Which is not to say I like him any the better. Candid as Peter contrives to appear, there is a shiftiness about the boy that is probably embedded. He has already broken faith with his suffering mother and he is about to betray a further confidence under my gentle pressure. I ought to be pleased at his compliance, but I deplore his baseness. He is cultivating me because I represent his ticket to the next station up the line. The instant my usefulness expires, he will discard me like a broken string. Peter Stemp, fifteen years old, is grooming himself for the conscienceless career of a classical virtuoso.

‘Tell me how you got to meet the frummers,’ I resume in the lounge as tea is served, a tower-tray of ham and cheese sandwiches, tinned biscuits and gooey cakes.

‘Just the one,’ he repeats. ‘This man, Mr Katzenberg, and a couple of his neighbours.’

‘Carry on,’ I encourage him, pouring dark tea from a chipped china pot.

‘I do a paper round before school every morning.’

‘Do you?’ I interject. ‘Used to do one myself when I was your age, during the war, it was.’

Peter ignores me. Having resolved to sell his story, he will do so without my participation. ‘I started it a couple of years ago, to pay for a mountain-bike that I really wanted. My mam said we couldn’t afford it, so I saw this ad in the newsagent’s window and suddenly I had money to burn.’

Some things in England, I mutely reflect, never change. I bet he buys himself a KitKat at the end of the round. He expertly unwraps a chocolate Swiss roll.

‘My round,’ he sputters, ‘takes in the up-river half of Oldbridge, including Gladstone Square, where most of the black-hats live. Four streets are almost totally frum: Canning, Palmerston, Disraeli and Chamberlain. None of those people takes papers; I don’t know if they even speak English. All except one. In Canning Street, there is one house, number thirty-two, that takes the Telegraph every morning and the Jewish Chronicle on Fridays. It’s a real drag to go down a whole street just for one customer, but Mr Amin the newsagent says an order is an order and you don’t turn good money away. Anyway, with a ten-speed mountain bike I can scoot down the street, drop the papers, and be out on Salisbury Avenue inside a minute. Fifty-three seconds is my personal best.

‘Who lives there, I have no idea. I never see anyone, and I’m hardly likely to ring their bell for a Christmas tip because those people don’t even celebrate Christmas. Mam says they killed Our Lord, but that seems a bit . . . much.