Dan watched the procession of worshippers stream out of the church and shake hands with the storklike vicar at the door; there were a couple of ex-military types who stood ramrod straight and threw back their heads in laughter at the punchline of the story their wives simpered out to the vicar; there was a bevy of Born Agains, with their nonexistent dress code and their smiles of sheer goodness and radiant sincerity; there was an old woman with a woolly hat pulled down over her tangle of matted hair who shuffled past the vicar without a word and went off down the street, muttering to herself as she carried her worldly belongings in several plastic bags, their handles entwined in her grubby, mitted fingers; and then there were the stalwarts—the ladies who cleaned the floors, polished the brasses, arranged the flowers, and organized midweek fund-raising coffee mornings to which only they turned up. They were dressed in drab Sunday best coats done up to the neck, carrying handbags on their forearms and gloves in hand, and they wore hats that appeared to have been beaten into submission with cudgels before adorning their tightly permed white hair.

Dan could never quite fathom why it was that, as long as he could remember, old ladies always seemed to have dressed in exactly the same way. Was there never a time in their lives when they favoured bright figure-hugging clothes and glossed their mouths with devil-red lipstick? Had those pink-spectacled eyes never flashed a “Come on, try your luck with me” to some cool young dude on the other side of the dance floor? It was hard to imagine. Maybe they all went through some bizarre metamorphic process as they approached their golden years, entering into some weird extrusion plant dressed as butterflies and coming out the other end as mothy pensioners.

Thank God for Mum, Dan thought to himself. There she was, rounded and wholesome, dressed in a fuschia pink raincoat, her grey, loose-curled hair blowing free in the breeze, standing amongst them like a rose in a cabbage patch. It didn’t take much to imagine her still as that young, vibrant teenage girl, dressed in flared skirt and bobby socks, who had walked away with every jive competition held at the Metropole Dance Hall in Tottenham Hale.

Dan got out of the car and went around to the passenger door and held it open for his mother. She gave him a little wave but remained on the pavement talking with one of her fellow church slaves, no doubt fixing up the next scintillating meeting of the Scrape-Your-Knuckles-to-the-Bone-for-the-Welfare-of-the-Church Club. A nod and a gentle pat on the arm confirmed the arrangement and Battersea Gran crossed over the road to the car.