‘I can handle it.’ I said. But the truth is I had a few ticklish moments. I made it through the women’s tent reasonably well, finding much to admire, in the photographs of women screaming and shouting outside military bases all over the world, in the finely judged camera angles. And it was interesting to see a section of real Greenham fence, decorated by Greenham women, and to discover that samples were being sent to interested parties everywhere, like moon rock. I smiled at the people wearing orange togas and expressions of highly offensive beatitude on the yoga stall. I didn’t take an axe to the right-to-lifers showing foetal videos. And I managed not to take umbrage when somebody offered me a badge saying. PLANT A TREE – MAKE PEACE WITH THE EARTH – FREE TREES. But the baby-talk tone of the place got me down. MAKE YOUR OWN MESSAGE, AND THEN PIN IT ON THE GROWING TREE, I read. And the serenity, which we were to suppose was a consequence of the proximity of babies and children, affected me adversely also. In fairness, although it goes against the grain, I must say that the extravagantly concessionary tone that was taken with children throughout the Peace Exposition did not result in any juvenile deliquency beyond the usual. Babies cried and they were soothed. Infants asked and they were given. Morally and behaviourally this was undoubtedly exemplary. But aesthetically it was intolerable. Parental serenity – I don’t care how many great painters have made it their subject – is hideous to the eye.

We took a break from it, in the late morning, just as Alison Bird was beginning the folk dancing, and drove into town for a beer. We chose, quite deliberately, the most open and noisy pub we could find. It was packed with bearded farmers’ boys and wild bushmen, scowling Aborigines, drunken Islanders, men with faces like splintered razor blades and teeth like daggers. Although it wasn’t yet midday the passions had all been unloosed: malevolence, mistrust, menace, a commitment of the whole individual and corporate identity to the idea of violence. Violence emotional and, should you have dared to catch an eye, violence actual. Communication back at the Showground had been wilfully amicable; an eye met an eye and if it was humanly possible both eyes had a go at a smile. Here, the window to the soul was nothing other than an entrance-hall to Hell. Be seen to see and you were doomed.

‘’Course I didn’t talk to you, you stupid bastard,’ a man covered with hair was saying to a huge, swaying Islander, ‘you were too fucking busy – you were up that Tongan.’

‘Buy me a drink now then, cunt.’