But it didn’t work. The Musselburgh population seemed predominantly elderly, and they were good-hearted. But the human dynamics were all wrong. Cherry-picking; it was really quite obscene. The pretty girls and the youngest kids were always requested first. Nobody wanted the older boys. Even now — and Ted found himself to be utterly naive about such things — there was a lot of concern among the professionals here from the social services about the dangers to the kids of lodging them with strangers.

The cherry-picking was repugnant anyhow, so Ted broke that up, and started to allocate the refugees on a more random basis, matching up on the basis of needs rather than individuals. The billeting was restricted to families with kids of their own, or people who were known foster parents. Only family groups, with an older male or two, went to volunteers unknown to the social services. If they’d take them, anyhow.

It all helped to reduce the pressure on the Rest Centre itself. But there weren’t enough hosts to go around. And there were some people who were just not suitable for billeting: large family groups, the elderly, people who had been undergoing “care in the community’, and the plain irascible who didn’t want to be billeted anyhow — under which category Ted would place the old guy with the yapping Alsatian, and himself and his diminished family. Ethnic-minority families attracted scarcely any help from outside their own communities, a phenomenon which made Ted feel ill with frustration.

Ted’s own informal estimate was that maybe ten per cent of all those who arrived at the Rest Centre couldn’t be billeted. And you had to add to that, he supposed, the population of the hospitals, the prisons, the remand centres for the young, the long-term care facilities, old people’s homes.

On it went: a lot of people.

Some things got worse, as time went on.

Like hygiene. Dog shit seemed to be everywhere. He found himself spending much of his mornings organizing volunteers on clean-up squads, and issuing warnings about the danger of children getting eye infections from the stuff.

More food arrived, canned stuff from the local supermarkets. Ted wondered how long that would last. But he heard of fleets of Army choppers bringing in supplies from Glasgow and north England, and when it arrived it came in boxes marked prominently with the name of the supplying store, big black letters to display for the TV cameras.

There were cameras everywhere, in fact. He found one crew filming a grinning care worker handing a sack of used toys sent from Boise, Idaho to some kid who was supposed to act grateful, a Scottish kid with her own life and dignity, in order to please the hearts of some beer-sodden arsehole on the other side of the planet, a kid who would forever be scarred by the experience. Ted had to be restrained, by Jane, from throwing the crew out.