Dovidl and I were taken round for tea. Mrs Blair, with mournful eyes (Father explained that she had lost a brother at Dunkirk), fussed motheringly about us, but the great writer gave no more than a thin wince from behind his pencil moustache. He fidgeted with a heavy cigarette-lighter while Dovidl played a Vieuxtemps amuse-gueule, drawing an involuntary tear from Mrs Blair. Unmoved by the music, his responses to Father’s conversational attempts were curt as we gobbled the little treats, ham excepted, that had been laid out for our tea. ‘What do you want to be when you grow up, boy?’ demanded the polemicist in a high-pitched, schoolmasterly voice.

‘A writer, like you, sir,’ I crawled.

‘They’ll need miners and farmers when this lot’s over, not pretty phrase-makers,’ sniffed Orwell. He seemed as ill at ease in the bourgeois décor of Langford Court as he did in his rangy, six-foot frame, all elbows and edges. His breath was sour and his handshake dank as he bade us farewell before the tea was finished, pleading a looming deadline. Mrs Blair apologised for his discourtesy, explaining that he was under great pressure. I was not offended by his disdain for music, small boys and over-eager Home Guard acquaintances. I knew his to be an inner strength, a moral resolve that made him stay in London while other writers fled to country homes, demanding peace and quiet for their muse. Like many writers I would later meet, he violently resented music as a rival for the public’s attention.

Orwell did not remain long at Langford Court, with its dainty fittings and uniformed porters. He moved to Mortimer Crescent, at the Kilburn fringe of my paper round, renting the damp basement and ground floor of a Victorian terraced house where I glimpsed him often at his desk, scribbling in meagre light. He waved at me once, in a vague sort of way, perhaps while in the throes of Animal Farm. His move was otherwise unlucky. The house was bombed in 1943 and the Blairs joined the roofless multitude that converged upon my mother’s gelid mercies.