‘I was the first man at Spadeadam,’ he said, looking down. ‘It wasn’t Spadeadam then, mind. Wasn’t an RAF base splashed all over the papers for being a waste of millions of pounds. Was just miles and miles of bog. Don’t blame me for it but I took the government land surveyors to see the site. Years back. Proper men from the ministry. Men like your husband, I’ve no doubt. Of course we didn’t know it then but they wanted a rocket site. I can see why they liked it. There was nothing of any value there – just a wasteland. When we surveyed it we were probing with rods that go down forty foot. We didn’t get near the bottom. There was a plane came down there during the war. It’s still there. Be a bloody puzzle for them archaeologists, eh?’

‘Fairfax wrote about RAF Spadeadam?’ I asked, confused.

He began to look agitated, though whether it was with me or himself I couldn’t tell. As he spoke, a shaft of sunlight briefly speared through the glass at my back and he raised a hand in defence as it blanched the pink from his face.

‘He spoke to every bugger,’ said Nixon. ‘I swear, late fifties this area was booming. Workmen from Scotland and Ireland. Men from the RAF. Surveyors, solicitors, inspectors. And everybody had been told to keep their mouths shut. Bet you struggle with the thought of that, eh? But we were under orders – you don’t speak when you’ve been told not to. So there was all this guessing. What were they building, what would it become. There were nigh-on three years of guessing before it came out. Some big shot from London came up and wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. Just came oot with it, like. It was going to be a rocket site. They were going to try and reach the moon.’

I nodded, smiling and waiting for more. I knew the story. The Blue Streak programme had been a failure of colossal proportions. Millions upon millions of pounds went into the doomed attempt to get a Brit into space. They’d have had more luck with a ladder.

‘We’d hear the rockets morning and night,’ said Nixon, looking at the pattern in the wood of his chair. ‘Shook the ground sometimes. But it gave the local lads a good living and it brought people in and Fairfax was always the first in line to buy them a pint and pick their brains and get their stories down in his notebook …’

‘Even outsiders?’ I asked, confused.