‘That’s where we kids used to hang about. It had a shelter, you see – so it was the only place to get out of the rain, if you didn’t fancy the youth club. And the only drug we ever saw in that bus shelter was the nub end of a Woodbine.’

‘I bet your dad had a Ford Anglia, too,’ said Fry.

Headon glowered at her. ‘No, he had a brand-new Mark II Cortina. But it was about more than that, a lot more. And not all of it was good. Not everything about the sixties was swinging.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Cooper.

‘It’s hard to explain if you didn’t experience it. But some of us who were youngsters at the time grew up with the idea that we could die at any moment. Blown to bits in a fireball and a mushroom cloud. We genuinely believed that World War Three could start at any time. It was worst around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, of course, a few years earlier. That was when –’

‘Yes, I did study a bit of Modern History at school. The Cold War, and all that.’

‘History? Well, I suppose it is history, now. No, the sixties were the Berlin Wall, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Six-Day War in the Middle East. The Soviet Union and China were both testing atomic bombs. And everyone talked about the four-minute warning we’d get of a nuclear attack. At school, we didn’t discuss whether there’d be a nuclear war but what we’d do in those last four minutes.’

Fry laughed. ‘Among schoolboys? I bet there was a reasonable consensus.’

‘So what happened to the ROC when the cuts happened?’ insisted Cooper.

‘About half the Derbyshire posts were closed. We lost Baslow, Chinley, Hope, and several others. The strength was reduced by fifty per cent in 1968, each post was limited to a maximum of ten observers.’

Cooper nodded. When you came to think about the events of the 1960s, the world must have seemed a pretty unstable place. Student revolutionaries on the streets. Civil rights, women’s lib. A time when anything seemed possible. And, if you’d asked his mother at the time, the biggest sign that the world was coming to an end would have been the introduction of decimal coins, those strange new ten-pence pieces that were making their way into her purse.

‘Yes, it was a very weird time,’ said Headon. ‘All around us, people spent their time talking about pop music and fashion, as if they were the only things that were important. But we knew the apocalypse was a real possibility. You know the nuclear strategy of the super powers was called MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction? It was commonplace to fear the end of the world. Now no one knows what an air-raid siren sounds like, or a fallout warning. I’ve even heard sirens going off by mistake, and no one takes a blind bit of notice.’