Our house was in a street of semi-detached properties built for the Edwardian middle classes, close to the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge. When I first saw it, I was taken by its simple, solid lines. It wasn’t grand but it had four bedrooms – twice as many as the little house where I had grown up – so it seemed huge to me. I wondered how Nick could afford such a place on a GP’s salary but his dark eyes had twinkled when I asked and he led me around the back to show why it was so cheap: the rear wall had been shorn away by a doodlebug in ’44, leaving a pile of rubble and a scar in the ground. A hastily erected wall in the middle of what had once been a rear parlour was the new back to the house, and a split in the bricks halfway up gave a pair of jackdaws access to the wall cavity, wherein they had built a nest.

If there hadn’t been a shortage of labour due to all the new flats being put up, Nick said, he could possibly have had the back of the house repaired properly, but as things stood we would just have to lump it. It didn’t seem such a hardship, in fact, I was excited about changes like the government’s push for housebuilding.

There were people who grumbled about the new way of things, but I couldn’t understand them, really – it would be wonderful, as far as I was concerned, to see an end to people living in slums and tenements. That would be the first great achievement of our new system and it did seem that the future could only be brighter. I had even been allowed to attend a couple of Party meetings in Herne Bay – although I had been quietly shown the door when I unwittingly broke the rules by mentioning the wrong thing.