The waiting room.

At ninety-five and physically fading fast, but with full mental capacities intact, the frenzied mental interruptions of middle-age have long gone, leaving memories that spill out at random: limpid freeze-framed images, like specimens under a microscope coverslip.

My mother and I sat in grey vinyl-padded chairs on a sea of cloud-grey carpet that lapped up to depressing storm-dark walls, which were interrupted by large photographs of bucolic green meadows in which happy animals grazed. The interior designer of the medical centre catering to the rapidly aging local population evidently couldn't decide whether to induce hope or to encourage patients to go gently into that good night.

Sitting next to me, my mother was painting one of those random memory pictures, obviously prompted by being in a medical establishment. She was talking about something that happened when she was very young, and the scene was set like fallen trees letting the sun into a forest after decades of darkness. 'I was four or five,' she said. That made it early 1930s. She had been in a hospital. She had forgotten what was wrong with her, one of those twentieth-century childhood illnesses; mumps or scarlet fever or something. But she remembered the bed next to her. It was covered in something like a tent. ‘She was my age. Burns. The smell came across. Her skin. I don’t know if she survived.’ Pause. 'Her name was Dorothy.'

The brevity of the words jumped across time and Dorothy lived again, even if just for a second.

She went on. ‘The matron was kind with the children, but she was impatient with annoying visitors and complaining relatives and the other staff, even some of the doctors. They called her a martinet.' How she remembered this detail was beyond understanding. 'She had been on the front in the war - the first one,’ she added unnecessarily, ‘and she had put soldiers together again. If she could.’

My mother was silent for a while, and then she went on, a different story now; not rambling, just the next chapter in the clearing, the sun having moved.

'I was at school. I had an apple. One of the girls who happened to live around the corner from our house watched me eat it. And then she asked if I could let her have the rest. Not much more than the core.' She paused, watching patients going into doctors' rooms. 'That afternoon I told my mother. The next day, after school, she gave me an apple and told me to take it to the girl's house. I knocked on the door and handed the apple to the woman who answered. "For your daughter", I said. The woman broke into tears.'

Back in the present, far away in time from the Great Depression, in the grey morning waiting room, patients were hobbling, hopping, hoping towards the safe haven of the grey chairs; old, hairless, hopeless; pushing walkers or faltering on sticks and staring at the fraudulent meadows, but only seeing death.

The doctor called us in and we sat down and she asked her what was the problem.

‘I can’t remember now,’ my mother said. And she laughed.