Today 2022, anywhere

But do the ghost footsteps ever die?

Didn’t I still hear them that night in the car park, when the firm’s swanky top client followed me from the dinner, pressed me against the wall, knowing I’d never talk in case I lost my job. At least, until ‘no, no, no…’ turned into so many screechy tears, he seemed to decide it wouldn’t be much fun anyway and went home to his wife and kids.

Didn’t they also echo later in my warnings to my own teenage daughter, who a generation on rolled her eyes at her mother’s histrionics? It will never be the same for them as for us, we who grew up always just one silent street away from being ‘ripper women’.

Perhaps I heard them even years down the line on a ‘Me Too’ march. Then again in the news headlines of the missing daughter of my colleague Jeremy Everard, kindest of men.

Maybe I still hear them now, as we all do, walking a dark quiet street, when the guy ahead who side-steps into shop doorway, waiting for you to come past. So you swerve across the road, dialling anyone on your phone, jabbering loudly about where you are, how soon you’ll be back, anything to deter, just in case.

They say that on one day over 300 women will be raped in the UK. If it’s a good day, 190 will be reported. 3 of those may end up in court.

So yes, the footsteps are still there, pacing down the dark, dingy tunnel to my girlhood. But inside a voice is still shouting that same instinctive if petrified female battle cry - ‘Ger off us!’