Knox shifted his weight, leaning against the wall. The old bricks crumbled under him and sent him skidding down into the hole in the earth. He grabbed at the wet dirt but couldn’t stop from crashing into the waterlogged, pitted floor of the crater. He pulled himself up, wiping his hands on his trousers and feeling filthy liquid pooling in his shoes and soaking his feet. For a brief, hysterical moment he stood in the centre of the void, daring his imaginary tail, or anyone else, to show themselves and take a shot at him, but there was only silence and darkness. After a few seconds he came to his senses and hauled himself back up out of the crater.

He thought about walking back to Soho, but decided to head in the opposite direction instead, to the one part of London he knew even better.

The night gave him one final stroke of luck when he was back on London Wall—a taxi to flag down. The driver had just dropped someone off at Liverpool Street station and was heading back into town to pick up some more late-night custom. He had no desire to go east again, but Knox persuaded him by offering double his fare.

Twenty minutes later the cab dropped Knox off on Roman Road, which, as its name suggested, was the old straight-arrow Roman route out of the city. He walked north towards Victoria Park. The park, as its name also suggested, was a gift from Queen Victoria to the people of the East End, a space where they could escape the drudgery of life for a few hours. It was a kind gesture, but it assumed that the people it had been created for could afford to take time off from working all hours every day to make ends meet to promenade through the park and smell its roses.

Twenty years after the Blitz, Bethnal Green also still wore its scars. Knox passed rows of old terraced houses, condemned but showing signs of occupation, collapsed buildings waiting to be cleared, and several low-rise blocks that had emerged from the wreckage of the war over the last decade. It was quiet now, but Knox remembered nights filled with people doubled over fires in the middle of streets and children with filthy faces tempting rats into traps so they could turn them into pets or a meal.

The war had been equal parts blessing and curse for Bethnal Green. The poverty of the years before the war had been grinding. It had killed countless people here. It had killed Knox’s parents. After the war there was no way life could go back to how it had been. The East End had become too much of a symbol of London’s tenacity and resilience to be left to fester and ruin. So, slowly but surely a new Bethnal Green was growing through its cracks and wounds.