The woman’s voice grew quieter as she thumped off down the stairs and Ben gave a wry smile. Good food indeed! Mrs Jennings’s breakfasts consisted of a rasher of bacon swimming with grease, an overcooked sausage and an egg that was so hard he might easily have broken his knife on it. Still, he supposed for the rent he paid for his room he shouldn’t really expect a lot more. Glancing about, he took in the gloomy surroundings. An old wardrobe stood against one wall with a chest of drawers that had seen better days standing beside it. There was an old washstand with a cracked jug and bowl standing on it and to the side of that a chair with a very wonky leg. That was it apart from the bed, which again had seen better days. The mattress was so hard he sometimes felt as if he had slept on a door – when he did manage to sleep that was.

The streets beyond the warehouses that led to the docks were full of such lodging houses. Cheap and cheerful, his landlady had told him, but he hadn’t managed to find anything cheerful about the place as yet. Most of them were inhabited by sailors who came and went on the ships that docked there. Dotted in amongst the lodging houses were a fair number of brothels and Ben had taken full advantage of them too. It was a far cry from the smart hotels he had stayed in when he first left Treetops. Strangely the novelty of staying in such places and being waited on hand and foot had soon worn off and Mrs Jennings’s lodging house was quite good enough for him now. He had soon discovered that you could be just as lonely in a palace as you could in a slum.