‘Shut up,’ he said, and I stifled them. ‘Never let me hear you spreading lies. The woman is trying to feed her family. If you think you can run wild in the street and I won’t find out, if you ever do anything so stupid again, I will break your head! Do you hear me?’

We nodded. Busola gave me a sideways look so he could see she still blamed me, but I didn’t look back.

‘Now get out before I punish you!’ he said.

The next day at school, Thaddeus wouldn’t speak to me, but with Sandra and Busola it didn’t seem to make any difference. They still played cat’s cradle with the string passing backwards and forwards between their hands and fingers. I saw him digging in the playground on his own because he’d been told off in class for not paying attention and wandering off, but I avoided him. I didn’t know what to say. He kept digging his hand in the sand and flicking, digging and letting it run out through his fingers, like he was trying to dig his way out of having to talk to anyone. I left him alone. He dug down, crouched in the sandpit holding on to sand, and never spoke to me again.

The Thames was flooding and the sirens opened. The sound came in waves, we’d never heard them before. There were the dark air-raid shelters by the flats that were full of rubble, and we played on the bomb sites, but we didn’t know that warning sound that came from everywhere and emptied the streets. The school closed and they told us to run home with the wailing sound following us all the way.

I was one of the fastest. There wasn’t any traffic past the London City Mission, past the shut-up shops, down Auckland Street which was empty of cars, around by the main road, under the railway arch and across to the silence of the embankment.

I got up to the river and put my foot on to the ledge to look over and see the flood. It was at the top of the wall, running level with my eyes all the way across to the other side. A slop of water splashed on to my face. It lapped at the monster fish round the lamp posts. I felt the pull of the water, the swirl of the current – that I was being dragged away.

I stood down, and I was alone on the pavement. No one else was coming. The sirens were sounding like slow panic, the river was above me and Thaddeus’s voice was pounding in my chest, telling me run!

Lambeth Walk

‘Come on,’ my mum said.