Northampton

Arlene Voss asked where I trained, which nobody at the studio has ever asked, and I said Smith, and she said her niece did the same programme, and for about ten minutes on a Tuesday evening I was a person with a history rather than the woman who leans on the clay. Two years in Northampton, 2014 to 2016. A third-floor flat on Green Street with a radiator that banged, four of us on placement rotations, and a level of poverty I remember as cheerful and which I suspect was not cheerful at all at the time. It was the last period of my life with no money and no anxiety about money, which seems like it should not be possible and was. I learned the job there. Not the theory — the theory is in books — the thing where you sit with somebody and do not rescue them. There was a supervisor called Marguerite Doyle who said almost nothing for a year and then told me, in about eleven words, the single most useful thing anybody has ever said to me about the work, and I have repeated it to supervisees and never once credited her because I cannot remember the exact phrasing and will not misquote it. That chapter closed when we moved to Boston for Danny's first real contract. It has been closed for ten years. I still think in that flat.