I start with myself at the age of seventeen, trundling over the Runcorn railway bridge towards Liverpool through the rain of a dirty winter's night in the early nineteen twenties. Street lamps shone in the deserted little township below the viaduct. There was a gleam of reflected light on the sweep of the sand flats, left bare by the receding tide. Suddenly, the gates of Hell opened. Furnaces, pinpoints of fierce flame, chimneys belching visible fumes, the fearful smell of rotten eggs. All my London veneer, my public school culture, the sophistication of my childhood in Cairo, all of it vanished, and I found myself gulping with excitement. ‘This is real … this is real’.

Where on earth that excitement had its origins, goodness only knows. I had dabbled in girls' club work (a romantic Minnehaha sort of organisation called the Camp Fire Girls, imported from America), but only in Ealing where poverty and injustice—‘reality’—were hard to come by. So why this sudden upsurge of passion about Liverpool being ‘real’?