Her mother’s wedding dress was a black two-piece cocktail outfit; short, French, silk-lined, chic, and outrageously expensive. When the teenager Justine Picardie found it, tried it on and wore it endlessly (until she lost it) she asked, ‘Why black?’ Her mother said, ‘Why not?’ The wedding was at Hampstead registrer office in 1960. Her mother was a 21-year-old convent girl, newly arrived from Capetown. Her father was Jewish, a political radical and member of the ANC who had left South Africa to come to Oxford. On their wedding day, they had known each other for 12 weeks and the bride was pregnant (with Justine). The marriage was fraught from the first and eventually fractured altogether.

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