I’d spent months living as somebody else and I’d only just got back into the habit of wearing my own skin. I can’t go into it all now, not without getting into more bother than I’ll get into for telling you about this, but for the previous eight months I’d gotten damn good at being a subversive. I did the lot. Went full punk. All spit and snot and imitation leather. Pierced my nose with a safety pin and grew my armpit hair long enough to braid it. Smoked the skunk and downed the scrumpy and took tabs of LSD from the tongues of colourful people with names like Bilbo and Dewdrop and Worm. I was a tapeworm deep in the gut of the anarchist movement; slithering through the underbelly of the subversives. My superiors thought of them as ‘the enemy’, which gives you an idea just who was in charge at that time. We were looking for rabble-rousing Soviet sympathizers. What we found were nice suburban mums who felt reasonably strongly that storing America’s nuclear weapons in Berkshire might not be a great idea. Hippies, mostly. Feminists. Bohemians and bra burners and some goodhearted housewives who brought flasks and picnic baskets and hoped that bringing about lasting change could be achieved without hurting anybody’s feelings. A few communists, of course, but communist in that particularly British way where it’s more about berets and Che Guevara T-shirts than any passionate desire to smash the system. I went deep cover on that one. Combat trousers, lace-up military boots, stinking fishtail parka and a buzz-cut with a feathery bit at the back of my neck. I blended in like a grain of salt in a sugar bowl and I’d wager a pound to a penny that there are plenty of women of a certain age who don’t know that Gwendoline, one of the movement’s senior figures, was reporting back to the security services the entire time we clung to the chain-link fence outside the military base and sang our jolly protest songs.

I sometimes wish I’d gone full native. If I’d really committed to CND and the Peace Convoy I think we could have actually achieved nuclear disarmament and got rid of Thatcher by the mid-eighties. Unfortunately the rest of the movement were too nice by half. Wishy-washy and well-intentioned but if they put a gun to your head you’d know they had no intention of pulling the trigger. If they’d been handed power they wouldn’t have known what to do with it. So I did the job I was there to do, spying on people I liked and reporting back to bastards I couldn’t stand. That’s the eighties for you.