During the day I worked. In the evenings I burnt incense and received the Locum’s messages, accompanied by a soundtrack of old jazz. I began arriving late for work in the mornings, exhausted from the previous evening’s exertions with the Locum. I rode the tube trains like a zombie, painfully aware of all the wrong things. There were dead pigeons everywhere; I found one outside the flat, writhing with an industriousness of maggots. There were benignly grinning ‘Smileys’ sprayed all over the road signs and anything else that was even vaguely circular. To me, their moronic faces came to represent the lobotomised fools strap-hanging in the rush-hour trains; too numb to feel or see what was being done to them in the name of ‘progress’.

A man was found dead on a seat on the northbound platform of my local underground station. I don’t think anyone would ever have noticed him if a commuter hadn’t reported to the transport police that he’d seen the chap slumped in exactly the same position the previous morning.

The other day there was a slate at the ticket barrier with the poignant message: Due to a body under a train at Earls Court there will be delays to all destinations. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused. What an obituary! To be dismissed even in death as an ‘inconvenience’, as if your demise was merely some humdrum public nuisance. What kind of world is this?

With hunched shoulders, I scurried home between decomposing pigeons and barricaded my door. Throwing off my coat and kicking off my shoes, I hit the power switch on the stereo system before I even thought of switching on the light and it illuminated the Locum, who was standing on the living-room window ledge, apparently gazing out at the blighted trees on the common.

I wasn’t even aware that she had registered my presence but suddenly she turned to me and spoke, in a squeaky, mechanical Betty Boop voice: “Deh wah no kuhwuhd butterfwies any mawh, ownwee cabbage-whites.”

Those were the first words she spoke to me.

In my stunned silence, staring at those artificial lips that had — even while she had been talking — remained motionlessly parted, I felt the twinge of a recollection from my childhood, as if the doll had pulled it, still damp and writhing from the recesses of my mind. And although it had nothing to do with butterflies or cabbage whites, I knew exactly what she meant. It was a memory of a Britain that doesn’t exist any more. Perhaps it never really existed in the first place; at least not in the bright primary colours of this mental film-clip; but it’s a Britain that I’ve always harked back to and yearned for.

As time went by, the Locum’s ability to shift my consciousness up a gear, to throw me into a reverie, became as precision engineered as the nano-mechanical flick of her hips as she crossed the bookshelf on one of her rhythmic missions to stroke the head of the Buddha. Her words were always accompanied by the fragrance of yellow rose incense. I don’t know whether that was a prerequisite, but it enchanted me as much as those huge oval eyes of hers with the fluttering lashes.

The messages she printed had become reflections of my feelings and dreams. Of lazy summer days in a long forgotten England. Memories of floating dust motes in cottage kitchens fragrant with pastry and home-made jam, in thatched-roofed villages with red G.P.O. pillar boxes, smiling postmen, the clink of milk bottles and satisfied, rosy faces.

I felt the inexplicable longing to gloat over the mildewed remnants of my Blue Peter, Crackerjack and Magpie annuals in the attic; to scour the snow on archived videocassettes for fragments of Catweazle and Dad’s Army episodes. I haunted back-street shops looking for tapes of those television programmes on which earnest, white-bearded men interviewed country craftsmen who were the last of their line.

I caught myself wondering if I’d ever be able to afford a Savile Row suit; started wearing Czech & Speake’s 88 after-shave and a lick of Brylcreem in my hair; smells that reminded me of barber shops and long-dead uncles.

I stocked the larder with bottles of vintage port that almost bankrupted me. The unidentifiable objects mouldering in the fridge were successively replaced by jars of pickled onions, Cheddar cheese and Stilton. I bought Marmite and lemon curd, cream crackers and gentlemen’s relish, steak and kidney pies and Worcestershire sauce.

And the Locum’s words lulled me, well-nourished, into visions of Arcadia:

“thul orlwajs b 1 wai uv getin cloas 2 yor ansesturz folo thr auld rode & az u wark think uv them & the auld ingerland yore ownly seein wat ther aijs sore u fordd the sajm rivrs the sajm burdz r sjnging & wenn u lai flatt un yor bak & restt wajtch the clawds sajling az ai oftjn du u cann here the thrummjng uv thr hoovs uv thr horsjs the saunde uv the whealz un the rode & the mewsic uv the jnstrumintz they carie...”

This language was an incantation and what it had conjured was the naïve vision of a life and land that never was, but which existed nonetheless; somewhere in my soul.

*

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