His visits to Florrie were irregular: sometimes nightly, then silence for a week. I would wake up thinking I heard a door click, only to find the rain spitting on my window-panes and the house quiet as a coma. Dovidl said nothing. Excluded from his sex-life, fearing that anything I said might alienate him still further, I grew anxious and irritable. I tried bingeing on KitKats, reverting to infantile comforts, but milk shortages had forced Rowntrees to substitute lactate reassurance with plain chocolate in faded blue wrappers. Disgusted, I never broke another bar.

Cocoa, camomile tea and tablets lifted from my mother’s bedside table failed to send me to sleep. I lay on my back praying for oblivion, while part of me listened for the C-sharp squeal of an unoiled hinge, the breathy, toneless whisper of welcome.

One summer’s morning at four, I heard the front door closing and a footstep on the staircase. This conformed to none of the familiar sounds. Grabbing my cricket-bat, I rushed out to confront burglars. What I met was Dovidl, in his disused synagogue suit, heading up to his room.

‘Where have you been?’ I hissed.

‘Out,’ he said, ‘to get some fresh air.’

‘Where?’

‘Up West. Want to come with?’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow night, if you like.’

I could not bring myself to accept. Once I would have rushed along with any madcap suggestion of his, but now I was sheltering behind a fortress of suspicion. What did he want of me? What were his motives? Did he need me to cover up for him? Was he inviting me out of pity? He was so much older than me now, in experience and in looks. He probably went to places that would refuse me entry.

Some days later, on our way to school, he made a second approach. ‘I’d really like you to come along, Mottl,’ he said. ‘I need your eyes about me, your ears, your analytical faculties.’

‘Where is it that you go?’

‘Come and see.’

That night, as soon as my parents turned out their bedroom lights, Dovidl opened my door. ‘Suit and hat, let’s go,’ he commanded.

Moments later we were out of the terrace and chasing the last bus into town, a number thirteen that took us down Baker Street, through Oxford Circus, around Piccadilly and to the seamy edge of Soho, where we jumped off and headed south. Dovidl lit a cigarette on dismounting, the first I had seen him smoke. I inhaled his exhalation and tried to look nonchalant. Covent Garden at midnight was sweeping out the last theatregoers and setting up the odoriferous all-night market. Canvas-covered lorries thundered in mountains of fruit and veg. Street cries that harked back to Chaucer’s day split the heady air as porters heaved sacks of apples and hundredweights of spuds for trilbied grocers and ascetic-looking restaurateurs to inspect. Good food was prized above rubies in those rationed times and it was anyone’s guess how much of the stuff got knocked off by black-marketeers before it reached the distribution chain. ‘See that bloke in the café?’ said Dovidl, indicating a Homburg hat above brown coat and wire specs, reading an early edition of tomorrow’s Times. ‘He’s a Treasury snoop, drinks coffee all night, never says a word. Here to catch smugglers, mostly booze and fags.’