“Don’t freak out,” his voice said. “It’s Jack. Jack Kent.”

Polly was freaking out. She stood shaking in her nightshirt, staring at the answerphone machine as it delivered a voice into her life that she had not heard for more than sixteen years.

She had met him in a roadside restaurant on the A34. She was seventeen and a committed political activist. What is more, she had been a committed political activist in a way that only a seventeen-year-old can be. More committed, more political and more active than any committed political activist had ever been before her, or so she thought. She would have made the secret love child of Leon Trotsky and Margaret Thatcher look like an uncommitted, apolitical layabout.

Polly described herself as a feminist, a socialist and an anarchist, which of course made her an extremely dull conversationalist. Smalltalk becomes wearisome when no two sentences can be negotiated without the words “fascist”, “Thatcher” and “capitalist conspiracy” being crowbarred into them. So when Polly had announced her intention of joining the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common her parents had secretly been extremely pleased.

“It’s only for the summer,” Polly assured them, under the impression that they would be devastated.

“Yes, dear, that’s fine,” her parents said.

“It’s just something I feel I have to do,” Polly continued. “You see, white male eurocentric hegemony has developed a culture of violence, which…”

Polly’s parents’ eyes glazed over as she spoke at length about the socio-political development of her commitment to the anarcho-feminist peace movement. They had very much preferred it when she had been obsessed with Abba.

The problem with idealism in the young is that, like sex, they think that they are the first people to have thought of it. Polly’s parents were lifelong liberals and would have assured anybody who cared to listen that they were very much against the world being destroyed by nuclear war. Yet their daughter bunched them in with Reagan and Ghengis Khan and seemed to feel that it was her duty to convert them from the warmongering ways of all previous generations.

“Did you know that the US defence budget for just one day would feed the whole Third World for a year?” Polly would tell them at breakfast over her fourth bowl of muesli, “and what are we doing about it?”

By “we” Polly’s parents knew that really she meant them and the truth was that, apart from maintaining a standing order to Oxfam, they were not doing very much.

Therefore, although they were certainly going to miss their beloved daughter, it was none the less going to be rather a relief to be able to enjoy breakfast again without feeling that by doing so they were shoring up the Pentagon and murdering African babies.

And of course Mr and Mrs Slade were very proud of their daughter. They admired her moral zeal. Other kids were going off grapepicking in France or working in supermarkets to pay off the hire purchase on their motorbikes, or having it off in Ibiza. Their daughter was saving the planet from complete annihilation. Mr and Mrs Slade felt that if she could do that and complete the prescribed reading for her A-level year then she would have spent a useful summer.

And, of course, one thing they did not have to worry about now was boys. Polly was a headstrong girl and between the ages of fourteen and sixteen had alarmed her parents by bringing any number of extremely off-putting young thugs home for tea. Scrumpy-swilling, long-haired bumpkins who kept falling off their mopeds; snarling rude boys in sixteen-hole Doc Martens; cocky New Romantics who wore far too much make-up – and, for a brief, distressing period, a green-haired lad who called himself Johnny Motherfucker and claimed to have eaten a live pigeon. Mercifully, since Polly had discovered politics there had been fewer of these horrible youths hanging about the place, although Mr and Mrs Slade lived in fear that on some rally or other their daughter would get involved with an anarcho-squatter peacenik punk with a tattooed penis and rings through his scrotum.

There would be no risk of such disasters at Greenham Common. The Greenham Peace Camp was separatist, women only. Men were not allowed to stay overnight. Mr and Mrs Slade thought it all sounded splendid. Summer camping, with plenty of time for reading, in the company of serious and idealistic women, struck them as a very good idea indeed. Of course the first mass evictions and the sight of their daughter on the news being carried away by policemen was rather a shock, but still, better a bobby manhandling her than some dreadful yob who rode a motorbike and washed his jeans in urine.

Jack skulked behind his newspaper and watched the girl as her parents ordered tea and teacakes. He watched as they attempted vainly to spread the lump of icy butter that had been crushed into the centre of the bun by some joyless jobsworth in a stupid white hat, dry teacakes with a bit of butter in the middle being a speciality of the restaurant chain they were in.

When they’d finished the father figure asked for the bill. Jack sighed to himself, his pleasant diversion nearly over. The little ray of sunshine was about to be extinguished. He hoped the girl would be the last to leave so that he would be able to look at her legs as she walked out.

Then the two older people got up, kissed the girl and left without her.

This was a surprise. Until that point Jack’s interest had been entirely passive. He was merely passing a few minutes of his dull day on his dull tour of duty, eyeing up a pretty girl. Now things were different. The girl was alone and devilish thoughts were playing on his mind. Should he say hello? Of course it was madness. He was a US army officer and she was a peace protester, dedicated to the confusion of all that he held dear. What was more, she was at least ten years his junior.

On the other hand, she was gorgeous and it could do no harm to say hello. She would probably tell him to shove it anyway and there would be an end to the matter.

Polly did not notice Jack approach. She was lost in her own thoughts and was feeling rather sad. This had been her parents’ first visit since she had joined the camp and now that they had gone she suddenly felt rather homesick. Strange, she thought, that having spent most of the last five years imagining that all she desired was to leave home she was now discovering that home had its advantages. The devoted love and affection of her parents and a regular supply of clean knickers were two that sprang immediately to mind.

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee, ma’am?” said Jack. “If you can dignify the swill they serve in these places with such a name.”

Polly couldn’t believe it. An American soldier! She had only ever seen them at a distance before, or whizzing by in their cars. The Americans were a different, more glamorous breed, officers and technicians and the like. It was poor little teenage British squaddies who actually guarded the fence and got sung at.

Having overcome her initial shock, Polly asked Jack to sit down. She was certainly not going to let an opportunity like this go by. Here was her chance to convert the enemy. Jack ordered the coffee and asked if she’d eaten. Polly said that although she had, she’d be happy to do so again. In fact she was starving, having only allowed her parents to order a snack lest they think she was not eating properly at the camp.

If Jack had been at all concerned that his impulsive gesture would result in an awkward silence he need not have worried. While ordering the food the girl managed to call him a fascist, a mass murderer and a zombie-brained automaton. She also asked him if he ever thought about what he did, appealed to him to desert the army and enquired whether he knew the temperature at which a human body combusted. From there it was, of course, a short step to a detailed description of the Hiroshima shadows.