‘She then said something to me that stuck with me for many years, something it was almost shocking to hear. “Morag, when the gods made mankind they discovered some pathetic little wrinkled bits left over, and weren’t sure what to do with them. Eventually they decided to allocate testicles to men, and look how they have wasted them, leading them astray in the search for pleasure. If they had given balls to women, just imagine the courage, the leadership and the determination the world would now have. Morag, make sure you have balls. You will get nowhere without them.”’

Gillard chuckled.

‘During the next vacation I was switched to a different and more challenging line, and after a few weeks was promoted to shift supervisor.’

‘Did Harry ever work on the line?’

Morag laughed. ‘Of course not. He’s a boy! More than 90 per cent of those in the packing hall were middle-aged women, with just a sprinkling of students. Not many stuck it for long. I did pick up some Hindi and Gujarati though, and I can also lip-read.’

‘So you and Harry were boyfriend and girlfriend throughout university?’

She equivocated slightly. ‘We were, but we also slept with other people. It was very relaxed and loving and trusting. When he qualified, with an upper second, he went straight into the company in middle management as preordained. He always knew it would happen. His father was already dropping hints about finding a good Gujarati girl. I pleaded with Harry to expand his horizons, to come travelling, to extricate himself from the dead hand of the family.’

‘Did he ignore you?’

‘Well, not entirely. We did travel together through the Indian subcontinent, and did some trekking in the Himalayas. He got altitude sickness, then amoebic dysentery, so that was the end of that. He came back to Slough, and I went off to Italy to get an MBA. I fell in love, then out of love, nearly got married, then came to my senses at the last minute, then got pregnant by someone else and gave birth. I remained working in Milan and doing well. Then my father died. Harry and I had lost touch, but amazingly he turned up completely unannounced at my father’s funeral in 2011. In Longannet, Fife he stood out like a lamb dhansak in a fish and chip shop. I was there with my own son, James, who was three. Harry told me that his father had already set him up twice for arranged marriages. Being the eldest son he had much more leeway to extricate himself than daughters would, but there was still this relentless drip-drip pressure for him to produce a son to carry on the business.’

‘Did he not want children?’

‘Of course! He adores children, but he just wanted to choose his own wife, and probably one who was anglicised. He wasn’t into the big Gujarati macho male thing. Deep down he is a west London boy, and a bit of a party animal. Harry’s father had a stroke in 2008, and after that the marriage pressure mounted enormously. Still, what he’d seen of arranged marriages wasn’t encouraging. Prisha wed Deepak in 2000 – that was arranged – and had produced a daughter, Indigo, but no son, and very little happiness. Kiara had fought her own way out of an arranged marriage in 2005, and was basically just completely bolshie, though of course I admire her for that.