‘Well, you’re tall, but you’re a very light little girl,’ he said. Katie put her hand up to her ear. His voice was so loud and booming! ‘How old are you then, my dear?’

‘I’m nine,’ Katie whispered.

‘My, my,’ he said. ‘Who would have thought it? Now – what would you like Santa to bring you for Christmas?’

My daddy, was the plea that welled up in her, but she knew that was silly, so she said, ‘A nice dolly.’

She came away not with a doll, but with a colouring book, but she was pleased with that too. Then they visited the millinery department where Vera worked, behind one of the long wooden counters with brass tape measures screwed into them, and all the big bolts of cloth behind. Katie took everything in, thinking it was lovely. Her mother looked around as if claiming it in some way.

From there, they went to Pets’ Corner, where you could stroke the rabbits and guinea-pigs, and there were even chimpanzees like old men with sad, brown eyes. She loved the way the rabbits kept nibbling and watching her at the same time, as she stroked their smooth, soft backs.

‘In the summer they take them out on the roof,’ one of the ladies who worked there told her. ‘But it’s too cold for them at this time of year.’

‘Can we come in the summer?’ She looked up at her mother eagerly.

‘We’ll see,’ Vera said. It was so strange, suddenly having her mother say ‘yes’ to things or even ‘perhaps’, instead of ‘no’ as it had always been, so that Katie had given up asking.

Next they went to the children’s hairdressers. Katie gasped with excitement as she went inside. She had never seen anything like it before! The children having their hair cut were seated on horses rather like the ones she had once seen on a carousel at the fair! It was nothing like the little barbers’ shops she saw in the streets near where they lived.

‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘Can I go on one of those?’

‘Yes – just wait your turn,’ Vera said, with a polite nod to one of the hairdressers as they took their place in the queue. It felt almost as if they were play-acting at a life they didn’t really have.

She loved sitting on the horse, pretending she was out for a ride, and a number of inches were shorn off her hair so that it only reached just below her shoulders.

‘That did need a tidy-up, didn’t it?’ the woman said. Then she tied it back with a pink ribbon, which looked lovely against her dark, wavy locks. Katie was ecstatic and bounced happily back to her mother.

To finish this extraordinary afternoon, Vera took them both to Lewis’s tea room. Katie sat at the table, aware of her shorter hair, which also smelled envelopingly nice because the lady had sprayed something on it. Every so often she put her hand up and felt the ends of it, and the ribbon. She gazed round the tea room with its little tables with white cloths and comfortable chairs, at the waitresses in their neat black-and-white uniforms, offering cakes to the customers on three-tiered stands. Katie’s mouth was watering before the cakes got anywhere near them. There was piano music in the background, and there was nothing ugly or dirty to be seen. It was like being in heaven. If only things could always be like this!