I was talked into marrying a man I did not love quite enough and we had a cottage in Dulwich Village with a white picket fence and hollyhocks. Wd divorced after seventeen years of amicable childless marriage jogging along in dullish tracksuits. Last year on the afternoon of the fifth of November, it was wet and already almost dark at three o’clock and when I was shopping in Superdrug, the shining coloured and sparkling Christmas gifts suddenly looked garish and tawdry in the fluorescent light and a male voice was slurping and droning ‘In the bleak midwinter’, and it felt like the end of the world.

Further up the road a council mini-van stopped outside a video shop and the sliding door opened and six or seven boys climbed out; and it was the bleakest thing. I knew that some at least of those boys did not want to be choosing videos on the afternoon of November the fifth and were taking them back to a house where who knows what goes on, and although they were dressed in padded jackets with flashes of neon pink and green, and trainers, their eyes were the eyes of the orphans of Beulah House. I walked on past Woolworth’s which was boxed in with silver scaffolding and I saw him, my husband Colin, pushing a striped double buggy skilfully through the shoppers, and it was as if one of the silver scaffolding poles rammed me in the heart.

It was Peter, our proper little Bobby Buster, our cuddly Jim whom everybody wanted to eat, who did the decent thing and gave Pergy and Betty four lovely grandchildren.

A train is coming up the line like a zipper knitting together the two lines of the track behind it, taking me back through the white and green and purple July to London. As I stare out of the window at the clustering suburbs I see, in the backyard of a warehouse, leaning against a wall, a row of tall coloured carpets exposed to the weather and in the sunshine they have the soft smudgy radiance of assorted chalks or pastels in the hues of hollyhocks and I feel a spasm of joy through my grief for Ruby.

Jaz is going out as I come in. She is wearing tailored shorts, subject to that law of nature which ordains that small broad-shouldered girls with pointy claves and noses must accentuate them with hems above the knee and mushroom-shaped hairstyles, and it strikes me as strange that she believes me to be a minor character in her drama while I think that she is a bit player in mine, nevertheless affection for her engulfs me in the hall.

‘You decided not to stay then. How was your friend? The cats have been fine.’

‘She was fine. Lovely.’

‘You look a bit I don’t know. I think you’ve caught the sun perhaps.’

‘Anyway, thanks and have a nice time wherever you’re going. You all take care, y’hear.’

Bobs’s and Dittany’s Fungi of the Kentish Woods, Fields and Hedgerow is in my bookcase next to their pale-blue privately printed poems Dog’s Mercury. Polysyllabic Dittany Codrington and brisker Bobs Rix. The coloured plates have retained their delicate and vivid colours. Had I been the destroying angel in a cotton frock and wellingtons?

Lex and Gloria’s crime was that they were given a work of art and they treated it as if it was worthless with no reverence for the care that had gone into it, all that precision stippling and the rainbows in the pigtails that ended in two paint brushes of wet red hair in the rain. Ruby dips a plait into the paint water in Art and scatters an arc of tinted droplets over the blue absorbent sugar paper to the annoyance of Miss Fay, Miss Fay in her kilt with its Cairngorm pin and her criss-cross dancing shoes, after the death of Major Morton. In remembering the past one inevitably makes elisions and takes meteorological liberties: drops stitches, embroiders and unpicks. It was true that I had, as I told Jaz, kept a journal for many years but, looking back, I must admit that many of my childish entries read only ‘wrote my diary’. A bowl of purple plans blooms on my table. I was unable to walk past the greengrocer’s sign that said Kentish plums.

Ruby and I lost touch. In half a century we never celebrated her birthday together. Now I have to think about Ruby’s extraordinary present to me, the names of her two children, and how to honour it; and as I sit in the sun in the ravaged garden in the scent of crimson roses watching the cats, I take the pint of Miss Fay’s most important lesson at last: kilt up your skirts, plump up your pumps and on with the dance.