‘Lost your tongue, have you? Well, here’s something else to pass onto your mam: if there’s anything knock-off arriving in this house on a regular basis, it had better stop right now. Do you understand? Makes sense to me that an empty house must be getting used for something, so fencing, I reckon. That’s why the nets are still up. Well, you make sure your mam knows I’m onto them. The robbing can stop, because Frank Wright is moving in, those nets can be washed, that step scrubbed and the playing on the bomb site, that can stop too. Have you got that? Make sure your mam knows that we will be in before the carnival. I think we can improve the standards around here no end and it will make it a better community for all to live in.’

Paddy nodded, his thumb was now thrust so deep in his mouth it protruded out of the side of his cheek. There was nothing knock-off in their house – no one trusted his mam and da to keep anything safe – but Tommy and Maura’s wash house and scullery had indeed been the trading post if there had been a haul and he knew the woman was bang on. The house was empty now, but as soon as the Morry came into dock, that would change. He knew that there were empty wooden tea chests, still in Maura and Tommy’s outhouse. Not a scrap of tea in them, though, or his mother would surely have had it.

He had slipped in himself once and tried to scrape some out for her, when he had found her sitting at the kitchen table, crying. He had tipped up a case and, pulling away the thin paper lining of the chest, to his joy extracted enough to make his mam a pot of weak tea every day for a week. She had been so grateful she even stopped crying and hugged him. That had been the week after Maura had left.

The woman folded her arms, peered down at him and sniffed. It had occurred to her that either little Paddy wasn’t about to cough up, or he was so stupid he was of no use to her. She had no ill feeling towards the boy, but Margaret was disappointed that the best the dock board could do for her Frank, following his promotion, was a house on Nelson Street. Margaret hated rats and therefore hadn’t wanted to live so close to the river.

‘I can tell you,’ she said, ‘if housing wasn’t still so short, we wouldn’t be moving here, but needs must.’ She wasn’t really talking to him as she looked up and down the street. ‘They will be building the new houses soon and then we’ll be off. All this lot, they will be razed to the ground and the rats along with them.’