BILLY BROGAN SLID OUT OF the Buckingham’s staff entrance and crossed Berkeley Square as the music of the ballroom faded behind him.

Sometimes it pained him to leave the hotel. In there, he felt important, a man who guests and staff relied on to get things done. Outside the hotel, he felt smaller somehow, less of a somebody. Or at least he felt that way until he hurried past the palace at Westminster and, crossing the old Lambeth Bridge, came to the terrace he had always called home. Billy Brogan might have been seventeen years old, but the pull of his ma’s home-cooked dinner still filled him with joy.

He could already hear the sounds of laughter, and his father barracking one of his younger siblings, coming through the walls. These were the beautiful, chaotic sounds of home. It was always quiet when he left of a morning, his father up and out to the fish market long before dawn, the others – his brothers and his sisters – still fast asleep, wrapped around each other in the big double beds. To come home to chaos was one of the most wonderful things of all.

This was an opportunity too good to miss, so Billy crept along the brick archway between his house and the next and, pressing his face against the glass in the back door, waited until one of his siblings cartwheeled by. Here came Patrick and Annie, here came Conor and Daniel, here came Roisin and Holly. Billy’s mother, with her flowing auburn hair and round shoulders, was too busy hunched over the cooking pot to notice – but when the smallest of all the Brogans, Gracie May, scurried by, she looked up, saw Billy’s face in the glass, and let out such a shriek of delight that it must have been heard from Crystal Palace to Parliament Hill Fields.

‘BILLY!’ she exclaimed – and, moments later, a multitude of hands were clamouring at the door to be the ones to let him in.

By the time Billy crashed through the doors and the children were upon him, his mother had put down her serving spoon, his father had come down the old creaking stairs, and the scenes of jubilation went on and on. Anyone passing by might have thought Billy Brogan had gone away to war and come back a decorated hero, such were the celebrations on South Lambeth Road.

‘What have you got for us?’ asked little Patrick, seven years old with a mop of unruly red hair.

‘Did you bring more pralines?’ asked Roisin, beseeching with her big brown eyes.