It weighed 13,000 tons and contained 780 tons of steel. Out of the then generally flat London townscape, it rose astonishingly to 619 feet – the highest structure in London, nearly twice the height of the dome of St Paul’s. The object that always repelled Melanie had always attracted me. She told me that once, when she was visiting the Middlesex Hospital, only a few hundred yards from the tower, she had worn a blindfold to avoid an otherwise inevitable sighting. If this was to be the tower, she knew the perfect diversion.

She said there was no street in the tower’s vicinity where she didn’t know what she would see when she came around the corner. To avoid this possibility, Melanie Kilim told me that she had developed an extraordinary sense of positioning and direction. She would turn a corner in Soho or Bloomsbury, and there it would be: ‘I think it might attack and strangle me – something to do with the neck again.’ She thought that the tower might suddenly jump out at her. She wasn’t nervous of any other tall buildings, only what she called this ‘grey-green monster’. I thought it might have a more obvious explanation – something to do with the phallus and sex – but she dismissed this. She thought her fear of it might have something to do with the robotic Daleks in the BBC serial, Dr Who, and with the memory of a man in a neck-brace she once saw in the local greengrocer in Golders Green. She said her phobia began soon after the building went up in 1965, transforming and modernizing the London skyline. ‘It’s been quite a while, but I want to ask you about something I’ve always wondered about. ‘Hi Melanie, this is Gus.’ Gus was my school nickname. One evening in April 2005, when I had just turned forty-five, I called her up about it out of the blue. It was because of other conversations during these visits that I knew his sister Melanie was still frightened of the Post Office Tower. We each have wives and children, and when I visit his house on a Sunday morning we talk of property prices and knee-joint trouble.

The crush passed and we went our different ways, but my friendship with her brother endured and I still see a good deal of him. The girl, Melanie Kilim, aged ten, was the sister of my best friend, and even as an eight-year-old I understood this relationship to have the potential of something socially complicated.

In 1968 I had a crush on a girl who was frightened of the Post Office Tower.

Private Battles by Simon Garfield