On the Strand policemen with whistles were attempting to negotiate a safe passage for pedestrians at the traffic lights. Howard could hear rather than see the shuddering bulk of buses and taxis panting out clouds of diesel, and feel their hot breath on his legs as he crossed in a shuffling mass to the other side.
At Charing Cross a great press of people was waiting in the concourse, weary office workers and Christmas shoppers laden with carrier bags. A group of half a dozen schoolgirls in uniform snaked past arm in arm, shrieking noisily, confident in their little gang. Swirls of ghostly mist had penetrated in here too, through the open archways, giving it a curious atmosphere of being both inside and outside.
He was elated to discover that the 5:18 to Hayes was still on the platform, its departure delayed, congratulating himself on having made the right decision to go back for the flowers and imagining his disgruntlement if he had left them behind for nothing. Sometimes the cards just fell right.
Drawn along with the curious urgency that makes people speed up as they approach a train, Howard hurried through the barrier. A flurry of movement, whistles and the slamming of doors suggested that departure might be imminent, so he jumped on one of the rear carriages and found a space to stand between the seats.
He laid the newspaper parcel of flowers gently in the overhead luggage rack and unwound the handkerchief from his face, grimacing at the sooty particles trapped in its fibers. The train gave a lurch and a tug. Howard’s fellow passengers exchanged smiles of relief and raised eyebrows. At last. He patted his pocket, feeling the hard shape of the velvet box, and imagined Jean’s look of recognition and pleasure when she opened it. He would not be so very late, after all.
Afterword
The Lewisham train crash of 1957, described in the opening chapter, was at the time the second-worst peacetime rail disaster in British history. （The Harrow and Wealdstone crash five years earlier being the worst.）
A total of 90 people lost their lives and 173 were injured. The driver of the Ramsgate steam locomotive, which had not stopped at the danger signal and collided with the stationary Hayes train, was prosecuted for manslaughter but acquitted after two trials, the original jury having failed to reach a verdict.
In a landmark case—Chadwick v. British Railways Board, 1967—which became a precedent for thirty years, the British Railways Board was successfully sued by the widow of a member of the public who had assisted at the scene for damage caused by “nervous shock.” Henry Chadwick, who had climbed inside the crippled carriages to help the injured and dying, was unable to work again until his death （from unrelated causes） in 1962.
An unduly observant reader might notice that the account of the crash appears in the （fictional） North Kent Echo on Friday, December 6, 1957, thereby knocking Jean’s virgin birth story off the front page.
The seed for this book came from an interview broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour toward the end of the last millennium with journalist Audrey Whiting. The Sunday Pictorial, for whom she worked in 1955, ran a competition to find a virgin mother, prompted by research by Dr. Helen Spurway, a geneticist at the University of London.
Dr. Spurway had observed that a species of fish （Lebistes reticulatus） was capable of spontaneously producing female progeny. It had also proved possible to obtain parthenogenetic development in rabbits by freezing the fallopian tubes. This led to speculation about whether or not spontaneous parthenogenesis might be provable in other mammals—most notably the human female.
The competition was launched, inviting women to present themselves for research. Of the nineteen who came forward, all were gradually ruled out for various reasons—including confusion as to what virginity actually involved—apart from a Mrs. Emmimarie Jones, who had been bedridden in a German hospital at the time of “conception.” She and her daughter, Monica, were subjected to various blood and serological tests, which seemed to validate her claim, but the final skin graft test eventually failed in both directions.
Details of the tests and their outcomes were reported in The Lancet, Vol. 267, issue 6931, June 30, 1956, pp. 1071–2 and Vol. 268, issue 6934, July 21, 1956, pp. 147–8. Even the doctors running these tests disagreed as to their significance. Their correspondence in The Lancet makes interesting reading.
Having caught the tail end of this interview on the radio, I sensed its potential as the basis of a novel but at the time I was writing （in my view, at least） humorous fiction, and this story didn’t lend itself to light comedy. I therefore left it hanging at the back of my mind for well over a decade, like a piece of flypaper, to see if anything stuck to it.