Caitlin was just pulling up the shutters outside Sarum Discs when I passed through the Old George Mall on my way to school, an unlit rollie stuck to her bottom lip. The little bells at the bottom of her crinkled Indian drawstring-waist skirt tinkled as she moved. ‘Hi Meredith, beautiful day, isn’t it!’

I grunted. Caitlin was one of life’s relentlessly cheerful people; even more so in the past few weeks since she’d had a new boyfriend. It was ‘Sam this, Sam that, Sam thinks … Sam says…’ all bloody day. It sometimes made it a bit hard to work with her on a Saturday, particularly if I was hungover. I usually just turned up the volume on the stereo to drown her out.

‘Oh dear!’ Her voice chimed like the tiny bells. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s my birthday,’ I said. ‘And I hate my parents.’

She rushed over and gave me a tinkly hug, wafting patchouli as usual. ‘Happy birthday! What a bummer you have to go to school. And don’t worry, everyone hates their folks. Come in after and we’ll have a special celebration, Alaric’s got the new Bauhaus record in. I’ll get a cake and … Oh wait, what am I thinking? I can’t. I took a half day. Guess where I’m going?’

My mood plummeted again at the immediate retraction of the offer – even though it wasn’t like this was my only chance to mark the occasion; I was having a night out with friends at the weekend. ‘Oh right. Don’t know. Somewhere with lover boy, I imagine?’

A brief, agonised expression flitted across Caitlin’s face, and I thought, uh-oh, trouble at t’mill?

‘No – Sam’s … busy this weekend. We’ve had a bit of a fight, actually. Try again.’

I wanted to ask if she was going to dance naked in the moonlight at Stonehenge. Caitlin was what my mother called ‘a loosely woven sort, probably knits her own yogurt’. Mum didn’t like hippies.

‘I’m going to Greenham!’

‘Wow, no way. Really?’ I probably sounded sarcastic, but was actually quite impressed. The women’s peace camp had been on Greenham Common for more than two years, and apparently there were tens of thousands of women living there, camping around the airbase perimeter fence. Living! I’d often wondered how they supported themselves financially. Or bathed. Whenever it featured on the news, I was simultaneously curious and appalled at the sight of all the mud, filth and violence. A few months back they’d managed, just by sending out a chain letter, to get thirty thousand women linking hands around the fence. ‘Embrace the Base’, it was called, and the media attention had been huge.