The bus was precisely the same red as the real thing, but for the two top rear corners where the paint had been chipped to bare metal. The banner ad running along both sides of it read ‘Swinging London . . . Carnaby Street’ with bunches of balloons crowded in-between. Where was that? Where was that London? I’d heard my mother talking about it with friends before we left Brisbane. The energy, the fashion, the style of the place. My mother had come to London planning to wear huge sunglasses and fur wraps and hang out with the Beatles, but they had all hated each other for years, and London hated itself and now she was Purdey on a bus with punks carelessly dropped dead on the ground.

She’d read the Australian Women’s Weekly on what Mary Quant was up to now, a decade after shocking the old fogies by turning up at the palace in a minidress to pick up her OBE. But this was 1978, Nancy Spungen was dead, stabbed in her hotel bathroom. Sid Vicious had slashed his wrists with a broken light bulb and the papers at breakfast said he’d been taken to Rikers Island jail charged with her murder. They printed the mugshots, side-on with his sideburn like a curved blade across his cheek, front-on with a look that said he’d be okay to be dead, a waxwork already.

My mother was back to watching the street, but watching nothing. Rain specked the window, umbrellas bumped and jostled on the pavement. She lifted her bag onto her lap and pulled out the golden Benson & Hedges box without looking down. She cocked the lid open, drew out a cigarette and lit it.

No-one would want to drive on these streets if they had the choice, she’d told me. Or find a park on them. So we always drove from Teddington into Butterwick and caught the bus from there. She said that made it feel shorter, breaking up the trip, but it made it feel longer.

We had an Austin Maxi, a hatchback so that we could go on weekend drives and have picnics. As soon as we made the move to Teddington, my mother bought a tartan rug and a wicker picnic basket with cutlery threaded into elastic loops in the lid, spoons and forks sardining to fit.