At home after the afternoon paper round, Dovidl and I would gulp down a high tea, dispatch homework and music and, if the Germans were running late, manage a bath and supper before the sirens sounded. More often, we would head for the shelters unfed, with packs of sandwiches and a Thermos flask that Martha quickly provided. ‘All I have to do is put the roast in the oven and those dratted Germans come buzzing over, making a pesky nuisance of theirselves,’ moaned our choleric cook. Fiftyish and emphysematic, one autumn morning Martha betook herself home to Devon leaving Florrie in sole charge, promoted from housemaid to house-mother. Father got Florrie exempted from war work by listing her as his army valet.

My parents were seldom around for the early stages of the Blitz, unavoidably detained at essential war work. ‘I hope you boys are behaving yourselves and being obedient to Florrie,’ Mother crackled down the telephone. ‘I shall try to come home tonight, at least to get a change of clothes, but the people here in the East End need our help and solidarity, as I am sure you can understand.’

‘I am sorry to be detained for so many nights at a stretch,’ said Father from Bristol, or perhaps Liverpool. ‘But I gather from the maid that you are coping admirably and not missing us at all.’

We were doing better than coping. We were having, Florrie included, the time of our lives. The Anderson shelter in our garden, popularly named after the Home Secretary who had saved Dr Steiner from internment, was neither safe nor seemly. Several such refuges collapsed on their occupants from the mere blast of a bomb in the general vicinity, and when the first mouse – or was it rat? – scurried over Florrie’s face as she drifted off to sleep, we transferred, at the next siren call, to the northbound platform of the nearest underground station, lying down with half the neighbourhood.

You slept with a better sort of person in St John’s Wood tube, giggled Florrie. A prissy decorum prevailed, as befitted ‘the Wood’. There were none of the heavings and groanings reported from Swiss Cottage, one station up the line, where as many as fifteen hundred souls of disparate origin huddled in garrulous and (it was whispered) carnal propinquity. Ida Haendel, I knew, was shepherded by her father nightly to Swiss Cottage. Josef Hassid refused to descend with his father into that darkness. He stayed at home, listening over and over again, obsessively, to the set of encores he had recorded with the accompanist Gerald Moore, just before the war. HMV had offered him a contract, but his strange behaviour was giving rise to concern. It was the talk of the fiddle fraternity.