Now she and Barry are engaged, and he’s keen for them to spend all of their spare time together, she still pleads for her Saturday afternoons. Once Dad started inviting him to the football, that got a bit easier. On match days, she can join them in their local pub afterwards, commiserate or celebrate, head on to the pictures or to Barry’s mum and dad’s for tea. She finds it easier to be polite, to talk about Z-Cars and Harold Wilson, and other things she isn’t much interested in, if she has spent a few hours in her cramped, impossible-to-stand-upright-in darkroom, lit by its red light bulb, watching her images develop as they float below the surface of a chemical bath. Feeling her soul’s happiness as she does what she has wanted, above everything, to do since cousin Betty’s wedding day.

20 June 1968

20 June 1968

VERONICA MOON HAS NEVER BEEN to a picket line before.

‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ Dad said, as he waved her off this morning. He had checked the tyres on their shared Ford Anglia, as though the hour and a half from Colchester to Dagenham was some kind of epic journey. Still, it’s probably the longest drive she has ever done on her own.

‘Funny thing to do on your day off,’ had been Barry’s comment, but Barry’s job isn’t his hobby, so of course he wouldn’t understand. Vee hates that he calls photography her ‘hobby’, but she can’t think of a better word. It’s her passion, really, but when she said that to him he laughed and said, no it wasn’t, he was.

And now, here she is. Actually where the action is, for once.

The papers yesterday reported that Ford are losing more than a million pounds a day because of the strike. The Secretary of State is involved. All the way, in the car, Vee has been thinking about what she would find when she arrived. She thought she would be able to see the world changing, and that she could be the one to chronicle it. She’s been drawn back, again and again, to Bill Eppridge’s photograph of the dying Bobby Kennedy. She feels the shock of the event, of course she does: she’s crowded round the papers, the television, with everyone else as the impact has been discussed, all over the world. But when she looks at the image of the man on the floor, the blood, the young man cradling his head, she feels something else, too. Or rather, she imagines – imagines she was the one in the Ambassador Hotel in LA when the bullets were fired. Would she have had the presence of mind to take those photographs? She thinks so. She just needs to get herself to places where history is happening.