The telephone call from Sally Mumford surprised me. Four years after returning to America for good—she had sent farewell postcards from Berkeley, California, and a retreat somewhere in Idaho—she was in England again, with a young husband, a small daughter, and a house in the Norfolk countryside. In a cheerful, almost matronly tone she told me that she had been back for six months, squirrelled away in what sounded suspiciously like a hippie commune left over from the sixties. She had invited David to visit them and suggested, on hearing of his lifetime driving ban, that I come, too, and give him a lift.

“We have a goat, I grow beans and cauliflower and bake our own bread. You’ll be amazed!”

My heart couldn’t decide whether to sink or soar.

The trip, three weekends later, got off to a confused start. David failed to appear as agreed in the lobby of the Heathrow Penta Hotel, delayed by a late flight from Brussels. After waiting for an hour I headed towards the North Circular, wondering if David shared my second thoughts. I was glad to be seeing Sally again, at last with a child of her own and expecting her second—or so she had seemed to mention in an earth mother’s vague afterthought, as if she now intended to be permanently pregnant for the rest of her life.

But the thought of returning to an intact piece of the sixties was as daunting as trying to re-enter the previous weekend’s hangover. Eight years after the decade’s end there were all too many sixties casualties still around, a walking wounded like the veterans of an unpopular war, who had no compunction about nagging at the public conscience. They clung to the fringe life of provincial universities, edited books on the occult or alternative life-styles, or sat entombed in remote offices of the BBC, always ready to waste a lunch hour with talk of programmes on some nineteenth-century herbalist or forgotten friend of the Pre-Raphaelites.

The dream of the sixties lay dead in their eyes, and probably in my own, along with the hopes for a millennial world of peace and harmony—hopes, curiously, that had been propelled aloft by the cruel excitements of the post-Kennedy era and a million drug overdoses. My children had set off for their universities, leaving a vacuum in my life that would never be filled. The house in Shepperton was like a warehouse discarded by the film studios, along with the plywood candy bars and toilet roll of Magic World. The old toys and model aircraft that crammed the cupboards were the props of a long-running family sitcom which the sponsors, despite its high ratings and loyal audience, had decided to drop.