Then there was the Letters page: ‘No decent woman uses that word. What sort of a model to her children?’ ‘An abomination: if this is modern literature, I’ll have none of it,’ and ‘If this is modern womanhood, we’re all in trouble!’ There was an opinion piece that referenced, and opposed, the still-recent lifting of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover ban. A counter-opinion, published the next day, quoted Harry Whitmore quoting Bertrand Russell. The book, the newspapers said, would surely not be stocked by decent bookshops.

INVITATION TO THE READER: A SONNET

F or all those readers contemplating here

U nrousing afternoons of quiet calm:

C oy men and women, fobbing off their fear,

K illed in their beds by every false alarm.

P repare yourselves for small incessant wounds

U nduly actioned on your hearth and homes

B urnished into bits of black and gold

L ike sequins from the very oldest bones

(I n patterns from the very oldest caves.)

S o sequins too! make dancers of dull feet

H arangue old bodies into quadrilles vain

E nriching life despite what life depletes

R espondez s’il vous plait to truths so bold,

S it by me, let our blood warm hands we hold

It’s a curiously classical, even stilted, poem for Mother, who did not write in closed form very often (bar a couple of villanelles that Julia most particularly admires). But at the time, I merely spelt out the letters vertically, like everybody else did.

The consensus was clear, however: women who hoped to be respected for their literary pursuits could not possibly expect to use language like that and get away with it.

There was a lot of talk of this: of Mother getting away with it. But Mother didn’t seem to be getting away with anything.

Mother couldn’t move.

She was dumbstruck.

It was as though she had planned and executed her literary revenge without any understanding of what it was, exactly, she was doing. Papa questioned her, but she just sat there, on the couch in the living room, white-faced, clutching her dog, saying: ‘I didn’t think it would come to this!’

‘I’m frightened,’ she said, ‘about the fate of my book.’

‘Why didn’t you just use the word “Damn”?’ asked Papa. ‘For god’s sake, Veda. Are you a complete idiot? Why didn’t you just use the word “Damn”?’

‘Because,’ said Mother, truculently, pressing her face into the dog’s fur. ‘That would’ve been a different poem entirely.’

‘And why the first poem in the book? Couldn’t you have buried it somewhere further in? James might not even have noticed if you hadn’t drawn his eye to it like that, plastering it on the front page.’

‘The sonnet was called “Invitation”,’ said Mother. ‘It had to go at the beginning of the book.’