If the Frankels were the poorest Jewish family I had so far come across, the Flatmans were the richest. They regularly went to Ostend for their holidays. Their children, two little tadpoles of girls aged somewhere between nought and ten, had their own paddling-pool in the garden (in 1953!); Mr Flatman drove around not in a round car with tiny windscreens but in a long sleek shooting-brake with space behind the passenger seat; and there was even a rumour that they were sending food-parcels, air mail, to their relations in America. Rabika Flatman was the first woman in the avenue and for all I knew in all North London to own what then passed as a bikini – shorts, I suppose they were, and a ruched top: a sort of From Here To Eternity number, modest in itself but the more suggestive, for that reason, of white surf and torrid encounters. And she would spend all her afternoons yawning and stretching and swinging in a bright orange garden-hammock set as far away as possible from the paddling-pool but in an absolutely ideal position for me to gaze down upon unnoticed from my station, bent double or even treble, at my bedroom window.