‘Like a bomb hit it,’ a man said, passing by in the street as my dad was locking the front door. My mum was beside me putting her coat on and looking up at the flattened houses – you could see through to the back of the school playground. Bits of brick wall were standing, but the houses just weren’t there any more. And they’d knocked down the first two houses on the corner of our street next to the bomb site.

‘The council,’ my dad said over his shoulder.

‘Why?’ The man paused on his way and shook his head, ‘Because they got outside loos?’

My dad shrugged, putting the keys in his pocket, ‘They want the land. Big Ben is just there.’

‘We’re being slum cleared,’ Manus said.

My mum looked embarrassed and tried to hide it by taking hold of Busola’s hand to go. But you couldn’t hide it, the houses were gone.

The man looked at us closer and I looked at him. He was sunburned but his face was smooth except for the bald lines in folds on his forehead, his ears were too big and he had sandy hair in wisps off the top of his head. He wasn’t a tramp, he had old clothes on and they were dusty but he knew where he was, and his eyes were blue like the sky.

‘They didn’t put down foundations under these houses,’ he said. ‘They got put up like tents on top of Vauxhall Gardens. There was always a storm gonna blow ’em down.’

My dad put a finger up in the air, ‘What wind?’ My mum shifted on to the other foot and pulled Busola closer. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ and he put his chin out like he didn’t care what anyone thought.

The man nodded and a grin came over his face, ‘I used to live here. Loved it.’ He nodded at my mum and went on up the street towards the missing houses, only turning back over his shoulder to call out, ‘Good luck.’

‘OK, we can go,’ my dad said, and my mum made us hold hands to go down to the main road.

I was holding on to Manus at the back and whispered, ‘What’s slum cleared? Did you know they were gonna knock down those houses?’

‘Open your eyes,’ he said.

I looked back and saw the man climb on to the mound of broken bricks and stumble down the other side holding on to a wall with part of the windowsill in it, like that was where he lived and he was going home.

‘They gonna do that to us?’ We turned the corner towards the train, the cars were louder on the main road, so I stopped and pulled Manus’s hand when he didn’t answer, ‘Are they?’