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It was Thursday, it was ten o’clock in the morning, and it was absolutely pissing it down.

The plum-in-his-mouth twat on the radio had got it wrong again.

“Sunny to start,” he’d said, “becoming cloudy later, and with a chance of light showers towards the end of the day.”

But Kitty Simkins – who was now sheltering as best she could in the doorway to Paddy Muhammed’s corner shop – was soaked right through to her bra and knickers. She’d only popped out to get a paper and a few other bits for old Mrs Williams, so she’d not even bothered with a cardy.

Light showers, my arse, she thought; and since when was ten in the morning the end of the bloody day, anyway?

She had her back turned to the wind and, for want of something better to do while she waited for the rain to let up, she was reading the ads sellotaped in Paddy’s front window.

Most of these were old and faded with age: Mr and Mrs Jenkins were still advertising their Tommy’s old pushbike, and Maisy Butler’s mum was still offering her cleaning services – and quite a bit besides, if you believed what Kitty’s mother said.

Among the newer ones on display, there was a James Fraser advertising a 1961 Ford Thames van, for parts, and the people at number twenty-eight promised a five pounds reward for news of their ginger tom, Tiddles – missing since last Friday lunchtime.

There was one ad though that particularly caught Kitty’s eye, partly because it was on a slightly larger, light-blue card and not a small white one, and also because it was printed and not handwritten.

At the top, it said, “Blue Babes Brigade,” and underneath, in a smaller font, “Open Meeting (to decide action), The King’s Arms, upstairs private bar (accessed through the side entrance on Wakefield Street), 7 pm Wednesday 23rd Feb.”

Now Kitty had no clue as to who or what the Blue Babes Brigade were, but they sounded like a protest-cum-political group of some sort, and if there was one thing that Kitty had lately come to be very keen on, it was protest-cum-political groups, especially ones that had a colour in their name.

In the summer just gone, she’d watched a BBC documentary all about Malcolm X and the 1960’s Black Panther movement in America. She didn’t much go for all their talk about giving Black people guns and that, but she was chock-full of admiration for the campaigns they’d had to set up medical clinics in the ghettos and provide free breakfasts for kids.

The weekend after the documentary, she’d got a book out from the Barlow Road library to learn a bit more. She’d not got much past chapter one though, because it had quite small print and a lot of big words; but she did enjoy all the black-and-white photos in the middle.

And what with all the past year’s news coverage about the Rainbow Warrior, and them trying to stop the whaling ships, she’d recently joined her local Greenpeace group. They didn’t do a lot in any practical way, of course – they were nowhere near the sea, for a start – but they did meet every month in the Methodist church hall, and they were happy for Kitty to do the teas. She’d also volunteered to hand out leaflets about stopping seal hunting and had spent a couple of Saturday mornings rattling a collection tin outside Woolworth’s.

Kitty thus decided that she’d give Wednesday’s Coronation Street a miss and go and see what the Blue Babes Brigade were all about. They sounded like they might be a bit paramilitaryish, so she reckoned she’d dig out something in the Sergeant Pepper’s line to wear.