Miriam had explained that a hole dug deep enough in our garden would emerge somewhere in China. The gravel pit was the largest lake that Henry had ever seen, and he often tried to convince me that it was this hole that went all the way to Shanghai. Once when I dived into the lake he watched me as if I were about to set off forever to the world of my childhood.

“Daddy, are you going to swim to China now?”

“Well, it’s too far to swim before tea. Let’s go to Magic World instead.”

I waited for Polly to round up the children and led them towards a screen of fir trees. Mattresses and rusting bicycles lay among the pinecones, and we followed the dark path to an enclosed meadow behind the film studios. The sunlight played by itself on the knee-deep grass, and the children ran ahead of me, their faces bobbing like lanterns.

Standing in the grass was a collection of stage props abandoned by the companies shooting television commercials. A candy bar the size of a small car lay in the sun, its papier-mâché wrapper peeling from the wooden frame. Beside it were a detergent pack my own height, its plywood sheeting warped by the rain and sun, and a fibreglass ketchup bottle painted in red enamel. Canvas peeled from the shampoo sachets and toothpaste tubes, but this never dismayed Alice and Henry. They ran squealing through the grass, fascinated as ever by the magnified versions of the objects that made up their domestic world.

Pride of place in their affections was taken by a ten-foot-high replica of a pink toilet roll. On earlier visits Henry had pulled back a flap of the rotting canvas, and through this small door the children crawled one by one. I could hear them shrieking with delight at this notion of a toilet roll large enough to live in. They waved their arms through the canvas, shouting to Polly, who was frantically trying to nose his way into the dim interior.

“Let’s have a party!” someone shouted.

“Party, party…” Alice was skipping inside the giant roll, eyes on her shiny shoes in case they vanished from her feet.

I lay back in the grass, thinking contentedly that there would soon be another child to dance in this enchanted meadow. I was glad that our third child would be born here, as much from the stream and the splash meadow as from Miriam’s womb. Her first labour, at the nearby maternity hospital, had been over before I returned home, expecting to be called the next day. Our huge son, solemn as any alderman, was asleep in his mother’s arms when I reached the ward. But the infants were separated from their mothers for long periods of the day, bellowing together in their cribs behind a heavy door, and Miriam vowed to have her future children delivered at home, in our own bed.