One Saturday morning she slipped into Sparkhill Library again. Since she didn’t dare talk to a real medical man, she found The Universal Home Doctor and took it discreetly to a corner of the hushed room, where she sat with her back turned to everyone. She felt as if everyone must be watching her, as if the book was red-hot. Here she was, this respectable-looking young woman, neatly turned out in a sage-green summer frock, jumpy as a mouse in case anyone came and looked over her shoulder and saw her looking up . . . But looking up what?

She flicked through the pages with clammy hands. Surely there wasn’t a heading ‘Getting rid of a baby’? Soon, under A, she found ‘Abortion’. Of course! Her heart was pounding. That was the term for it, and a terrible one. Even seeing it on the page made her tremble. You could go to prison for that, couldn’t you?

She read frantically, full of dread, her breathing shallow and jerky. At first she thought that the entry was only about natural miscarriage. Too much activity, it said, or heavy lifting, might bring on the baby. It was the next part that chilled her blood. ‘It is well known that abortion may be due to the taking of certain drugs or the criminal use of instruments.’ Either of these, it warned, often resulted in the death of the woman.

Her legs turned to water and her hands were shaking so much that she almost dropped the book on the floor. She managed somehow to get it back onto the shelf and stagger out into the pale sunshine of the Stratford Road, the word criminal, criminal, pounding in her mind. Life burst in on her, the Saturday-morning scramble to the shops with ration books. As people came towards her they made her jump. They felt like a threat, and she found herself laying a hand protectively over her stomach.

Why on earth am I doing that? she wondered, shivering. She felt very cold and sick. I want it not to be there, I want it to die . . . Oh God, she wailed inwardly as tears rose in her eyes, I don’t know what I want. She felt as if her life had been taken over and was not hers any more. It was terrifying.

To try and calm herself she went into the park and, taking deep breaths, walked slowly round the green space, speckled with playing children. She found a bench where no one else was sitting and sat staring ahead of her. The criminal use of instruments . . . She’d heard whispers about wire or knitting needles being used to end a baby, about buckets full of blood. She felt faint just thinking about it. And it all seemed so far from who she thought she was. It was girls in sordid back streets who did such things, girls who had asked for it, who were fast . . . Not people like her. How snooty she had been in her thinking! Yet now she was one of them, caught in this trap where to continue with the child or to end it was equally dreadful. For a few moments it all welled up and overcame her and she put her hands over her face, fighting back her tears.