This was unforgivable, an outrageous invasion of marital privacy. My parents had stopped sharing a bedroom a year before, preserving the formalities of marriage without the intimacy. Whatever spark had first flared between them had been allowed to die, and I was the sullen mourner in a house turned sterile and cold. Sniffing a chance to bring them back together, I plunged presumptuously into prohibited areas and was thrust back with a forbidding look.

‘Quite right,’ said Father. ‘You will have to give up your study for him to sleep in, and David can use the parlour for practising. As for school, let’s see what comes to pass in the next few weeks . . .’

‘How soon do you need my answer?’ I asked.

‘Ten, fifteen minutes,’ said Father. ‘Shall I come back?’

‘Not necessary,’ I said. ‘He can stay. I’ll clear out my playroom after tea.’

Another parent might have given me a hug, or a pat on the head. Not Mortimer Simmonds. He stood up, shook my hand gravely and thanked me before descending to give the good news to Mr Rapoport, who left immediately. And that was it. Mother, coming down for tea, found a refugee boy playing Paganini ‘Caprices’ on the violin in her best room and her son turning the pages, unnaturally contented.

There was to be no more boredom for me that blazing, pre-bellum month. The next day I rode top-deck with Dovidl on the number thirteen bus around central London, introducing him to a city that would soon be blitzed into darkness and dread. We hopped off to pop into half-empty museums and halfpenny-a-head newsreel cinemas. Together, we watched the digging up of rose gardens in royal parks, the pitching of army tents on Hampstead Heath, the hanging out of washing on imaginary Siegfried Lines in the slumyards of King’s Cross and Camden Town. We saw tin-hatted bobbies on bicycles wearing placards around their necks and civil-defence wardens blowing whistles in a pathetic charade of air-raid preparedness.

‘Git orf the streets, yer little perishers. Can’t you hear there’s an alarm on?’

‘Wot, that whistle an alarm? I thought it was a football referee’s.’

On Thursday we rode down to the Houses of Parliament to hear the Commons briskly debate and pass the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, bestowing a blessing of legality on the violence ahead. The Prime Minister, Mr Chamberlain, rose from his green bench like a sombre walrus and spoke without spirit, a defeated man. ‘Who is man in big wig?’ whispered Dovidl.

‘That’s the Speaker.’

‘Why he doesn’t speak? Maybe he is better than Prime Minister.’