A crowd had appeared from somewhere and was surging toward Torrington Gardens. Smoke and sparks and the sirens had summoned them. There was even one woman in a dressing gown. They were uninterested in us and no one looked in our direction when we went over the wall into a wilderness of ilexes and tall weeds. We climbed up the scaffolding onto the roof above Flat 4E. Wim had been right and the fire was quite a long way away, in the second terrace from where we stood and beyond three chimney stacks.

Did the sirens wake “our three” and did they suppose the vehicles that wailed and brayed were coming for them? Wim did his hanging upside-down act and told us the table lamp had been switched on in the living room below but no one was to be seen. We stood and watched what we could see of the fire, which wasn’t much, the whole expanse of roof down there being shrouded in dense dark gray smoke. The crowd on the opposite pavement had a better view than we did and we a better view of them than of the fire. Three fire engines had arrived, arcs from their hoses shot into the dark shining air like fountains from artesian wells. A plane tree had caught fire and burned like a torch until some kind of flame-quelling foam was sprayed on it, leaving a pitiful black skeleton behind.

No one had been hurt, though we knew nothing of that till the next morning. The tenants of the two top flats were all out, returning home somewhere around midnight to find themselves homeless. Someone, I don’t know if it was ever discovered precisely who, had overloaded the system. I didn’t understand it then, though I was already quite interested, but I imagine that what had happened was that there were old radial circuits in the house and, though each was supposed to feed just one socket, extra sockets had been added and too many powerful appliances used. Whatever it was, it badly damaged several houses in the middle of Torrington Gardens.

We slid off the roof onto the balcony, all three of us this time, and slithered along among the dry leaves until we were under the window of the room where that dim light still shone. Wim went first and was first to get a glimpse of the room. “Look. He’s there.”