Daniel was at school with me, the Upper School, a kind of comprehensive I had attended since I was eleven. He came at thirteen when his parents moved from where they had been living, somewhere in Norfolk. He was younger than me, but not the vast amount people made out after he was dead. I had become seventeen in February and he would have had his seventeenth birthday in November if he had lived. It was October when we went up the pylon.

It’s legal to ride a motorbike in this country when you’re sixteen. Daniel and I went all over the outskirts of London and the Home Counties on his Motoguzzi. Our elders disliked that motorbike. Mr. and Mrs. Fleetwood kept saying they wished they had forbidden it from the start, now he had got it, it was too late, and every time I went out on it my parents said that was the last time, Dad was going to put his foot down, it had to stop. They all said, and said repeatedly, that we’d be killed on that motorbike, it was one thing when they were young but the traffic was too heavy now and there were too many container trucks on the roads to make a motorbike safe. We’d be killed and it wasn’t fair on them, giving them all that worry. Ironical, wasn’t it? We never had a spill on the bike, we never had any sort of accident, not even a near-miss. It was on the pylon that we came to grief.

That summer we made love in the fields. Sometimes we were lucky enough to have a bed when both his parents were out or both mine were. Such chances happened very seldom. I knew a girl whose parents let her have her boyfriend to stay, to sleep in the same room as her, in the same bed. I talked about it at home, I told Mum and she told Dad. Some part of me knew that would never be allowed in my home, but just the same it would do no harm to let them know, pave the way, prepare the ground. It wasn’t that I expected them to acknowledge that we were lovers now, but in the time to come, in a year or two maybe . . . I thought, of course, that there would be a time to come.