After a few pints he became even more animated, kept touching my arm, moving ever closer, as he talked about his specialist subject: Northern Ireland. It was February 1971 and the first British soldier had been killed that day by a gelignite bomb as he moved into riots in the Ardoyne district of Ulster. Miles was outraged. Not by the soldier’s death but that he was there at all. He bought another round of beer and whiskies and slipped an arm round me as he sat, his hand encircling my waist. ^cThe British should just get out, let the Republicans exercise their birthright. We’ve got no bloody business there.’

As it turned out that was exactly what we had — bloody business. In those early years I worried very little about the Troubles, as the never-ending battle was quaintly named. It was not that I was uncaring as such but the world at the time was frankly overwhelming. American troops were in Cambodia, the American National Guard was shooting students at Kent State University. The PLO took hostages and blew up jumbos on airstrips. A tidal wave killed 150,000 people in East Pakistan, the steel railings buckled at Ibrox and Charles Manson was found guilty of slaughtering the pregnant Sharon Tate. In England the strikes were beginning to take hold. The death of a soldier in Ulster was as nothing compared to all this, as nothing compared to watching Miles’ soft lips talking so close to mine.

I’d already arranged for John to spend the weekend with his grandparents in Plymouth since I’d been expecting to see Tim that night. I discovered later that Miles had been so sure of himself, so sure of me, that he had asked me out on the Friday night of a weekend when his wife and children were away. We left the Bridge Inn late that evening, my head swirling with beer and whisky, but even so, as we staggered drunkenly into Topsham heading for the Globe Inn, I knew what would happen. Not all of it, not all that was going to happen, because if I had I would have listened to Miles more closely and then walked away from him.

The next morning when I woke, headache pounding, it occurred to me that Miles must already have booked the room. He was in the bathroom, shaving, when I asked him if he had and he said, ‘Yes.’ A flash of anger, mingled with a streak of faint shame, splashed over me, soon to pass. We spent the weekend together, most of it in the hotel room, a few hours walking the banks of the Exe and the Turf, and then Miles went back to his family and I drove to Plymouth to collect John.

Miles and I were equals and that, I suppose, is why we were so drawn to each other. Literally drawn. I would be sitting in my office, the door open, and would look up suddenly to find Miles watching me. We seemed instinctively to know where to find each other in the labyrinthine corridors of the university; at the day’s end we would drift to our cars and, wordlessly, one would follow the other to a pub, to a hotel, to a park. Eventually to Miles’ family home. I remember following his car - a grey, utilitarian Mini with sliding windows and cracked red leather seats — in my bulbous, much-loved Morris Minor, pulling into the drive and sitting in the seat. Miles came to my window and I wound it down.