I was recently enjoying afternoon tea with my mum at a garden centre when two women, one elderly and one middle aged, sat down at a neighbouring table. Both corpulent and wearing unflattering nylon and home perms, they attacked a mound of profiteroles in silence, exuding an inexplicable sadness.

“Did you see those women?’ my mum asked afterwards. “The spinster daughter? Very sad.”

“But that’s me!” I replied. “Fifty-six and never married. I am that spinster daughter.”

“Yes, but that poor woman looked like a spinster. You don’t,” Mum said.

Our exchange reminded me of the elderly sisters who shared a cottage round the corner from us in the Seventies. It wasn’t their incipient beards that gave everyone the creeps, nor the fact that they rode around on a battered tandem. Their strangeness was attributable to the fact they were spinsters: single, childless, less-than-women who dared to live life differently in a small Yorkshire town where marriage and kids by 22 was the norm.