‘Good evening, and welcome,’ she begins. Marcus had suggested jokingly that she had better not say ‘ladies and gentlemen’ but actually, he was right. ‘We are here, at the opening of this exhibition of the work of Veronica Moon, to celebrate the contribution that she made to second wave feminism in the UK. She recorded it, yes, but she shaped it, by dint of being the success that she was.’

She raises her head and looks around. Vee is standing at the back of the crowd. No one has seen her. She gives Erica the smallest of smiles, the slightest of nods, and Erica wishes she still had a living mother. Breathe, Erica. She looks at her notes.

‘The feminist movement in this country has had many stars, many suns, many shining lights. But only one moon.’ There’s a hum of laughter around the space. Erica tries to make her voice come from her diaphragm, now, not the top of her chest. ‘I’m not going to say a lot about the work, because it speaks for itself. But I will talk about the moon.’ She wants to look at Vee, but knows that, if she does, everyone will turn to see where she is looking, and Vee won’t want that. So she shifts her gaze to the portrait of Leonie, just visible over the heads to the right. Oh, for an eighth of that woman’s confidence, a tenth of her ability to speak the truth as she saw it.

‘The moon is always with us, although sometimes it is hidden by the light or the shadows of other bodies. The moon shapes the tides and so shapes our experience of the world. The moon is connected, intimately, to the experience of women everywhere.’ This had looked cleverer on paper; the audience looks, if not bored, tolerant at best. Well, Erica is better on paper. That’s why she’s an academic, and now a curator. She keeps. She holds.

She looks back at her notes. She’s written, ‘re-centring’. She can certainly speak to that. She puts a hand to her belly and breathes.

‘When I began this project, it was because I found treasure in my mother’s attic. Leonie Barratt’s box of clippings and mementos of Veronica Moon’s work. Even though this was not, strictly, my specialism, and even though historians must always be wary of the pull of the personal, I could not stop thinking about Veronica Moon, about Leonie Barratt, about all of the other women in the photographs. They deserve to be seen. And heard.

‘We have work to do, in this world, in making sure women’s voices are heard. One look at the news, or half an hour of TV, remind us that women are still talked over the top of, sidelined, ignored, and oppressed.