Barbara Scully

And I could feel my father starting to get a bit like kind of hot under the collar.

And then he said, no, she's actually on maternity leave.

And at this stage, I was going, oh, God.

And I was upset, not because anything to do with me.

I was upset that my father was being made feel embarrassed by this conversation.

Because the next thing he said was, no, no, she didn't get married.

No, George thought he'd missed a wedding somewhere.

No, no, she didn't get married.

And the next thing he said was, yes, she does know who the father is.

Because the automatic thing was that if you were an unmarried mother, you were clearly having sex with every fellow who walked past your front gate.

So you wouldn't probably know who the father was.

And I remember being mortified, not for myself, but for my dad, that my dad was being made feel like that.

But that conversation illustrates that.

very much the prevailing kind of thing at the time.

But then about maybe 10, 15 years ago, I happened to be, I don't want to identify this person, but again, a man who I didn't know well, but whose business I would have been in and out of the odd time.

And I remember standing just casually chatting with him on the road one day and this girl passed us.

This, as I say, would have been maybe 15 years ago.

And she was in a school uniform and she was clearly pregnant.

And we were talking about, I don't know, the weather.

And as she passed by without missing a beat, your man said, oh, look at that.