MG: At fourteen I wrote a poem called ‘Why I am a Socialist’. It began, ‘You ask?’ Of course, no one had ever asked me if I even knew what socialism was. I had got hold of A New Anthology of Modern Poetry, published in 1938. I was fifteen and that was the Depression. Left-wing poetry I admired enormously. I liked the marching rhythm. There was Auden and company. There was Ezra Pound, so they weren’t all left wing. I read this stuff over and over, knew it by heart. Muriel Rukeyser; the gang. And this inspired ‘Why I am a Socialist’. It was a better world. And my mother found this. She wanted to know who I was mixed up with. Mothers then were very interested in preserving their daughters’ sexual purity.

JL: Some mothers now, too.

MG: For the marriage market. She drove me cuckoo. She read everything. I never could keep anything to myself.