, a snowball rolling down a hill, but also inserts itself, like a thread of protein, into the feed of the people who retweet it. It becomes part of that tweeter’s billboard to the world, their bowerbird display, their DNA. It calls to other tweeters, and it begets new tweets marked by its style. All of which is dynamic, fun, and deeply human.

As Twitter the joint organism has evolved, and its potential for shaming has been revealed, so too has its underlying bias towards a particular quality: innocence. If what you retweet shows the world who you are, and the consequences of being the wrong sort of person are dire, then a need is created for something not just appealing and colourful to place in your feed, but for something that is guaranteed to be harmless, something that will bolster the retweeter’s safety: a neophyte’s plea, a child’s painting or hand-turned salad bowl. Emergency Kittens. A Quokka Every Hour. As I wrote this paragraph, for example, a pleasant-looking woman posted a photo with the caption “I was told by a date this week that he was disappointed when he saw me. So here I am with zero filters, or any photo enhancements” — and acquired 40,000 likes. It had no joke, no politics, no special cleverness: Twitter had selected solely it for its innocence, just as a peahen picks out the longest tailed peacock for its mate.

The problem with peahens fixating on tail length, though, as Darwin pointed out, is that selective breeding means the tails themselves grow to a useless length. On Twitter we have tweets, threads, and entire profiles which are peacocks’ tails of innocence: primarily performative. There is also a special problem with reproducing innocence: it cannot perform itself without becoming knowing. Nor can it plan its own appearance. It has to be always on its debut, forced into a new position by the force of its feelings, which is why so many tweets begin with statements of helplessness: “I can’t stop thinking about…”, “Can’t unsee this!”, “I had a cry!”

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There is another particular problem with innocence: it’s disproportionately bad for women. It plays into enormous, basic, cross-cultural prejudices against women’s maturity, humour, experience, cleverness, overt sexuality and knowingness. It feeds into deep binaries about virgins and whores, good girls and bad girls, Cinderellas and ugly sisters, fairy godmothers and evil stepmothers. Behind that lurks our deepest binary, the one that any psychologist or two-year-old will tell you is often embodied in one person: good mother/bad mother.

Twitter, as we all know, loves binaries too. In the time I took to get this paragraph, the popular tweet with the unfiltered face had been rammed by a fleet of replies accusing it of lying and ugliness. The tweet was hidden, and the original tweeter had protected her account. (She later unlocked it.) Innocence and sweetness had to be accompanied by its opposite: design and corruption, as if we were all in a Jacobean drama.

The hatred of Sarah Moulds was also sharpened by a good mother/bad mother binary. She wasn’t the good carer of horses and children she was dressed to seem, therefore she was entirely evil and deserved to be hunted to death.

So I believe was the hatred of me. I once had a popular Twitter account where I put poems by my young students online. The poems were ‘safe’ to retweet because — as well as being good texts — they were innocent. I rarely, if ever, tweeted anything personal or even retweeted other peoples views. I tried, in fact, to have as little personality as possible: I thought it could only get in the way of the young people’s poems. But my face did float in the blue Madonna bubble, and I was aware that many people thought I was much better than I was, an angelic person who spent all her time among the disadvantaged. In fact, my teaching was only one of the strands of my work. I worked with lots of people and I was motivated by many things, including intellectual curiosity. But I was not the opposite of an angel either. I didn’t abuse anyone, or dox anyone, or run a cruel classroom, or force children to write poems or make money out of poems. (Actually, I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to force children to write good poems, or possible to make money out of any poems.)

That dark opposite came from the Good Mother/Bad Mother binary, and from Twitter, just as the persecution of Sarah Moulds did, and the persecution of many other women, good, bad, but mostly indifferent, mostly just human. I’d very much like to be safe from all that, but I think we may be too far gone, and that even a book as thorough as Nina Jankowicz’s cannot take us there.

A new edition of Kate Clanchy’s Some Kids I taught and What They Taught Me is available now from Swift Press. 

Of course I cared. I’m horrified that people found prejudice and cruelty in my book. And I went into the process willingly: I’ve always enjoyed and benefited from editing and saw this as an extension. I did an initial rewrite — there were many things I was eager to change — in the autumn of 2021 and sent it off full of interest and optimism. I received the reports on it before Christmas. They were never formally used and I share the content here — anonymously, of course — because sensitivity reads are being used more and more widely, and mine gives a valuable insight into how they might work with non-fiction and memoir.

There are several reports — Picador did a thorough job — and they are varied. The novelty of the whole field is reflected in the fact that the Readers use different titles — sensitivity and authenticity — and different methods, too. Some write A4 reports, others use the comment button on Microsoft Word or an Excel sheet, still another presents a simple list of headings, done very possibly with a word search. More than one grades infractions, 1-3. They have of course special areas of expertise — Islam, blackness, disability — but these emerge through inference, not announcement.

Their scopes vary, too. One Reader fusspots around single words: I should not use “disfigure” of a landscape (infraction level 3, as presumably comparing bings — spoil heaps — to boils might be harmful to acne sufferers). Nor should I use “handicap” in its ordinary sense of “impede” (infraction level 2, serious); and I should prefer the acronym “SEN” to its origin phrase, special educational needs, because it is more inclusive (infraction level 2).

Others have grander ambitions: paragraphs, sub-sections and even entire chapters should be revised. Still others focus on issues around the presentation of the book. One suggests the authors of endorsements containing the words “love” and “humanity” might want to “rethink their stance”. To add to the cacophony, the Readers contradict each other freely, even praising and disparaging the same passages.

Given this diversity, it seems reasonable to start with areas of agreement. These mostly occur in the first part of my book, which is set in the Nineties. Perhaps this is because all of the Readers seem to be experts on sexuality and gender, and resisting homophobia is one of my themes. There is even a particular passage, the only one in the book, on which the whole Reader crowd comments and concurs.

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The setting is London, 1992. After end-of-term drinks, a favourite student, Liam, comes out to me and then asks me to take him to G.A.Y — because, he says, no one else in his world would know where it was. I was very worried about doing this at the time; even though Liam had just left school, I still felt like his teacher, and I worry even more now, when teachers no longer take 18-year-olds to the pub and are much more aware of influence and consent.

None of these sensitive issues, though — raised at length in the book — worry the Readers. They are concerned, rather, that I might be boasting about helping a young gay person: “Straight white saviour trope”, suggests Wordsearch List, “could be problematic”. And they set up a chorus about what I feel and say after Liam hits the dance floor and I note:

… a new kind of pain, a physical, chesty anxiety that I was not to experience again until I watched my own children walk along ledges or cross a busy road. What would happen to Liam among all those strong bodies? What would happen to his body? He was too young to understand you only got one. Fortunately, it was only twenty minutes or so before he came back out of the crowd and grasped his beer.

‘Liam,’ I said, ‘I love you. You have to promise me to always use a condom and never get AIDS.’ 

I make, my Readers agree, a “reductive” and “rogue” remark. The preceding passage “comes across as homophobic” and is an LGBTQ infraction Level 2. But in 1992, people were still dying in large numbers from AIDS, and I would have urged all young people to use condoms. Excel Reader is kind enough to acknowledge this — “the author has chosen to reproduce contemporary dialogue which may not … reflect brilliantly on her” — but the other Readers seem to concur that the past should match an idealised present, in the same way that Anne of Green Gables, say, got a gay best friend when she went on Netflix.

There are similar injunctions throughout the text. I am enjoined not to quote from My Ántonia by Willa Cather, as it is “an old novel”; nor to state that homosexuality has historically been taboo in Nepal, as homophobia comes from colonialism; nor to mention that the Taliban were terrorists. Extending the principle of sunny improvement into the present, Wordsearch List breaks out of their list to make the helpful suggestion that I should remove references to terrorism from across the book, as it “over-sensationalises such a heavy topic, especially with minors involved”.

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Nor should I say that more middle-class than working-class children go to university; nor that Foetal Alcohol Syndrome leaves children unable to progress; nor that a long tight dress restricts movement. All of these things are, for my Readers, “hurtful” notions of mine, not unfortunate facts. Writing, they imply, should represent the world as it ought to be, not as it is.

Perhaps this is a reflection of the sensitivity read’s origins in children’s and young adult fiction. There are good reasons for regulating children’s reading: it is foundational and formational and may be enforced by school choice or being read aloud to. It is genuinely important, there, to avoid oppressive stereotypes.

But Some Kids isn’t a novel, nor written for children. Adults are able to put books down if they upset them, so their books may safely contain difficult ideas. I don’t, for example, agree with my Readers that the references to looks, attraction and sexuality in my book should be removed in case readers are hurt by a metaphor as a child might plausibly be. I think adults can endure bings being compared to boils. I also believe that physical human beauty empirically exists, is enormously important for adolescents, and that I can observe its currency and often destructive power, especially for young women, in the classroom. I make an explicit argument about this, which readers may disagree with.

Argument, though, is not a word the Readers use, or even something they seem to think I should be engaging in. “Please avoid generalisations about anyone”, snaps Comment Button Reader from the margins, while Excel Reader trails a noisy stream of alerts, like a lorry reversing, down their squares: “chosen to make the stance/vent the opinion”, “Author gives her view”, “Author stance”.

I find Excel Reader irritating, but at least they acknowledge I am constructing a point of view. Comment Button, on the other hand, thinks I am accidentally misrepresenting the world because I am not aware of my “benevolent racism”. It’s exoticising, they say, when in my section on “Faith” I show a group of young people from diverse cultures and religions discussing the terrorist attacks of Paris 2015. “It is as if these children and their friendships are especially praiseworthy because of their backgrounds, rather than just treating them as people, as “normal” children”. But the young people were behaving in a special way that day: that’s why I wrote about it. I sincerely (Author taking a stance) found hope for humanity in the capacity they demonstrated for forgiveness and communication. I also believe (Author giving her view) that I am entitled to say so.

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Similarly, in my chapter about art and poverty the Readers ignore several pages about history and economics to home in on a conflict between me and a character I named Cheyenne. The chapter is read as pure autobiography: “It’s clear the author did not like this pupil”. It’s “hard on Cheyenne personally”, sighs Excel Reader, “to the point [she] becomes an allegory of poverty”. But Cheyenne is an allegory of intergenerational poverty, a composite carefully constructed from details observed in different people over many years. She is a literary figure, not a person, doing what literary figures do: make abstract ideas visceral and moving.

My Readers though, have not been hired as literary people. They are there to help create a book that would play better on Twitter, not one that is better written. For example, they like my liberal conclusions to chapters so they recommend I put them as introductions. I should eliminate journeys of thought across chapters, ambiguity from paragraphs, and nuance from sentences. Love, they assure me, is never expressed with shadows.

I struggle with all this. I baulk, besides, perhaps snobbishly, at their language: the imprecision of phrases such as “feels like the kind of saying that could be deemed insensitive these days”, or “white knight tone/verve” (verve?). I snarl when Excel helpfully suggests I have made a typo with e. e. cummings, and lost his capital letters. It upsets me in particular, when so many of their criticisms depend on it, that none of the Readers deploy the word “irony”, but use “sarcasm”, “jocular aside” and “subtlety” instead, always as negatives. Comment Button condemns my entire chapter on Prizes as “it shows none of the adults involved in a good light”. Indeed it doesn’t. They are being satirised, even though one of them was me.

Irony, for me, is more than satire, and far more than sarcasm. It is a way of saying that two things can be true at once, of holding comedy and tragedy, romanticism and practicality, grand emotion and self-deprecation, together in a paragraph. Because it contains contradictory elements, irony doesn’t settle. It can keep the tension and life in any sentence: except of course on Twitter, where elements of a sentence can be taken out and caricatured; except in the hands of sensitivity readers, where it dies from granulation. As A4 Report comments: “I sometimes found it difficult to tell when the author was poking fun, and when she was not … if sarcasm is too subtle, all that is left is the bad implications”. They recommend stronger signposting.

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Times change. In 1997, a second edition of my first poetry collection, Slattern, was published with Picador. I was thrilled, and immediately took a copy to show off at a festival in St Andrews. Two poems into reading from it, though, I was startled to discover the words had been changed.

A copy editor had decided my irony, commas, and word-choices were too eccentric, and had taken it upon himself to alter them in several poems. I emailed Picador, and the next morning found myself speaking (on a pay phone) to the legendary Peter Straus, Picador’s Publisher. He noted down each tiny adjustment himself and explained he would be ordering the pulping of the books, the carpeting of the copy editor and the printing of a new edition. He wouldn’t be thanked. He seemed to think this was Picador’s mission: to preserve, within its profit-making superstructure, a space for the miniature nuances of a poet.

A quarter of a century later, publishing had moved on. Philip Gwyn Jones, the new holder of Peter Straus’s position, tweeted: “I now understand I must use my privileged position as a white middle-class gatekeeper with more awareness to promote diversity, equity, inclusivity, as all UK publishing strives to put right decades of structural inequality”. At the same time, one of the sensitivity reads Picador had commissioned was advising that Some Kids “exemplifies why publishing is so unwelcoming to marginalised people”. The Readers were explicit that this was not to do with any actual words on the page, but because they could tell that I personally had not done “the self-reflection and self-education that is necessary to understand the underlying reason that so many people felt harmed by [my] work”. They recommended the book should not be republished.

Before we could discuss this, Picador and I agreed to split. After the announcement was made, Swift Press offered to take on the book. I thought carefully about all the notes I had been given and, in the end, adopted none of the suggestions proffered by the Readers. The Kindle edition of Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me now on sale with Swift is the same one I originally sent to the sensitivity readers for report, and if you want to know more about what caused such deep offence, and seems to exemplify so much about publishing, I suggest you read it.

It was published only in 2018. It’s hard to believe that a little under four years later, its rights have been returned to me and its charities have repudiated it. It is not as if there is a real world scandal or complaint from a young poet here — the reverse is true. But the literary and theoretical charges against it are very serious. They predate by some time those against my memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, and are in many ways foundational to them.

Remarkably, in 2020, Professor Sandeep Parmar’s state-of-the-nation 2020 essay on poetry and race, “Still Not a British Subject” chose this book by children, rather than any of the hundreds of anthologies and collections of poetry by adults published in the preceding few years, as its ultimate and most damned item. She warned that this book may morally infect the reader, and that to appreciate it is “to be beguiled by the benevolence of whiteness” and even enslaved, as the book “requires an ever-replenishing source of aspirational learners — not just these children, but all poets who are perceived as ‘striving'”.

It’s a large charge for a slim volume, but literary criticism is an ambitious medium these days. Academic essays like Parmar’s are cited on social media accounts and pinned to profiles like manifestos. As our lives have shrunk over Covid, scrolling through the endless smorgasbord of quotes that is Twitter and analysing them become many people’s primary political activity. There’s been a shift in attitudes too: Parmar is surely right to say, as she does in her essay, that in the last few years many book-reading people have come to agree that our literary culture is actively malign, infected, as she puts it, with “a pervasive and unempathetic whiteness” .

Literary criticism has long taught us to trace and name moral systems in texts through the identification of tropes and story, but now it has discovered a more important job in rooting that malignancy out. Books such as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility have further popularised the activity of linguistic rooting in living humans, and all of this lends political relevance and prestige back to the parent activity of literary criticism. It is not surprising now, to come across terms such as Parmar’s “lyric violence” and “lyric dread”, nor her idea that mere poems, can have (unspecified) “real, even dangerous, consequences”.

As it has become more relevant and exciting, literary criticism has also become more personal and shed some of its hefty academic conventions. Once, the word ‘trope’ indicated a system of language and imagery traceable through a whole, lengthy text — a semantic field or underlying narrative shape. Now the word has shrunk to mean a single metaphor or even word. Wide assertions may balance on very slender, tweet-sized proofs.

Thus Parmar diagnoses Carol Ann Duffy with “lyric dread” — an end-of-empire anxiety — and the fear of “the influx of foreign bodies of all kinds” on the evidence, not of her oeuvre or even a collection of poems, but of an image of oilseed rape in a single poem. The conventions around quotations have also changed: TS Eliot Prize-winning Hannah Sullivan’s enviably accomplished poetic oeuvre, for example, is said to hold a “obsessive superimposition of the past on the just-past-present” and a sinister “fantasy of an unchanging nation”, on the basis not of verse but of conflated extracts from an “essay” which transpires on closer inspection to be a short piece of journalism about a favourite park.

Overt argument or evident intention are often, in this new criticism, less important than the critic’s own linguistic detective work — bias, after all, is always unconscious. For my introduction to England Poems from a School, for example, Parmar is not to be fooled by the lengthy argument about multilingualism and the inheritance of poetries, nor sentences such as “it is impossible to overstate profound and multi-layered are the forces of cultural silencing; or how strong and subtle is the belief that poetry belongs only to the privileged”. She skips past them, in order to pluck out that single word “striving” — which I agree, makes me sound like the Daily Express when describing migrant families — and conjures me on its evidence as a memsahib, teaching English as “a linguistic and disciplinary tool of colonial domination”.

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As for the poems, she declines to quote from them at all, because to do so will be to join in the “exoticising” “servitude” the works have been “pressed” into; but she assures us they are in any case without originality, merely expressing “a uniformity of suffering”, and with only “loss, belonging, otherness, migration, war and family” as subjects.

These were good enough for The Odyssey — but I’d still say Parmar didn’t quite capture their essence. The poems are often about dissonance, and duality, but they are also about language: a Russian proverb summons a freezing Soviet tram into a sitting room; on a computer screen, a poet assigns her Hungarian to “Never Show Again”. They are often joyous and they are also, all of them, dynamic, not passive, about living with the duality of a mixed identity, about changing, moving on, seizing the moment and their lives.

Then I
set out to be a woman.
fearless of the natives
Down There
In their world
Not mine 

writes Rukiya Khatun in the title poem, England, imagining the country she will soon migrate to, and how, in a magnificent colonial reversal, she will possess it. The poets and the poems write themselves, and their Englishes, into this imagined England and its poetry. “I want a poem,” says Shukria Rezaei in the epigraph, figuring verse as an Eid pastry, “that leaves gleam on the fingertips”.

And Mukahang Limbu answers her from the end of the book:

“My words
have to have colour… shades of hummingbirds across hijabs
of Christian girls
in silver boots…”

Limbu is evoking the multicultural classroom from which, over a decade, all these poems grew — classrooms where I have spent most of my teaching life and my happiest hours. Exactly what I think I am doing there, and what multiculturalism itself might be, though, has never been easy to intellectually define. When I began teaching in the Eighties, I argued with a French friend about how it was we allowed hijabs, turbans and crucifixes in my North London comprehensive when her Parisian lycée would have banned the lot. Why were we so muddled, so unenlightened, she asked? What was this with the Hanukkah candles and Christmas trees, the Diwali party for Nelson Mandela?

My answers were always hesitant, because multiculturalism has always been a practice rather than a theory. Multiculturalism is the thing that happens in schools when young people from all over the world — overwhelmingly, in England in the past 20 years, recent migrants — turn up in your classroom. Multiculturalism is a messy, quotidian, humanist, creed. It was better if a child brought their whole self to school, I used to tell my French friend. You can’t make a division between faith and culture, not really; everyone can learn from each other, stumblingly. Solecisms and Easter eggs all round — what’s not to like?

A lot, it seems today. The new criticism has made the underlying dominance of white colonial Christianity in the lycée much easier to name — but that same light shines cruelly on the soggy body of English multiculturalism. Solecisms now seem dangerous; trust, presumptuous; Easter eggs a deadly gift. As Parmar sternly asserts, isn’t it true that this country “is not (nor has ever been) tolerant or kind towards non-white people”? Multiculturalism’s answers can never match such absolutist rhetoric. Multiculturalism can only say: we try to be kind; individuals are kind; there are kind schools. It can ask: what, please, is the alternative? It can say: look, this is a beautiful poem.

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Professor Parmar was educated in California. The experience of sitting in a classroom where most students are not born in that country, and where there is no majority group, is a particularly 21st-century, English thing. I experience these classrooms as exceptionally kind and creative places where young people hear and listen to each other openly and deeply; make cross-racial and cross-cultural friendships that endure, and, far from being “dominated” by English, remake the language daily in thrilling ways. Poems grow there readily, and poems, also in my experience, do not grow from cruelty, but from confidence and affirmation.

And also from attention. The alchemy that made the poems of England so exceptional was one part multilingualism, one part experience, and one part attention. We created, through readings and self-publishing a culture in school where young people listened to each others poems often and willingly. To this, over time, was added the magical attention of Twitter: adults, often hundreds of them, often writers or teachers themselves, reading and praising the young people’s poems, giving back to them, making them feel heard and important. It was rocket fuel for the young people’s motivation to write and also to read widely in contemporary poetry — poets were people they knew.

No doubt this attention was sometimes, by the new critical standards, impure or patronising, but the overall process of being read and published did not seem to have “real, even dangerous consequences” or to “press” these young people into “servitude”, or “exoticise” them — indeed they have said specifically otherwise — but to inspire them and fill them with confidence. Several of them have gone to great things in writing and politics. They will not be derailed by the destruction of the book, but they are very much saddened by it.

In 2016, a young boy just arrived from Syria, Mohamed Assaf, tumbled into an Arabic poetry workshop I was running with Oxford University and wrote a short poem, apparently off the cuff. It took weeks to get it translated, then printed in a book I was making. It ran:

“The Word Ummi,
My beloved mother,
When I go to my house the pain of missing her
Arrives before me.”

This devastating poem ran first through our school, making Mohamed famous and giving him his own assembly. Then it went onto Twitter, speaking to American poets grappling with Donald Trump’s response to the migration crisis. Then it went into England, Poems from a School to be produced and distributed as beautifully as our publishing industry knew how.

No doubt some people involved were virtue signalling or pleased with their own virtue: overall, though, people were acting from their best impulses; not to promulgate the “benevolence of whiteness” but to frame and present a work of piercing humanity. Certainly, the multicultural consensus in publishing that allowed the production of England Poems helped diverse young people in their lives. The current moment, for all the high principles so sincerely stated, does not seem so productive.

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Professor Palmer was privately educated.

I was impressed. I knew Henry was in Naval Intelligence, but not at this level. Was my grandad M, then?

‘Well,” said my father, “Not M. A few letters back from that. Maybe H. He could speak German, was the point.”

Henry Clanchy loved languages. We have his Russian vocabulary words, still, written in fountain pen, tucked in a silver cigarette case. He might have been happier as an academic, like his son, Michael, but he was sent to sea at the age of 12 instead and was sea sick on every boat — even the ones he commanded.

These memories didn’t come just because my father was 83 and in the last year of his life. Lockdown, with its apocalyptic quiet, its empty streets and filmic light, returned him to foundational experiences of authority and fear. My father’s first years were passed in Stalinist Moscow where Henry was Naval Attaché. He returned to England only in 1939, on the last train across Europe, an experience of terror which resisted 40 years of therapy. Then, just under six years old, and speaking Russian and German in preference to English — he’d had a German nanny — he was sent to a brutal, chaotic prep school. A Catholic version of Ronald Searle’s St Custard’s, or a ‘School’ in Decline and Fall, a place where the boys would sell poached rabbits and kindling to the hungry junior masters.

My father’s deepest feelings were set against authority. His refusal to sit on any sort of high table had cost him all his life. Now, when orders were being given from a single desk in Downing Street and the press talked in hyperbole and numbers, when the careful, fragile threads of his web of social contacts — the Norman French Seminar, the vegetarian café, his grandchildren — were all cut at once; when friends in nursing homes arbitrarily found themselves in confinement more solitary and hopeless than would be handed to any prisoner, his jaw set again. “Obviously,” he said, squinting up at me — a dystonia had recently collapsed the nerves and muscles of his neck — “Obviously, what you do in these circumstances is look around and see who else is not going to fall in with it. Who is your friend?”

By “fall in with it” he meant: performatively join in any rituals of shunning, add to the tangible fear. As a personal protest, he insisted on continuing to walk each day to the mini-market to collect the Guardian, leaning on a stick, chin to chest like a condemned prisoner, saying good morning to each person who stepped wide of him. More than once, he was asked by a self-appointed commissar, or train guard, or Grabber the school prefect, where he lived, and why he was out of his own street, and he would explain he wasn’t shielding, he was still allowed to walk about. He took comfort in going in to the whole food shop where the hippy owner remained disbelieving and merry, greeting him warmly as she raised the price of chana dal yet another notch.

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Mostly, though. I was his friend. He’d trained me well. I walked round the corner to see my parents every day of lockdown, even before it was clear this was permitted. They weren’t well enough to be on their own: they had between them two sorts of cancer, lupus, depression, osteoporosis, shingles, heart damage, nerve damage, and recurrent cellulitis. They couldn’t reach their own bulb sockets, high shelves, weeds, and feet.

They needed help too with the NHS. Help with the late letters, the contradictory emails, the cancelled dates, the disappearing consultants, the tangled medications, the finding out if you had to go private, who you paid, for how long, under which name, when, help with the whole vast behemoth of the thing. It had dominated our lives for several years already, and it didn’t seem so unexpected somehow that it had become our national Authority, our religion, a thing we sang to and clapped.

It’s not that my parents weren’t grateful to the NHS or the extra years of life it had brought them: they were. But under pressure, first austerity and now lockdown, they had seen it drift into an ever more attenuated, disparate, emergency-orientated system. With Covid, the imperative to save lives, through high-tech medical measures, especially the lives of elderly frail people like them, intensified, while the means of delivering simple, limited medical care, such as podiatry and physiotherapy, withered away. This, though, was the reverse of my parents wishes. They had each had more than their fill of hospitals. They had sore backs and feet. They wanted no more drastic interventions. If their conditions couldn’t be humanely managed, they wanted to die at home.

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Over lockdown, my father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, entirely over the phone. He never met a nurse or received physiotherapy. In order to change his drug regime he had to come off his antidepressants: a terrifying step when the Parkinson’s locked his mood, made his depression unshiftable. But no new prescription was forthcoming. Each day, after I’d reached something down from a shelf or photographed a wound, we would supplicate another doctor. Eventually, we were told the consultant had gone on holiday and forgotten the prescription. I walked my shaking father round the water meadow and he remembered his father.

“Henry,” said my dad, “was very upset when he got to the prison cell to find Dönitz’s uniform and personal things had been taken away. In particular, his watch was missing. The guard had taken it.”

“Now Dönitz,” said my father, picking up his pace a little, “was a terrible man. It was ridiculous the way he was treated as a sort of gent. He was a fascist like the rest of them.” My father was a scholar, among other things, of Henry III and Simon de Montfort. He taught me about the English pogroms before I was 10, taught me about the evils of blood libels, the lie of Hugh of Lincoln, and to never, never think that England was more free of anti-Semitism than any other place in Europe.

Nevertheless, Dönitz was the same age as Henry. He was also a Catholic, also a boy who had been sent to sea and buffeted by war. He had been a British POW when Henry was fighting the White Russians. There are lonelinesses which speak to other lonelinesses in the shadow of authority. There are human gestures which benefit the giver as much as the recipient.

“And the next day,” said my father, “the next day, when he came home, he got Dönitz’s watch back. He was pleased about that.” And he raised his head, with difficulty, to smile at me. My father, I am sure, associated the gesture with his German psychiatrist, who always replied to letters by return, who was soon to get hold of Neurology and shake the prescription out of them.

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My parents surely had more, and more detailed, Advanced Decision documents about their future medical treatment and death than any other pensioners in Britain. I had a drawer full of copies. They had carefully prepared folders to take to hospital with them, documents to offer the authority at the border. But, as I have written elsewhere, for my mother, this did not work. On a first hospital stay, one set of advanced decisions went missing. On her final journey, she did not have them at all, as she was supposed to be going for a day visit.

In January, 2021, under peak Covid Authority rules, alone without documents or an advocate, everything happened she had specified against: a drastic operation, intensive care and a ventilator. “It is as if,” said my father, as we sat despairing at the kitchen table, “she had been kidnapped.” In hospital, she contracted Covid-19. Track and Trace phoned the house repeatedly, lending a Stalinist note to proceedings as they demanded to speak to my mother. We were permitted one end of life visit, during which my father also contracted Covid-19. Ten days later, after repeatedly pulling feeding tubes from her own throat, my mother died, entirely alone.

Covid and grief weakened my father’s heart. Two days after my mother’s death, I had to pick up my father’s advance directive and follow its very clear instructions: if he suffered a stroke or heart attack, he wanted to die at home. I had to be grimly determined. First, I denied, like Judas, an ambulance three times. I took surreal calls from the council, explaining that I was entitled to help with care, but as there were no carers, none would be coming. Track and Trace called again, asking for my mother.

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But help came. My cousin, whose father had been to prep school with my father, and had inherited his anti-authoritarian streak, crossed the country to be by my side. My brother was always present. With that, I remember the humanity of the medical people who came: the district nurse, the GP, and the teams who arrived in the night with morphine and tranquillisers. Each one of them affirmed my father’s wishes and enabled them, and said, very often, that a death at home was what they wanted for themselves, what they wanted for their relatives. I remember a nurse at 3am pulling the visor off her sweating face and saying, with the vehemence of a secret, of information passed under the castle walls, ‘This is the right thing to do. This is what everyone wants for the people they love.”

I loved my father and my mother very much. A year later, I am haunted by the loneliness of my mother’s death and comforted by the intimacy and peace of my father’s. I wonder if those deeply humane doctors and nurses — and the equally humane, I am sure, doctors and nurses who cared for my mother — are more or less able, now, to allow people like my parents to choose to die out of hospital and die without intervention. Over Covid, the numbers dying at home have leapt by 39% , but this remains little spoken of, as if each of those deaths were an accident or secret, a subversive happening under the shadow of authority, a watch taken back from a guard. But each one is a just a small, human exchange, and the walls of this authority are made only of ourselves.