‘The Bogeys. Blades up!’ Alfie yelled over my shoulder into the cinema. His shout was echoed and magnified within the walls until it became a roar. I felt a chill. On the few occasions I had seen real violence close to me – once a fight with broken bottles outside my local pub, once when the Nazis had caught a member of the Home Guard – I had felt every blow in my own flesh. The prospect of it happening scores of times in front of me made my chest clench around my ribs. As one, the boys snatched inside their jackets and back pockets for brass knuckles or knives, clicking out the blades and sprinting in defence of their friends.

They surged forward to jab at the police. I could hear the blows landing and the cries of pain before a crash above us made us look up, to see a window exploding, its glass falling just metres from where we stood. Through the empty casement we could hear the music as Lorelei welcomed the brave Soviet troops filing off the Archangel.

One of the Teddies drove his bike straight into the police ranks, leaping off when it struck home. Some of the boys, however, were riding in the other direction, away from the violence – whether scared or going for reinforcements, I couldn’t tell – and stones were flying in the air in both directions. A few cracked into the wall beside us. Alfie pushed me towards one of his friends who was about to ride from the scene. ‘You, go with him,’ he shouted to me.

I stared back at the film poster, committing to memory what I had seen there. ‘All right,’ I said, jumping on the back of the bike. Something metallic sped through the empty air where my neck had been a second ago. The boy with the bike gunned the engine so that it deafened me and we wound through the throng. Over my shoulder I saw Alfie barge into a policeman, knocking him back, but the officer was a burly man and he grabbed the boy in a bear hug, dragging him down. In the last moment Alfie looked directly at me. Then he was lost in the tide of bodies and it seemed almost as if he had been swallowed by some sort of beast.

As soon as we were clear of the danger, the boy whose name I didn’t even know dropped me off in a long, shabby street and roared away without a word. I was worried to see a police checkpoint where uniformed officers were going over people’s cards – it could have been a result of the trouble nearby, or simply down to the increased security we always saw for Liberation Day.