‘Looking back, I can’t really say whether he or Alison was the driving force behind the things we did. Perhaps they fed off each other. Together, they were unstoppable. Which meant we all were. Or felt as if we were. It was a good feeling. The best, in fact.

‘The world seemed old and stale to us. It needed changing. Protesting outside the nuclear submarine base at Devonport or sitting in front of bulldozers destroying ancient woodland on the route of a new dual carriageway? That made us feel as if we were making a difference, as if we were actually altering the way society was run. Nonsense, of course, in the greater scheme of things. We weren’t altering anything. And we were never going to. But we hadn’t lived long enough to understand that.

‘There’s no point pretending we were always thinking straight. The pot-smoking didn’t amount to much, but Geoff was a source of some seriously mind-bending stuff as well. I steered clear of it as far as I could, but that wasn’t quite as far as it should have been, especially not when Alison was the one encouraging me to try something new. It probably made us … over-confident at the very least, so I suppose it was inevitable that, sooner or later, we’d overreach ourselves.

‘The end of term was approaching – the end of our time together. I was worried I’d never see Alison again. My attempts to tell her I loved her had all misfired. She didn’t take them seriously. What she really took seriously was our latest cause: exposing what was going on at Nancekuke. No one outside the base knew sarin was being produced there until long after production had ceased in the late fifties, although there were rumours it hadn’t really ceased at all. What was known, when we started to take an interest, was that Nancekuke was manufacturing CS gas on a large scale. We staged a roadside protest at the start of the Easter holidays and got our pictures in the paper. Well, the local paper. “You are entering a chemical warfare zone.” That line on the banner was Alison’s idea. She always had the best ideas.

‘The picture in the paper caught the attention of Tom Noy, who’d worked at Nancekuke, and, like quite a few others employed there, had gone down with a series of mysterious neurological disorders. He got our address from the university office and, one day, showed up on the doorstep. Thin as a lath, ferret-eyed and twitchy from the nerve damage, he wasn’t someone you’d feel inclined to socialize with, but Alison and Peter wanted to hear what he had to say. We were the only ones at home at the time. We took him down to the Mount Radford and plied him with beer while he coughed his way through half a dozen cigarettes and told us his story.