On the Sunday of Dovidl’s arrival I was second in her hierarchy of irritants. Father had arrived, as usual, late for lunch, which passed in a wordless clinking of cutlery on crockery, broken only by orders to the staff.

‘Florrie, would you pass Mr Simmonds the gravy?’

‘The carrots are very nicely done today, Martha, not at all dry.’

‘Thank you, Mr Simmonds.’

‘Florrie, you may clear the table now.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Be especially diligent about cleaning around the boy’s seat.’

After iced dessert, my parents rose to take a nap in their newly decorated separate bedrooms.

‘I’m bored,’ I announced to their receding backs.

‘Why don’t you go and play with a friend?’ sighed Father.

‘He hasn’t got any,’ snapped Mother. ‘He buries his head in Picture Post and won’t make the effort. I don’t begin to understand the boy. Why won’t he take that football I bought him over to Johnny-Isaacs-next-door and ask him if he wants to play?’

‘Hate football,’ I mumbled.

‘Bone idle, that’s his trouble,’ grumbled Mother.

‘I’ll give you a game of chess when I wake up,’ promised Father. I knew he meant well, but I expected him to forget, as usual.

‘Whatever he does,’ said Mother, ‘I don’t want to hear a peep from him in the next two hours. I think I have a migraine coming on.’

Father and I exchanged a male look and slunk off in our separate ways. A compensatory urge tugged me towards my underbed stash of KitKats, a compulsive treat in irresistibly rebranded red wrappers. Previously sold as ‘Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp’, KitKat was supposed to invoke the languid grandeur of an eighteenth-century literary club. To my well-read eyes, it suggested something even more exotic than Fry’s squishy Turkish Delight – a hint of khat, or qat, the hallucinogenic drug of the North-west Frontier. I had grown addicted to these milky chocolate fingers, but for once, this vacant Sunday, I resisted their beck.