“Hold on! Professor Harris is going to be bailing you out of the local clink.” She leaned back and put her feet on the desk, revealing her long legs and the white skin of her thighs through the holes in her black school stockings.

“So?” I asked.

“Instead of the dead, why don’t you try the living?”

*   *   *

In her teasing way, this intelligent schoolgirl had seen through my undergraduate banter and realised that I was still preoccupied by wartime events that now seemed to be reimposing themselves on the calm Cambridgeshire landscape. The students poled their punts on the Cam, talked endlessly in the coffeehouses, and debated the issues of the day at the Union, mimicking the tones of the House of Commons. Meanwhile, on the airfields that ringed the university, American bombers were massing for a final nuclear countdown.

On Sunday afternoons I drove Miriam on my motorcycle to Cambridge airfield, where we watched Richard Sutherland circle the field in his Tiger Moth. Later I took Miriam out to the great American bases at Lakenheath and Mildenhall, and we walked together through the November wind to stare at the nuclear bombers. Once we came across a run-down British air base where World War II Liberators sat in parking bays far from their hangars. As Miriam kept watch, I climbed through the wire and approached one of the unguarded bombers. I swung myself through the ventral hatch into the equipment-cluttered fuselage. As the wind drummed at the bomber’s hull and flexed its heavy wings I imagined myself taking off towards the east.

“Jim, you’re trying awfully hard to get arrested,” Miriam told me when we returned to King’s. “Where is your father now?”

“He’s still in China.”

“You won’t feel at home until he comes to England.”

“He’s stuck in Shanghai for a while. The Communists put him on trial. Luckily, he’d read more Marx and Engels than the peasant judges, so they let him off.”

“There’s a moral there…” Miriam took my arm as we stood by the fire, running her eye along the Surrealist reproductions. “Ernst, Dalí, the Facteur Cheval … they’re your real syllabus. Don’t let Peggy Gardner rubbish them. Hang on to your imagination, even if it is a bit lurid.”

“Miriam…” I had heard this too often at school. “The world is lurid. You’ve never had to rely on your imagination, thank God.”

“Any moment now, he’s going to start tunnelling…”