‘Bye, Mia!’

Scout gave me her folder stuffed full of the year’s work. Her name and class printed neatly on the front.

Scout Wolfe, 1D.

On top was one of her early works, a picture called ‘My Family’ that I remembered from last September. In the picture Scout’s family was just a little stick-figure man who didn’t even have a briefcase to call his own and a little girl with brown hair and a red dog. That picture had torn at my heart last year because the man and the girl and the dog had seemed lost among all that white space. But now it made me smile.

We made it!

We drifted away from the school gates, and all around us there were best wishes for the holidays, and plans being made to stay in touch, and I felt a sense of relief that was almost overwhelming.

All parents want the same things for their children. But the single parent wants something extra. The single parent wants to survive.

If Scout and I could get through the first year of school, then I knew we could get through anything.

She took Stan’s lead, wrapped it twice around her thin wrist, but the dog was still skittish, as if the thrills of the school gates had yet to wear off. He was sniffing a lamppost, wild-eyed and lost in his own world, that world of scent that dogs live in, when he suddenly looked up and spotted a well-groomed poodle on the far side of the road. Without warning, he tried to dive into the traffic and Scout had to hold him back with both hands.

I took the lead from her and we both stared at Stan, who only had eyes for the poodle on the far side of the road.

‘He’s reached sexual maturity,’ Scout said. ‘You’re going to have to face it, Daddy.’

The homeless man sat on the pavement in the shade of the great arched entrance to Smithfield meat market.

He wore an old green T-shirt, the sleeves far too long, threadbare camouflage trousers and combat boots with no laces. There was a baseball cap in front of him containing a few coins. Everything about him said ex-serviceman.

Without looking up, he spoke to us as we walked past.

‘Spare fifty grand?’

The line made me smile. It was a good line. Unexpected.

And then my smile froze because I knew that voice from years ago. Not the voice of this man but the boy he had once been. A time when I knew that voice as well as I knew my own.

I slowly turned and walked back to him, Scout and Stan following me. And he looked up – a light-skinned black man who had not shaved for a while, who had not slept in a bed last night, and who had not eaten properly for a long time.

But it was still him.