There’s a sign at the gate of the Peace Garden, saying that it is on the site of the first of the women’s protest camps. So this must have been where Vee took the first photographs. And the gates to the air base, the fences that women chained themselves to, were here. But you wouldn’t know it, now. The boundaries and the buildings have been replaced by a Land Rover garage and an auction house. There are signposts to other businesses, selling cars and kitchens. It’s as soulless as any other business park. It’s hard to believe that so much emotion had its home here, for so long: such struggle, such fear and hope and determination. Now it’s a blank.

It seems impossible, too, that it is so long since she came here for the first time. Thirty-seven years. But of course, that’s what all old people think. Is it wrong of Vee to envy Leonie her death, just for a second? To die so suddenly and so young seems like a gift. She has achieved almost nothing in the years since Leonie died. She may as well have gone then, too. (Is that the sort of thought that only a diseased brain would have?)

Towards the bottom of the sign are the words: ‘. . . We hope the time you spend here will refresh your spirit.’ Vee hopes so too. It feels like a lot to ask.

Erica is trailing behind with the pushchair, fussing over Tom with chatter and toys. Vee pushes the gate open, walks down a small scrubby path, and finds herself in a circle of half a dozen standing stones and a central sculpture which is made up of women-forms, flexing and curving like flames. Further on is a fountain, although it’s not working: it’s a stone spiral, and the words ‘You can’t kill the spirit’ are carved into it. And then there’s the memorial to Helen Wyn Thomas, who was killed on the site when she was run over a military vehicle during a protest. That was 1989. Vee remembers reading about it. She was away at the time, in Canada, still trying to fall in love with landscape photography. She had felt a long way away: she missed her sisters, her country, Leonie. She’d looked at the photographs in the days-old newspaper that had found its way to her Quebec hotel, and thought about how much better they could be, if the photographer had thought more about the framing of the shot. There had been too much sky, not enough detail of the shocked, grieving faces. The camera should not be shy of showing the detail of hard things.

The memorial is part of a flowerbed, which even on this drab March day has enough plants, in enough shades of green, to make the place feel alive and at least partly protected from the world without.