We didn’t get to the bottom of that distinction. All I can deduce from it is that they serve chips and dim sums at a site and that you’re better off at a base. But Alitha had something else she preferred talking about. ‘Do you know what I wanna do?’ she said. ‘I wanna go to England.’

‘England?’ we both said together.

‘Yeah, England. Does it rain in England?’

‘Yes,’ we both said together.

‘I wanna go to England.’

She hadn’t seen any rain, to speak of, since she’d been here. She longed for rain. I could see her trying to remember what it looked like, what it felt like, what colour it was.

A couple more service wives, also black, passed our table and nodded coldly at her. You could smell small-town trouble. Then a third arrived, wheeling a pushchair. ‘You wanna sit down?’ Alitha asked her. The woman looked fed up. ‘No, no I don’t think so. I think I’m ready to leave now,’ she said. She had only just come.

Alitha rose and hoped that our trip would be a trip. Together we wished her rain. She didn’t know what we meant at first, then she remembered. ‘Oh, wow,’ she said.

Outside, a man was selling tickets for the Woomera Drama Group’s production of Blithe Spirit. Unfortunately there was no performance that evening. As we drove out of town an impossibly handsome black G.I. standing at a bus stop flashed his expensive teeth at us and saluted. Something gold on his wrist caught the sun. Three minutes later we were in the desert.

Between Woomera and Coober Pedy there are not many diversions off the Stuart Highway you would think of taking, which is just as well since you wouldn’t be allowed to take them if there were. For this is prohibited territory, rocket and atom bomb testing country. Maralinga is in there somewhere to the west, though far enough away, my guide book assured me, not to cause any contemporary traveller concern.

It was a long and tedious drive to Coober Pedy. The landscape threw up a few variations – the odd salt lake, an occasional declivity, a subtle shift of shading in the scrub – but the road itself often ran horrendously straight, showing you where you were going miles before you got there, and how little it was different from where you’d been. Apart from dead kangaroos on the roadside – a shocking nightly slaughter this, providing a day-long running buffet for crows and eagles the whole length of the Stuart Highway – we passed nothing, were passed by nothing, for three hours. Only once did we stop and that was at the Glendambo Roadhouse for fuel. The girl who served us had a neck covered in love-bites. So it was either not as isolated out here as it looked, or she had resorted to biting herself.