In 1935 I went up to St Hughs in early October to read Mathematics on an education grant. I had always wanted to be a teacher. How Peter coped with Peggy’s absence and the fact that she and Arthur were both together in London, I don’t know. She did visit him. That autumn there was a local election in Oxford and, as a loyal member of the Labour Party, I was helping out in one of the committee rooms – folding leaflets. Peter and Peggy swept in looking incredibly glamorous – much of a height it seemed – Peter with a shock of blue-black hair – Peggy a mass of glowing red hair piled high. They glanced round the room at us lesser mortals, asked if we were all right – and swept out again. I was dazzled.

One afternoon when I was drinking coffee in the Labour Club coffee rooms someone dashed in saying “Peter Hewett has had an accident on his bike!”, but as I was not then aware of which Peter was which, I was not unduly worried.

It seemed to me that as I had attended an all girls’ school and known mainly younger boys, my brothers’ friends, I ought to find out what made men tick. The best way to do this, I thought, would be to accept any invitation to tea I was offered – after all, tea is a relatively safe meal and one can escape early. So, nearly every day I took tea with a male student. If he turned out to be as neurotic or boring as I suspected, I thanked him but must be back at St Hughs almost at once. If, rarely, he proved able to talk about something other than himself, I might stay a little longer, but we had to be back in college by 7 pm when the doors were shut – and anyway I needed to be in college for dinner. In those days I hadn’t really learnt to talk much, but was a very good listener.

One student I found interesting was Andrew Filson. He had been a member of the University Communist Party but had defected and felt free to tell me a great deal about it, in particular about the underground members who kept their membership very secret. This got back to Peter and his comrades. I had been an object of suspicion from the first as my father had been a leading light in a conference in Oxford that summer and had taken a firmly anti-Communist stance. Our unusual surname, Spikes, made it inevitable that our relationship was noticed.

Then, at St Hughs, one of my friends, Ruth Kaye, said that she had been thinking of becoming a Communist but didn’t know how to set about it.

“Don’t worry” I said. “I can get a message to them”. So I did.