The Cambridge of old, of Rutherford, Keynes, Ryle, and Crick, had long since departed to the American universities that had superseded it, leaving behind a TV academia with its eyes on its script-consultancy fees. Meanwhile, the more real world that I had first glimpsed on my motorcycle rides still existed. Away from the tourist cameras and the posing dons presided the enduring realities of American power. Beyond the hedges and the chain-mail fences the nuclear bombers stood at the ends of their runways, guarantors of the civilised order upon which the university so preened itself.

Hearing the sound of American engines, I turned off the road near Mildenhall as a huge bomber swept over the trees. A car passed me, carrying an off-duty American airman and his family. They wore civilian clothes when they ventured from their bases, like the keepers at a nature reserve maintaining a discreet watch on their unpredictable charges. I parked in a narrow lane and stared through the perimeter fence at the worn concrete beside the nuclear weapons silos. The unsung and unremembered cement was more venerable than all the primped and polished stone of the university. The runways were aisles that led to a more meaningful world, gateways of memory and promise.

*   *   *

“Jim! You haven’t changed … you should have warned me!”

“Sally…? Dear, you’ve—”

“I’ve changed. My God, yes!”

She embraced me fiercely, arms strengthened by tethering goat, child, and husband. Her hair was cut short, swept back to reveal a plump, cheerful face that might have belonged to Sally’s sensible younger sister, married to a Philadelphia surgeon. Her skin gave off a rainbow of scents that set my mind reeling back to the first years of marriage—baby lotion, disinfectant, kitchen herbs, a recently potted geranium, warm breasts and armpits, topped up with a dab of best perfume brought out to greet the occasion.

I put down my presents and surveyed her fondly, amazed by the sight of this robust Anglo-American housewife. She was only three months pregnant, but seemed to have doubled her weight, a handsome, strong-legged woman with a warm flush of a complexion.

Surrounded by this pleasant farmhouse overlooking the tidal mud flats of the river, I had the feeling that I had strayed into another film set. A few minutes earlier, driving up the rutted farm track towards an old metal barn, I had expected to find an encampment of tepees, with a troupe of former account executives and record industry dropouts picking the fleas from their caftans as they mumbled mantras and smoked their pot. But the farmhouse, with its Chinese carpets and deep sofas, seemed more like a dream of the eighties. Even its coffee table was stocked with genuine coffee-table books and not with highbrow biographies. Its comfortably lived-in air and children’s toys heaped in a corner might have starred as the backdrop to a wholemeal bread commercial.