That day Ted and I travelled to work by bus, and I sat close up against my father in the blue, smoky fug on the top deck. It was exciting to ride so high above the streets, and to be able to look straight in through smeary windows and see cramped offices and the rumpled secrets of half-curtained bedsits. Phebus Fragrances occupied a small warehouse building off Kingsland Road, in Dalston, on the fringe of the East End. It seemed very far from our house in a north London suburb. There was a bomb-site to one side of the warehouse, and summer had turned the piled rubble lush with the blue-purple wands of buddleia and the red-purple of willowherb. It must have been the school holidays because there were children out playing on the open space. I held my father’s hand as we walked from the bus stop and felt sorry for them because they weren’t going to work as I was.

Anthony Phebus was Ted’s earliest mentor in the perfume business. Ted always called him the Old Man. Ted had started working for him not long after I was born, as a bookkeeper and general office administrator, although of course he didn’t actually have any bookkeeping skills or relevant office experience. In the years after the war he did a variety of jobs, from van-driving to working as a garage hand, but when I was born he decided that it was time to move up in the world. He applied for the job with Mr Phebus and impressed the old man so much with his apparent expertise with figures that he was offered the position on the spot. I knew this part of the story well, because Ted liked to tell it with a wink.

‘I learned on the job.’ He smiled. ‘Always the best way. You don’t know what you’re going to be able to do until you have to do it, and when you have to it’s surprising what you can do.’