It was eleven that Sunday morning and the weather had turned cold. Hilda was accompanying me to this Greenham Common place, where the peace women camped out. I’d seen them on the TV. She was coming, she said, because Lesley had nicked her quartz alarm clock and she wanted to get it back. Neither of us had high hopes of finding Lesley there—who would sleep rough for a year with two children? But somebody might know where she had gone.

The best Daddy in the world. Mine was, of course. Each man is, to his own son. What right had Barry to be the object of such adoration? Hilda said that children saw the truth, but I knew they lied. They had to lie to themselves; they had to make some faulty couple into the best parents in the world, because that was all they’d got. Barry was all my son knew. Even a father who disappeared to Saudi-Arabia was better than a father who had never turned up in the first place.

My son was slipping away from me. He had never known me, anyway; I’d never made him a bow and arrow. What right had I to him? From this absent boy I had constructed my own property, my own salvation in this—as they say in church—my Hour of Need. He wasn’t a real son, he was some picture postcard equivalent of one. It was like people pretending that thatched cottages were a true picture of England. On my coach tours, that was the England we saw—Stratford, the Cotswolds. We fooled ourselves, of course.

That frosty morning, the first morning of winter, I knew that sons had to lie about their fathers. How? Because I’d just been lying, myself.

‘Ugh,’ said Hilda, shrinking in her seat.

We were driving past a high wire fence—the perimeter fence of the missile base. In front were various heaps of plastic, sort of tents, and hunched shapes sitting around in the smoke.

‘How could they?’ she muttered. ‘The mud!’

I parked the coach further up the lane, and touched my CND badge. Like the Peckham Football Club, one sex only was welcome here; I knew that from the TV. But perhaps this badge made me an honorary member.

A woman stepped out from behind a gorse bush and walked up to us. She was bundled up in men’s clothes. I opened the door for her.

‘Great!’ she called. ‘Where are they?’

I stared at her. ‘Where’s who?’

She had an American accent. I thought her hair was grey, but on closer inspection it was speckled with dandruff. She gestured at the coach.

‘Everybody. I’m real pleased there’s so many.’

I turned round, and gazed at the empty seats. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

She frowned at me. ‘You from Exeter?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’