He wanted to give Florence everything. She asked where he’d grown up, who’d raised him, so he told her plainly: his great-uncle Patrick Leventree had spared him from the orphanage. She sat there listening and nodding, sipping tea, while he accounted for his troubles in the only way he could make sense of them.

‘I called him Uncle Patrick, but most people called him Lev. He used to push a handcart. Made the thing himself from scrap. He was industrious like that. He’d take it down the docks and back a hundred times a week. The folk who came in off the ships would pay him and he’d cart their wares back home – their kitbags, furniture, big joints of meat and palliasses, all kinds. He’d been doing it for years and it was all he really knew. He never spoke a bitter word to anyone, my uncle Patrick. He’d be there for people if they needed help. Ask Lev, they’d say. Old Lev won’t mind. But times have been especially hard on everyone round here. And circumstances change the way you’ve got to think. Came to a point when Uncle Patrick couldn’t use his handcart like he used to any more. The ships weren’t coming into dock and cargo wasn’t moving anywhere, so all the men were gathering on the corners, asking after jobs – but there was nothing going. Just a bit of money from the government to live off, and it barely got you anything. A loaf or two. Everybody was on tick with every shop in town. My uncle had gone knocking on a thousand doors, looking for work, and he got sick of it. He wasn’t in the best of health. And we were living off potatoes and fresh air. He could’ve dragged me out of school and sent me off somewhere to scrounge a wage – he didn’t, though. He knew that I was better off in class. But still, he got me helping him on evenings and weekends.

‘He started totting with his handcart, collecting empty jam jars. He knew a fella at the Hartley’s factory who’d buy them back, a ha’penny for ten. That kept us going for a time. But it wasn’t quite enough to stop the rent man banging on the door. My uncle had a lot of pain by then and he was really showing his age – his knees were shot. He couldn’t walk, most days, and couldn’t do the totting any more. So he sent me off to see a bloke he knew called Stanley Hoult – he was a runner for a local bookie. Stan said he had things that needed moving with the handcart later and he’d pay me half a crown to do it. Well, I knew what I was getting into – for that kind of money, it was obvious – but I reasoned we were desperate for it or my uncle would’ve told me not to do it.