In 1978, age 27, I was recovering from a serious illness and had returned to my home town in Hertfordshire to live with my parents for six months. While there I made phone contact with a local co-counselling group that was advertising in a local library. The contact person told me she was withdrawing from the group, and passed me on to someone else, but not before I'd been smitten by her voice. I couldn't get it out of my head for months.
Some while later, I forget how long, a year-and-a-half perhaps, I met a young girl while doing an English A level class at the local college. I'll call her Angela here. We became friends and used to meet in the college refectory after classes to discuss the work we had been set. By that time I was living in a flat in town. At some point during that year I moved out of the flat and into a larger one. The next time I met Angela she told me that she, too, had moved. She had left her family home and, as it turned out, moved into my old flat. She hadn't previously known where I lived.
The landlady of my new house share asked me to interview a couple of people for a spare room.
