Jewish boys, who made up half the school, were allowed a separate assembly as we could not be expected to feign sincerity in ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Unwilling to admit actual Jewish ritual, the Head placed us in the hands of Father Edward Jeffries, a brown-cassocked, nicotine-stained Anglican monk who made us recite Psalms in English, Hebrew and Latin. Which is to say that we would read a few verses in King David’s Hebrew or St Jerome’s Vulgate, and he would then freely translate them into an English more colloquial and compelling than the King James Version. For gravel-voiced Father Jeffries, it must have been a vacuous exercise; he never once met the eye of any of his unbaptisable Jewish brats, or showed satisfaction in our reading. He was a dry old stick with a nasty habit of waggling a finger in his ear and closely examining the waxy yield. But for me, and for Dovidl to a lesser degree, his virtuosity was revelatory in bringing two dead languages to life and both of us closer to the desert source, making us feel its hot-headed Jewishness. Renditions by Father Jeffries lodged in my memory for life.

‘Do not fear the night’s terror,’ he orated in mid-Blitz, ‘nor the missile that flies by day. The plague that goes in darkness, the destroyer that ravages at noon. A thousand may fall beside you, ten thousand more at your right – but it will not come near you. Only your eyes shall see it, Simmonds, and witness the reward of the wicked. Carry on, in Latin, if you please.’

‘Quoniam tu Domine spes mea, altissimum posuisti refugium tuum.’

‘Not bad. Next verse, Rapoport, in English.’

‘No harm will befall you, no trouble upon your tent . . .’

Back on our bikes after school, we delivered evening papers to about half as many customers. It left us with time to buy a penny ice, pick blackberries from a bramble bush, or simply scoot around the summer streets, still with heat and fear, before resuming work in the music room. On 25 June (I had begun keeping a diary), we came home to the first sign of panic. Dr Steiner was stamping up the front path, waving a sheet of paper and flailing his fine old fiddle-player’s hands. ‘What is this?’ he wailed. ‘Why must they deport me? What will be with my wife?’

The poor old professor had been served with an internment order at his front door by two uniformed police officers. As a class C alien under the age of seventy, though barely, they ordered him to report to West Hampstead Police Station next morning, with one small suitcase of personal essentials, for secure detention at an unnamed place of confinement. ‘What shall I do?’ he appealed to us, his pupils.