She watched me as I undressed her, curious to see how I would discover her body, beckoning me towards her with a ready smile. When I stroked her clitoris she lay back with her legs wide, her face between the soft toys. She took my fingers and moved them to her anus, rhythmically pumping her rectum like a soft accordion.

“Don’t bother to fuck me. Just bugger me.”

She knelt on the carpet, her chest and shoulders across the cushions. Spitting on her fingers, she pushed the saliva into her anus with one hand, testing my penis with the other. I hesitated to enter her, nervous of tearing her scarred anus, but she pressed my penis into her, adding more spit between the gasps of pain. When I was fully inside her she at last relaxed, and her rectum was as soft as the vagina of a child-bearing woman. She buried her face among the teddy bears and brought her wrists behind her back, inviting me to force them to her shoulder blades. I moved carefully, trying to control her prolapsing rectum, gently forcing her arms as she wanted, picking the hairs from her mouth as she shouted to me, an eager, desperate child.

“Bugger me, Daddy! Beat me! Pixie wants to be buggered!”

*   *   *

From that moment Sally Mumford became my guide to a new world. At the start she seemed keen to make a new life for us all in Shepperton, to be the wife and mother we had left among the Spanish cypresses. Part big sister and part friendly witch, and capable in the children’s eyes of unlimited amazements, Sally brought all her good cheer and wayward flair to our suburban retreat. I tried to calm and steady her, as she relived her childhood like an exciting roller-coaster ride. Despite playing the role of her father, I felt surprisingly dependent on her and hoped that I could give her the happy childhood that she was helping to give to my own children.

At the same time I knew that I could learn so much from her. Sally was a true child of the 1960s, and my guide to the secret logic that I saw unfolding. After years of domesticity in my marooned suburb by the Thames I had stepped into the middle of a decade that had started without me. I had woken from a dream of the Second World War into an England that seemed like the aftermath of the Third.