Somewhere below the ideal and the clear-eyed gazes, we knew, lay a shapeless, oozing plain, riddled with other words, objects, images, and behaviours: unwed mothers, the white slave trade, the film posters from Dear Caroline, ‘rubbers’, mysterious advertisements for ‘intimate hygiene, discretion guaranteed’, the covers of Health magazine (‘women are fertile only three days a month’), ‘love children’, indecent assault, Janet Marshall strangled with her bra in the woods by the adulterer Robert Avril, the words ‘lesbian’, ‘homosexual’, ‘lust’, and sins so abominable they couldn’t even be brought
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