‘We’ll see,’ she said. She turned to Ruby, smiled warmly, and held out her hand. ‘I’m Eth Leckwith,’ she said with the easy grace of a visiting duchess.

‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Ruby Carter.’

‘Are you a student, too, Ruby?’

‘No, I’m a maid at Chimbleigh, a big country house.’ Ruby looked a bit ashamed as she made this confession. ‘It’s five miles out of town, but I can usually borrow a bike.’

‘Fancy that!’ said Ethel. ‘When I was your age, I was a maid at a country house in Wales.’

Ruby was amazed. ‘You, a housemaid? And now you’re a Member of Parliament!’

‘That’s what democracy means.’

Lloyd said: ‘Ruby and I organized today’s meeting together.’

His mother said: ‘And how is it going?’

‘Sold out. In fact, we had to move to a bigger hall.’

‘I told you it would work.’

The meeting had been Ethel’s idea. Ruby Carter and many others in the Labour Party had wanted to mount a protest demonstration, marching through the town. Lloyd had agreed at first. ‘Fascism must be publicly opposed at every opportunity,’ he had said.

Ethel had counselled otherwise. ‘If we march and shout slogans, we look just like them,’ she had said. ‘Show that we’re different. Hold a quiet, intelligent meeting to discuss the reality of Fascism.’ Lloyd had been dubious. ‘I’ll come and speak, if you like,’ she had said.

Lloyd had put that to the Cambridge party. There had been a lively discussion, with Ruby leading the opposition to Ethel’s plan; but in the end the prospect of having an MP and famous feminist to speak had clinched it.

Lloyd was still not sure that it had been the right decision. He recalled Maud von Ulrich in Berlin saying: ‘We must not meet violence with violence.’ That had been the policy of the German Social Democratic Party. For the von Ulrich family, and for Germany, the policy had been a catastrophe.

They walked out through the yellow-brick Romanesque arches of the station and hurried along leafy Station Road, a street of smug middle-class houses made of the same yellow brick. Ethel put her arm through Lloyd’s. ‘How’s my little undergraduate, then?’ she said.

He smiled at the word ‘little’. He was four inches taller than her, and muscular because of his training with the university boxing team: he could have picked her up with one hand. She was bursting with pride, he knew. Few things in life had pleased her as much as his coming to this place. That was probably why she wanted to buy him suits.

‘I love it here, you know that,’ he said. ‘I’ll love it more when it’s full of working-class boys.’

‘And girls,’ Ruby put in.

They turned into Hills Road, the main thoroughfare leading to the town centre. Since the coming of the railway, the town had expanded south towards the station, and churches had been built along Hills Road to serve the new suburb. Their destination was a Baptist chapel whose left-wing pastor had agreed to loan it free of charge.