When I think about it now I wonder why it was all right for me to go into the selling-out shops and buy cigarettes but all wrong for me to get extra sweets from a couple of women who were happy together, even if one of them wore a balaclava all the time.

A few months later we were having our afternoon walk when I said something about how nobody had cuddled us when we were little. I said ‘us’, not ‘you’. She held my hand. She had never done that before; mainly she walked behind shooting her sentences.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.

‘My advice is this. When you are young and you read something that you very much dislike, put it aside and read it again three years later. And if you still dislike it, read it again in a further three years. And when you are no longer young – when you are fifty, as am I – read the thing again that you disliked most of all.’

Yes, we are alike. The optimism, the self-reliance. The ease we both have in our bodies. I used to wonder why I have always felt at ease in my body and liked my body. I look at her and it seems to be an inheritance.

I was confused about sex and sexuality, and upset about the straightforward practical problems of where to live, what to eat, and how to do my A levels. I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because

All she ever wanted was for everyone to go away. And when I did she never forgave me.

And then we had an argument about Dorothea Brook in Middlemarch, and the revolting Rosamund, whom all the men prefer, presumably because she hasn’t become what women become . . .

‘Of course it’s not from Ann!’ I opened it – the trouble is that the Baltic lovelies all began with things like ‘Can’t believe it’s you . . .’ and so did this.