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The pain was indeed difficult to control. When there seemed no way forward, I was driven prone on the back seat of the car to a chiropractor for two weeks' intensive attempts at pelvic adjustment. I was soothed by heat packs and treated kindly, but to no avail, in a room overlooking a twisted tree.

I carried a handkerchief embroidered with yellow and white page 14flowers which had been offered by a friend for prayer at her church, together with a slip of paper on which I had written 'the nerve is smooth and free in a cool breeze' in my left pocket.

I composed paragraphs of happy, healing words: words like optimism and good health; better, and best, and best step forward; violet and yellow, the colour of pansies and crocuses; orange, the colour of poppies; pink, the tinged peace of roses.

I turned my small herd of elephants and occasional ornaments on the bookshelves, so they wouldn't feel trapped, their trunks and noses facing the door.

I investigated Buddhism and pondered my accumulation of negative karma, and Zen Buddhism which suggested that as long as I continued to be a slave to 'words and logic' I would experience 'untold suffering'.

I sought the teachings of Confucius who advised against taking unfamiliar medicine and, if ill on the occasion of a princely visit, assuming a supine position beneath courtly robes, head facing east. The theological intelligence of C.S. Lewis, who admitted his thesis, The Problem of Pain, was written without personal insight of pain, from which I most usefully deduced that animals suffer less because they have no capacity to imagine the future. The Celtic wisdom of my husband's grandmother, parent of eleven children, who used say, 'You'll always be where you're meant to be,' and, 'If you're meant to be punished you will be.' The spinning thoughts of Persian mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi, who wrote in 'Enough Words':

You must have shadow and light source both.
Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe.

I considered growing hashish, or rascals' grass, as Arabs once called it; trialling methadone; graduating to slow-release morphine.

In the lowest moments, when the pain escaped the pelvis and developed a pallid, external life of its own, when it became a cloud filling the room, closing me down, and it seemed neither words nor 'the world of men' could help me, I fantasised about oblivion. I eyed the squat, brown bottle of codeine, carried it in my pocket, counted page 15and recounted the tiny white pills; contemplated the weightlessness of stepping late at night from a high window or bridge into the wind, curling beneath a fern into oneness with nature, sleeping in the transforming softness of moss and of gathering leaves.

Later, when the pain was less relentless, I did not find this need to surrender unreasonable or unreal. The body releases the surface memory of short-term pain. But chronic pain hides in the mind; waits, as if haunting the walls of a building or the wood of an instrument long played, storing and orchestrating sounds for the future.

As my novel—the unrequited khan, the captive countess beset by 'the heaviness which, like the night before and the day ahead, never leaves her'—languished; as the days shortened, and each evening I drew the curtains and lit and heated the house; as I repeated my encouraging mantras and paragraphs of positive words; as I read Henri Charrière's Papillon and Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; I felt locked, without recollection of summer and little prospect of lifting spring, between Warsaw's autumn and the onset of the Wellington winter.

John (my husband) started coming home for lunch. The children brought a burner and bergamot, lavender tree and orange sweet oils; a lambskin rug for the sofa, a pair of opossum fur boots, a hand-stitched hot water bottle cover, a regular supply of dark chocolate, a pot plant, daily words of encouragement.

I absorbed the support. I achieved a measure of acceptance. The world became simpler, gifted with time and the fascination of small things. The clutter of life—deadlines, appointments, extraneous obligations—fell away. Energy and optimism slowly returned. I began to focus for short periods on writing; placating the 'animal in perpetual unrest' with the controlled stories of less immediate worlds: a modern translation of Pushkin's poema, a third collection of poetry.

The pain held on, a cohesive influence, a necessary edge to my thinking. I was reminded that Wordsworth had compared the spontaneity of childhood expression with the measured 'philosophic mind' of later years; and that the American poet Louis Simpson had spoken of his awareness of the 'power and intelligence of things'. Pain was those later years, that power of things.

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What of the neurosurgeon, Professor Robert in France, I started to wonder, as poetry—the pleasure of rhythm, the grace of words, the power of thinking in lines—cleared my mind, and the medications and constant standing tempered the pain. What of Nantes at the Atlantic mouth of the Loire, childhood home of Jules Verne; three hours by fast train, or an hour by plane, south-west of Paris?