There was an exuberant jazz/disco band called the Daisy Chain. There was a large white cake in the shape of the Sydney Opera House. There was Sam’s grandmother, twinkling and shameless at ninety-two, using the phrase my former lovers. Men round her like bees, even now.

Nikki and Sam wore identical sleeveless white dresses, lace over the shoulders, satin panels on the bust, stomach and hips, then lace again below the knee. They each carried a bouquet of white roses. Sam was big but beautiful. Thick blonde hair. Femme. Which was doubtless a word one didn’t say these days. Not a million miles from the way her friend Lucy looked all those years ago, if you swapped the dress for stone-washed OshKosh dungarees and removed the make-up.

Something uncomfortable about that thought.

The light far out. It was rising and growing brighter. It had to be a star. Amazing to think they were up there all the time, invisible in sunlight. Which was doubtless a metaphor for something, though she couldn’t say precisely what.

Nikki was not the easiest of teenagers… She had dried up in the middle of her speech, a sudden blankness, heart drumming. Who were all these people? Nikki leant over and squeezed her hand. Palpable unease in the marquee. Then a dog barked very loudly and very nearby and she jumped and everyone laughed and the words came flowing back.

Ryeland Road, The Women’s Republic of. That was the last time she’d smoked a rollie. Carob cake and joss sticks, ‘Sweet Dreams are Made of This’ and a pink-and-blue Guatemalan throw covering the stained sofa with the sticking-out spring at the far end. Twenty-four, a baby, pretty much. They thought they could change the world. Upper Heyford. The South African Embassy. Facing off against the police in Wapping. Lucy’s mum being hit in the head by a brick thrown by a cack-handed anarchist. Six hours in casualty, playing snap with a policeman who’d broken two fingers in the door of his own van. Like Christmas in the trenches. What did happen to the separatist lesbians? she wondered. You never heard about them these days. Perhaps they roamed free over some sapphic Serengeti set aside in perpetuity by a mannish Norfolk baroness. And that night they were not parted.

Her own mother was conveniently deceased. That was one blessing. If women didn’t go out to work there wouldn’t be any unemployment. A life spent polishing the boot standing on her own neck. Christ alone knew what she would have made of today. That constant bitterness. Watching your daughter enjoy the freedoms you had denied yourself on principles which had become antique. Unwilling to admit that the key to the shackles had lain in the bottom of your pocket all along.

You don’t want to get above yourself, young lady. Though getting above yourself was surely the point of education.

Would they become pariahs when the pendulum swung back, Nikki and Sam? A squirm of panic on their behalf. Though it was never technically illegal, was it? Only counted if a cock was inserted. Women do not do such things. An apocryphal story, no doubt. But if you were excluded from wills, if you were barred from hospital bedsides, if you were separated from your children… The atmosphere of disgust. How could you breathe it every day without being poisoned?