By the time the map had given up its secrets I was looking anxiously at my watch. The group of writers had to talk to journalists in the afternoon, and then we were to do a reading at the South Bank. I needed to get back to the hotel. I was cutting things fine. But I was determined to see Brunswick Court.

It had turned into a sultry day by this time, the sunlight grey and unpleasantly hot. Brunswick Court began as a spooky archway under the railway, scabs of black ooze hardened on the bricks. There was nothing old here—Bermondsey was comprehensively bombed during the Blitz—but nothing had really changed either. What had once been Butler’s Buildings was still a mean little street, barely wide enough for a car. Where the boxes of terraced houses had lined up next to each other in the eighteenth century there were still small identical houses—though of postwar stained pale brick—squashed up together. On one side the looming brick bulk of Jones Maltings filled the sky and cut off the sun. The sweet reek of the brewery filled the street. The cramped houses on one side, the towering walls of the brewery on the other, pressed in on me.

If Wiseman had been an honest waterman, or a better thief, some genetic variant of me would have grown up somewhere like this, breathing the stink of the brewery in my dreams.

The other end of the street, where the old map showed Bermondsey Workhouse, was now a triangle of park with worn-out grass, and a bit further along was the church of St Mary Magdalene, where the first child of Solomon and Jane Wiseman had perhaps been baptised.

The church was locked. So was the rectory next door, but my eye was caught by a sign on the front door: ‘PLEASE DO NOT RING THE DOOR BELL for food before you have read the notice in the window on the right.’ The notice in the window on the right read: ‘Sorry, no food parcels available until further notice.’

As at Spitalfields, I was in another world, where people were hopelessly, unfixably poor. Wiseman’s world.

St Mary Magdalene, all those christenings—but, with that name, wasn’t he Jewish? The family story said nothing about it, so I’d always wondered. But people had always looked at me strangely when I tried to voice my doubts. She’s wondering if Solomon Wiseman is Jewish? I’d see them think. Is the Pope Catholic?

Back at the hotel I was getting ready for the reading—the blue or the black? the jacket or the shawl?—when the phone rang. It was a researcher from the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain, whom I’d asked earlier for information about Solomon Wiseman, born 1777. They had no record of him, and the researcher thought he probably wasn’t Jewish. He explained that an English Jew called Wiseman would have been descended from German Jews called Weissmann, and most German Jews didn’t arrive in England until the early nineteenth century.