‘Pink is only a colour.’ It’s a good strong colour, too, this one, throaty and vivid against the green-black of trees, grey of the sky. ‘This would look good. On camera.’ She remembers a woman in a photograph she took, the first time she came here. She wore yellow dungarees; how bright and sharp she seemed, even against the tie-dye and boldness of the others around her. It was one of the few times Vee thought seriously about switching to colour photography. She had begun her career in the days when black and white was stock-in-trade; even when colour photography started to be seen more widely, from the early eighties, she wasn’t interested. Instinctively, she knew that the way she had learned to work was the best way for her, and she could do pretty much anything with natural light. But she would have liked to have captured the yellow of those dungarees.

‘Some feminists don’t like pink,’ Erica says, pulling up her hood.

‘I think you’ll find that what feminists don’t like is the infantilisation of women,’ Vee replies. She wonders if the yellow sou’wester-style coat and cream knitted hat that Tom is wearing were chosen deliberately because they were not blue.

Vee strolls the perimeter of the garden under her pink shelter. It’s chilly, it’s bleak, she’s spent hours in a car, and yet today she is – not unhappy. Erica, pushing the pushchair now, joins her.

‘What was it like? The first time you came?’

This is a part of her past that Vee has always remembered. ‘The gates were huge, there were trucks going in and out all the time, a lot of soldiers and’ – she pauses, feeling the backwards pull of remembered happiness – ‘I liked the feeling of it. A lot of the women’s movement at the time was getting very discursive. There was still activism but there was a lot of debate. And I suppose that was important, but it was good to come here and see purpose and drive. It reminded me of the early days.’

‘And you were here at the beginning. That photograph.’ Erica pauses, and Vee knows the one she means; if Leonie hadn’t died the way she did, it probably would have defined her. ‘There’s just something about it. It’s iconic.’

‘I only pointed the lens in what seemed the most relevant direction. History made the story, afterwards.’

18 October 1981

18 October 1981

Leonie