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Kamanin was among the first to reach Gagarin where he had fallen. He was not best pleased at the cosmonaut’s condition. There was so much blood that he imagined for a moment that Gagarin must have shot himself. Meanwhile Valya had run downstairs to see what had happened. She screamed at Kamanin, ‘Don’t just stand there! Help him! He’s dying!’

Immediately, doctors from a field station at Sevastopol were summoned. Meanwhile, the Foros medical personnel provided some basic first-aid; they checked for feeling in Gagarin’s limbs, then decided it was safe to put him on a folding cot, which someone brought to the scene from indoors. Then they took him inside, where the doctors applied local anaesthetic to his brow. Some of the bone in his forehead was chipped. When the Sevastopol surgeons arrived, they cleared out the fragments, effected temporary repairs and stitched the wound. Gagarin held someone’s hand throughout. He made no sound whatsoever, but his nails left livid marks, so tight was his grip.

The enormity of Gagarin’s blunder seemed to catch up with him. He looked up at the nurse Anna for a moment and she remembers him asking her just one question. ‘Will I fly again?’

She said, ‘We’ll see.’

Anna Rumanseyeva was grateful that Gagarin took the trouble even now, in his pain and discomfort, to protect ‘Anna’ from the authorities. ‘He asked for one of the sanatorium directors, and he said, “Of course you know it wasn’t her fault.” And it was so. She was moved to a different building, but she continued to work in the sanatorium.’

A special private medical facility was established in the main wing of the sanatorium. Anna and another nurse alternated their duty rota, keeping Gagarin under permanent observation, while Valentina spent many hours at his bedside. All things considered, she was remarkably friendly towards Anna. ‘She recalled how they lived before Yuri went into space. She explained how he studied hard, and she did regret that life sometimes.’

At the scene of Gagarin’s accident, the doctors feared that he might have sustained concussion injuries. Afterwards, Yuri insisted that he had never actually lost consciousness, but a strict regime of bedrest was ordered nevertheless. After three days of inertia, he was propped up on his pillows, complaining to Anna, ‘I’m fed up. I want to do something. Anna, please close the door. I want to do some hand-stands.’

‘Yuri Alexeyevich! If the doctors find out, I’ll lose my job!’

‘Don’t worry. I’m feeling healthy. I just want to do something.’ He stood on his hands, larking about and feeling fine, but bored to hell. Anna persuaded him to get back into bed. He said, ‘People will talk about this for the next hundred years. One day, when you’re a grandmother, you can tell your grandchildren how you once took care of Yuri Gagarin.’

But he knew he had done a foolish thing in jumping from the window. Perhaps this adventure was unlucky for him. Behind the jokey smile and his irrepressible self-confidence, Gagarin brooded about his future.

Nikolai Kamanin was also concerned. He was responsible for maintaining discipline among the cosmonauts. In his diary he noted:

This incident could bring a lot of trouble to me and others responsible for Gagarin. It could have had a very gloomy outcome. Gagarin was a hair’s breadth from a very nonsensical and silly death.

Three days later a Chaika limousine arrived to take Gagarin to the Party Congress. He was carried on a stretcher, although he was up and about by now, and found the whole process absurd, laughing out loud. They took him to Sevastopol and put him on an aircraft to Moscow. On arrival he was not permitted to speak for too long at the Congress, or to mingle afterwards with the other delegates. The official records tell of his fully active participation, despite Kamanin’s conviction in his diary entry that Gagarin was in no fit state to attend and did not take part. Golovanov explains, ‘Actually he did turn up, but only on