The smell of diesel, combined with the constant rocking of the sea, made me horribly nauseous. But worse was the overpowering sense of shame. It was hard to accept that I wasn’t as brave as I had anticipated. I had imagined being on the frontline with the other protesters, an anti-nukes Joan of Arc, but I had turned out to be frightened, unable to fight for a cause I believed in. What kind of protester did that make me?

I kayaked back to where we’d left our car. As I shivered, pulling on dry clothes over my still damp body, I could see my friends way off in the distance, their canoes so small against the bulk of the Whipple. Beyond them, free from all police intervention, a jet boat trailing a long ‘welcome’ sign zoomed back and forth, clearing a path for the visiting warship.

Not long after the protest, complaints started coming in to the university about the American studies department. Most of the criticism came from Americans and typically went, ‘American studies? More like anti-American studies!’ Bob, as head of department and resident expert on American foreign policy, was completely unfazed by the controversy and, to a certain extent, relished it. He gave interviews to the press and even wrote some articles for the student paper. When I asked if he was worried about possible backlash or losing his job, he shrugged.

‘They’re not going to touch me,’ he said. ‘There’d be such an uproar that half the university would walk out in support.’

In 1985, David Lange took part in the famous Oxford Union debate with the joke about smelling the uranium on his opponent’s breath. As the news clip was played over and over again, a memory was triggered for me and I fetched Granny Seren’s strange green bottle from my jewellery box, where it had been kept since I had inherited it following her death. I gave the bottle a rub and waited, as I had throughout my childhood, to see it glow. Though it was as vivid green as ever, it didn’t shine any more brightly than usual. I tipped the bottle and then uncapped it, peering inside at the tiniest hint of a brown viscous perfume within. I took a long sniff and there, still identifiable after more than ninety years, was the distinctive bitter, forest-floor, fungal smell of oakmoss, no longer permitted in perfume in its natural state because its toxicity caused skin allergies.

Notes from a student flat: sewage, rubbish, methylated spirits, coal, diesel and oakmoss. Oakmoss again.

My career path following my masters in American studies was haphazard, to say the least. Immediately after graduating I was persuaded by my boyfriend to leave Christchurch and join an alternative community of mainly anti-logging activists on the West Coast, not far from Greymouth. He quickly adapted to a life of cold, uncomfortable self-sufficiency and possum trapping, but I didn’t, and before long we parted company. I returned to the city, and all the comforts of home. Over the next several months I took on a number of part-time jobs before landing my first ‘real’ job, in an art museum, curating exhibitions.