I pulled it out of the waistband of my RECYCLE shorts (yes I’ve had them a long time) and pointed the barrel at the nearest dangle. This caused a bit of a stir and one said, ‘You a loony or something?’ He said that but he zipped his flies and buzzed off. ‘Hands up boys,’ I said. ‘No, don’t touch it, it’ll have to dry in the wind.’

At that moment I heard the opening bars of ‘Strangers in the Night’. It was Inge’s signal to say we had five minutes ready or not. I motioned my doubting John Thomases through the door and broke into a run. I had to get into the mobile burger-bar Inge used as a hide-out. I threw myself in beside her and looked back from between the bread rolls. It was a beautiful explosion. A splendid explosion, much too good for a load of demi-johns. We were alone on the edge of the world, terrorists fighting the good fight for a fairer society. I thought I loved her and then came the pigeons.

She forbade me to telephone her. She said that telephones were for Receptionists, that is, women without status. I said, fine, I’ll write. Wrong, she said. The Postal Service was run by despots who exploited non-union labour. What were we to do? I didn’t want to live in Holland. She didn’t want to live in London. How could we communicate?

Pigeons, she said.

That is how I came to rent the attic floor of the Pimlico Women’s Institute. I don’t feel a great deal about the Women’s Institute either way, they were the first to campaign against aerosols that contain CFCs and they make a mean Victoria sponge but I don’t really care. The point was that their attic faced roughly in the direction of Amsterdam.

I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator. Why didn’t I dump Inge and head for a Singles Bar? The answer is her breasts.

They were not marvellously upright, the kind women wear as epaulettes, as a mark of rank. Neither were they pubescent playboy fantasies. They had done their share of time and begun to submit to gravity’s insistence. The flesh was brown, the aureoles browner still, nipples bead black. My gypsy sisters I called them, though not to her. I had idolised them simply and unequivocally, not as a mother substitute nor a womb trauma, but for themselves. Freud didn’t always get it right. Sometimes a breast is a breast is a breast.

Half a dozen times I picked up the phone. Six times I put it down again. Probably she wouldn’t have answered. She would have had it disconnected but for her mother in Rotterdam. She never did explain how she would know it was her mother and not a Receptionist. How she would know it was a Receptionist and not me. I wanted to talk to her.

The pigeons, Adam, Eve and Kissmequick, couldn’t manage Holland. Eve got as far as Folkestone. Adam dropped out and went to live in Trafalgar Square, another victory to Nelson. Kissmequick was scared of heights, a drawback for a bird, but the WI took him in as their mascot and rechristened him Boadicea. If he has not died yet he is still living. I don’t know what happened to Inge’s birds. They never came to me.