Sensory memory is a very strange thing. A hot summer’s day, the scent of a unnamed flower and suddenly you are plunged back, not just to a time and place but to a very specific incident. In an instant you are somewhere else.  This happened to me today, and the somewhere else was a leafy square in Kensington. The year is 1970.

I was a drama student at one of London’s most famous drama schools. There were ten of us in my term, one of whom I was visiting that day in her bedsit (sorry, now called studio) flat. Patricia (not her real name) was only three years older than me but in experience, sophistication and worldly knowledge she was light-years ahead. She took me under her wing, for which I was not particularly grateful. Patrica was a Marianne Faithful type beauty. Waif-like, wistful, sensitive. She had cascades of auburn curls, like a girl in a pre-raphaelite painting. Patricia made no secret of the fact that she was bi-sexual, but there was never any romantic feeling between us. I was wildly in love with a succession of fellow, male, drama students throughout our friendship.

That hot, cloudless, still afternoon I arrived at her flat for tea to find her in the middle of an argument with her  ex-girlfriend. I’ll call her Jaime. Jaime was a tough-talking, wiry, boyish mixed-race girl, but even I, inexperienced though I was, could see that she was by far the more vulnerable of the two. It transpired that Patricia had demanded that Jaime return a certain pair of purple velvet hotpants that Patricia had lent to her. Jaime was holding them firmly to her chest and refusing to return them, insisting that they had been a gift. Suddenly, she turned to me and said, ‘I don’t want them but I’m not giving them back to you. I’m giving them to Hilary!’ She handed them to me. I reached out  to take them but not quickly enough because Patricia snatched them away from me. ‘No you’re not! I’m giving them to Hilary!’ she shouted. Once more the hotpants were proffered to me and once more they were snatched away. Patricia made another grab for them, Jaime clung on like a limpet. I could see my lovely hotpants in danger of being torn in two like the baby in the Old Testament wisdom of Solomon story. Brave as a lion (I really lusted after those hotpants) I nipped forward and grabbed them. After that it all  rather degenerated into a lot of slapping, hair-pulling and name calling. I remember shouting to Patricia, ‘shall I call the police?’ They both stopped fighting long enough to look at me with derision. ‘You don’t think the cops are going to come out to a fight between two lesbians do you?’ After that they didn’t seem to want to continue. Jaime slammed out of the room and Patricia put the kettle on. But I had my hotpants!