There was no announcement from Em that Susie can remember, and no discussion; it was more a gradual dawning, and with hindsight she feels that she let Em down. 'At 16 she fell in love with her best friend. I thought it was a crush, but it wasn’t. She loved this girl profoundly. Maybe I was in denial, I don’t know, but I couldn’t deal with it, and I still feel terrible about that. Pete was so much better with her than me. He used to take her to a place in Swindon to talk to a counsellor.’ This is the man who later made Susie furiously angry over the years because he felt unable to tell anyone that their children were gay – not his golfing friends nor his mother and sister. 'I have told them all,’ she says. 'Not because he’s ashamed – he just doesn’t have the emotional vocabulary, yet he has supported them in a completely different way.’