But a few weeks later I felt the first cramping pains. I tried to persuade myself it was nothing sinister, but then the headaches came, the faintness, and finally, as I knew it would, the spots of blood that grew heavier and heavier until there was no doubt that my baby was seeping away from me before it had barely had a chance to begin. I was devastated, absolutely inconsolable. Doug tried to keep positive: it was good news that I could at least get pregnant, he said, perhaps next time it would ‘stick’. He held me for hours as I sobbed, but it didn’t help, nothing did.

And then, by the cruellest twist of fate imaginable, there I was, two days later, placed on the maternity ward. I had to witness baby after baby being born into the world, had to continue as though the sight of each one didn’t feel like a knife to my heart, but there was one in particular that completely crushed me. Candice, she was called, a teenage drug addict, whose baby, like the two she’d had before it (or so I’d heard), was whisked away into care by social workers as soon as it was born, the mother stony-faced, unblinking, indifferent it seemed to me then – though I suppose now, looking back, that she wouldn’t have been, not really. It broke my heart, the unfairness of it all. I would have given everything I had to be that baby’s mum.

It was 1980. The use of IVF, or ‘test-tube babies’ as we called them then, had hardly begun; it was considered an almost freakish thing in those days, ‘weird science’. It certainly wasn’t available to someone like me and wouldn’t be for years. Perhaps, eventually, I would have come to terms with it all; perhaps I would have gone on to happily adopt like many millions of couples do. But I was very far from that state of mind back then: it was like a physical, desperate need that was bigger than myself, that I couldn’t control or contain.

That particular morning, the morning of the baby who was taken into care, I fled from the delivery room and shut myself in the first store cupboard I came to. I clasped my hands to my mouth but I couldn’t help it; I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. And then the door opened and to my horror Rose Lawson walked in, absorbed in a list she held in her hand, presumably of supplies she was after. She stood stock-still when she saw me. ‘Beth?’ she said, astonished. ‘What on earth’s the matter? What’s happened?’