I watched quite a lot of television that Christmas.

A month later Ted had a new job with a small independent fragrance house. Restall & Jackson was never mentioned again and it was only now, turning the 1965 pages, that I thought of the tin shed and the vats of sickly-scented coloured sludge.

On the Friday morning before Audrey was due to come for lunch, I drove to the newspaper library. The archive was housed in a north suburban street, not so very far from Dorset Avenue itself, and I followed a route that was so familiar that I didn’t have to think about which way I was going. I passed a hardware shop, once owned by the father of a girl I was at school with, and noticed that it was now a video store. The cinema had been turned into a bingo hall in the Eighties but was now empty and boarded up and there was a huge supermarket and DIY store complex on a triangle of land where there had once been some ramshackle garages and a dance hall notorious for Saturday night hooliganism.

I was already waiting in the lobby when the library staff opened the reading room. A leather-bound volume of the Hendon & Finchley Times was put on the desk in front of me. I sat for a moment staring at the dull red leather binding, and noticing the worn corners and the uneven gold-tooled printing of the volume’s dates. A bulk job, quickly done, I judged. But it must have been nice steady business for whichever bookbinder had had the contract for binding all these papers for library use. Everything was put on film these days, of course.

I opened the cover and glanced automatically at the marbled endpapers.

Then I looked at the front page of the first paper: HENDON SCOUTMASTER’S HIGH AWARD. CHIEF RABBI VISITS KINGSBURY.

It was like peering into another century rather than a mere forty years back. The yellowed pages were limp and the paper fibres seemed to have sucked up the type, turning it soft and muzzy. There were interviews with local girls who looked forty but were in fact eighteen, and who had ‘passed with flying colours’ the selection tests to become air hostesses. Every wedding in the borough seemed to be covered in minute detail. There were women’s features about choosing dainty gloves and hats to get ahead in, and I read incredulously that ‘gay bachelors have had their day. Now it’s gay spinsters and gay wives.’

Those were the days when gay had nothing to do with damned homos, as Ted used to grumble in his old age. I was still smiling at this when I turned another page and saw it, next to EDGWARE BRIDE’S SATIN GOWN.

HENDON MAN GUILTY OF FRAUD.