I seldom did read them, but I wasn’t going to say so. I asked her what I could do about the light and she looked warily at me, the way you look at a person in the street who’s gesticulating or talking to himself. “You need stronger bulbs, don’t you? Like hundreds, not forties. It’ll be an outlay but worth it, I reckon.”

I could get them around the corner, she said, at a store which had some fancy name but which everyone called “Superglue”—a title instigated originally by Beryl, I expect—and that same day I did. She showed me how to put them in the lamp sockets. A couple of months ago I showed my gratitude (for that and a thousand other things) by rewiring the flat she had recently bought from the council. The 100-watt bulbs made a great difference to old Mrs. Fisherton’s and if I still felt enclosed and oppressed, the breathlessness and the sensation of the ceiling sinking and crushing me were less bad.

Beryl lived in a tower block on the Harrow Road and a son and a daughter lived with her. Neither of them could be induced to take up cigarette smoking, for as with their mother it didn’t agree with them. Her son was an electrician and her daughter sold cosmetics in one of the Oxford Street stores. Beryl had made a corner for herself in Russia Road, cleaning for Max and Selina and the people at Nos. 13, 15, and 17.

“Those Silvermans,” she said, “they only come up for a weekend and not many weekends in a year. The place is like a palace, never a fingermark, I don’t know why they keep it on, really.”

I asked her where they lived in the country and she told me. Did she mean No. 15 was empty most of the time?

“Barring the top flat, love. Their son’s up there, him and I don’t know who else, half a dozen of them if you ask me. He gets rid of them or maybe he hides them under the beds when his mum and dad come but that’s only once in a blue moon.”

The people at 17 and 13 were less interesting, an elderly doctor and his wife next door to us while 13 was divided into two flats whose occupants Beryl hardly ever saw, they were out all day and she had keys. One couple she called, with a fine disregard for political correctness, “Indians and very dark.” The others had virtually no furniture but mattresses on the floor and steel chairs. It may have been minimalist (not Beryl’s word) or perhaps they could afford nothing better.