I was so shaken up afterwards that I couldn’t sleep at all last night, or tonight. Which, as I say, turned out to be a good thing, because that’s why I ended up outside with the indigo hamlets. They do still soothe me, you know, despite everything. I think I had a good idea, back then. I knew what I was going to do even before I returned from maternity leave. That’s when the idea came to me, you know, struggling to breastfeed at four in the morning. I was raw and bleeding, clasping my hand over my mouth so the sound of my crying wouldn’t wake my husband. He would get so angry when woken. But the doctors told me I had to keep trying – we were made to feel hauntingly inadequate if we didn’t breastfeed, back then. One of so many hauntings that I would have to deal with. So I kept trying, and when I couldn’t try any more because the pain was so extreme, I knew what I had to do.

What I’m saying is, it was never intended to be a political statement. It was the physical reality of the situation I was thinking about, at first. The rest came later. Progress doesn’t come about through protest groups and the slow, grinding change of democratic legislation. It comes from invention. Technology. Medicine. Invention is how you change things. I knew that then, and I still know it now. I’m not ashamed of being a scientist. I am very proud of it.

And yet, here I am.

Astonishing, how few people have tried to track me down. I’m not really all that well hidden, you know. Have none of you been wondering why I disappeared?

Perhaps no one even noticed. I suspect I’ve not been missed as much as I like to imagine. I am sorry I shut Holly out the way that I did – I miss her. But she has her family, and they were always more important to her than I was.

I remember that they asked me, when I got back to work after giving birth, if I missed being at home. If I missed it terribly, they said. It was shocking, I suppose, for a woman to choose to work rather than stay at home with her new baby. Thank God they never thought to ask me about breastfeeding – they’d have been horrified that I stopped so soon. Formula was my lifeline, as well as my new strand of research.

How does it feel, they kept insisting, to be a mother?

I looked at them with feigned confusion on my face. What do you mean? I said. I’m a scientist.

I wish I’d said it differently now though, looking back with hindsight, at 4 a.m. of another night’s dawn, talking to a computer in an isolated lighthouse on the edge of the North Sea.