Walter Fletcher was useful in other ways. He loved committees, and sat on as many as possible. Local government, the Co-op, the local Sports Association, the local primary school, the local Labour Party—he was involved in them all. He had been shop steward, before his promotion. (They promoted him, Kate later found, to shut him up.) The only thing he kept clear of was religion. His grandfather had been a Plymouth Brother: his own father had defected, in favour of the Municipal Workers’ Association, and Walter had inherited his father’s deep dislike of anything to do with church, chapel or God. This also used to annoy his neighbours and embarrass his children: not that many of them were in any way devout, but the least devout of them objected to being accosted by virulent rationalism while waiting for a bus or trying to buy a packet of cigarettes. Walter was a proselytizing atheist, and he was stunned by the poor logic of those who claimed to believe in God. He was good at producing definitive arguments against the Deity, and saw religion (with some reason, it must be said, in view of his grandfather’s affiliations) as a conspiracy to keep the working man in his place. Kate and Peter must have been amongst the few children who had to plead with their parents to be allowed to attend prayers and assembly and scripture lessons. All they wanted, in these early years, was to be inconspicuous.

So Walter Fletcher, as we see, though in many ways an admirable man, was not an easy father, nor was Mrs. Fletcher an easy mother. The children lived precariously, nervously, subject to teasing, mockery, contempt, outcasts in their own community. It was not, Kate recalls, a very pleasant community anyway, and her mother may have had good reasons for spuming it, but that did not make life any more agreeable. Kate has said several times that she can imagine no way of life more cramping, painful, and pointless than the life of the lower-middle-class family aspiring to be better than it is. Their house itself, she says, seemed to suffer from acute indecision and paranoia. Arblay Street was one of those long, low, dull, little streets built round the turn of the century, a street of little artisans’ houses, onto which some but not all families had added bathrooms; they had tiny front yards about four feet wide, into which passers-by would chuck newspapers full of fish skin and old chips. At the end of the road ran the sewage bank, which led in one direction towards the Blackridge works, in the other towards the marshy wastes of Pinstead; this grass-covered bank, about twenty feet high, was a secret thoroughfare, a walk through the backways of Romley, the scene of many childhood games and excursions, a green spine through the surrounding brick industrial wilderness, a link with scrubby open space which counted, to the children of the district, as countryside.