Betty sniffed, as if she could conjure it up, pulled her hankie from her sleeve and blew her nose. She still missed her mother, more than ever. More than her sister, perhaps. It was difficult to know. She knew what had happened to her mother, but her sister had just gone. This meeting is for them, she thought. For them. She felt the man glaring at her. She tucked her hankie back and focused on the podium. Who was Alex Comfort? She liked what he said though, about Britain’s moral bankruptcy and ceremonial suicide. That was a good turn of phrase. She wrote it down. There was more applause. She put the notebook between her teeth so it wouldn’t slip away while she stood up again and clapped. It was, she knew, very un-British to behave like that at a public meeting. Still, needs must. She agreed with every word. She’d sign up, or whatever you had to do, immediately.

She removed the notebook from between her teeth and fanned herself again. The hall was packed. How many people were here? She couldn’t begin to calculate. Thousands, at least. All of them thinking like she did. Some of them were quite old, too. Nuclear war was wrong. What did it matter if Russia had won the space race? So what if they could fire an H-bomb from a sputnik? Didn’t mean the West had to copy them. America and Russia were like roosters sharpening their spurs. Or was it a game of chicken? The first to blink – bam! Armageddon. For what?

She couldn’t understand why so many people didn’t see that, harping on about the Red Peril and world domination, about godless Communism and heartless Russians who’d sent the family dog into space and incinerated her alive. They seemed to care more about the dog than they did about people. If there was a nuclear war there’d be nothing left to dominate, whoever started it. What was the point of that? That frightened her far more than the threat of Russia. She didn’t always sleep at night, dreaming of the nuclear strike, the firestorm, the mushroom cloud, the slow invisible blanket of poison. Sometimes she wondered whether she’d take a suicide pill, like Mary in On the Beach. Was it cyanide? She couldn’t remember.

There was an air of urgency here, in this room. She was breathing excitement, she and all these strangers, linked in this moment. Even the grumpy man next to her was smiling. She’d never felt like this before, part of a vast, unstoppable movement of change. It felt, she thought, like being in love, swept in an avalanche of hope and adventure. Bliss. She listened to the last speaker, a call to action, a march on Aldermaston. Ban the bomb! We will stop it. Yes. Yes.

The meeting came to a close.