Last week, I was invited to a doctor's meeting at the Ruth Hospital. In one of the rooms a patient, an old man, got up from his bed and moved slowly towards me. I could see that he hadn't long to live, but he came up to me and placed his right foot close to mine on the floor. "Frank!" I cried in surprise. He couldn't answer, as I knew, but he tried to smile, all the time keeping his foot close to mine. My thoughts raced back more than thirty years - to the dark days of 1941, when I was a student in London. The scene was an air-raid shelter  , in which I and about a hundred other people slept every night. Among them were Mrs West and her son Frank, who lived nearby. Sharing wartime problems, we got to know each other very well. Frank interested me because he was not normal. He had never been normal, ever since he was born. His mother told me he was 37 then, but he had less of a mind than a baby has. Mrs West, then about 75, was a strong, able woman, as she had to be, of course, because Frank depended on her completely. He needed all the attention of a baby. One night a policeman came into our shelter and told Mrs West that her house had been all destroyed. That wasn't quite true, because the Wests went on living there for quite some time. But they certainly lost nearly everything they owned. When that kind of thing happened, the rest of us helped the unlucky ones. So before we separated that morning, I stood beside Frank and measured my right foot against his. They were about the same size. That night, then, I took a spare pair of shoes to the shelter for Frank. As soon as he saw me, he came running - and paced his right foot against mine. After that, he always greeted me in the same way. How did the writer know that the patient was Frank?
He was told that Frank was in the hospital. He was invited to study Frank's illness. Frank's name was written on the door. Frank greeted him in a special way.