The picket-line women are in flat shoes and mini-dresses, arms bare to the sun, tiny and bright against the metal gates, the grimy brick of the factory building glowering over them. Vee wishes she hadn’t dressed the way she always does for work. Her knee-length skirt is sticky with static against her stockings. Her jacket, so handy with the pockets for film cases and spare lenses, is weighing her down, and she can’t take it off because she knows she has sweated through the blouse beneath it. She feels old-fashioned, out of touch. Why doesn’t she have a mini-dress? Why is she sleeping in rollers? And why on earth are hair and clothes what she is thinking of now?

Maybe this is what the world changing looks like. It’s not as dramatic as what happened in Grosvenor Square or the protests in Paris, but it could still be part of a change. As her dad says, nothing lasts forever.

She takes a closer look at the banners. They are painted or coloured in, made with careful attention to detail, letters equal height and the spacing of the wording considered. ‘No Deal Till You Recognise Our Skill’ reads one banner. ‘Unequal Pay Is Sex Discrimination’, reads another. ‘We Want Sexual Equality’ says a third. These women are organised and they mean what they say. Vee inhales and straightens her spine. This is change, all right. She needs to teach herself to see it.

Behind the banners, women chatter and laugh. Someone is handing round sandwiches. Well, there isn’t really any reason why something like this shouldn’t feel like a picnic. However serious it is.

She looks around, for a leader to introduce herself to. There’s no one obviously in charge; but then she recognises one of the women from the press coverage.

‘Hello,’ Vee says, ‘I’m Veronica Moon. I wonder if you’d mind if I took some photographs? Of the picket line?’

‘Be our guest,’ the woman says, ‘it’s nice of you to ask. The blokes don’t. Where you from?’

Vee takes the lens cap off the Nikon F1 that she still can’t believe is hers, although technically, it isn’t, until she’s finished paying Dad back for it, out of her wages. ‘Colchester. The Echo. But I’m not here officially. It’s my day off. I came just to see, really.’

The woman nods. ‘There’s been a few of those. Especially women. Do you get paid the same as the blokes?’