Before I knew what I was, I lived with my brothers in a grand old house in the heart of the New Forest. It had blue velvet curtains full of dust, and fire surrounds painted like marble to fool the eye, and a paneled Entrance Hall hung with old dark mirrors. An oak griffin perched on the newel post of the creaking staircase; we touched its satiny wings for luck whenever we passed, and whispered the motto carved on the scroll across its chest: Verité Sans Peur. We can’t have been far from the ocean—I realize that now—but we’d never been beyond Ashbridge, never seen the water. We dreamt of it though, the three of us, conjured a gentle hushing as constant as the hushing of our own breaths, our own blood. Close, we thought, to the sound children heard before they were born, so that something in us—some old instinct—made us long for it. One day we’d go there, we said, to the place where all life began.

The house was one of the Sycamore Homes purchased in 1944, after the war, to accommodate children like us—although numbers dropped over the years. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Scheme...? But then again, perhaps not. For the most part, for decades, everyone ignored us—never gave us a second thought. And afterward, people didn’t like to talk about the Homes because they didn’t like to feel guilty, which I can understand. Anyway, they’re all gone now: boarded up or bulldozed, or turned into flats that bear no trace of what happened there.