We all stood up and said thank you on our way out. But we couldn’t go quickly because when they knocked on the door it was us who bullied our mum into letting them in. We didn’t think he’d be back till later and she knew we were bored. ‘It’s your own fault,’ she said, but there was nowhere to go and only four houses left between us and where they were knocking down. Most of the rest of the street was boarded up. So we mobbed her, saying it wasn’t fair not letting us see a film in our own house, and got her to let them set up the screen and projector in the front room. It was only when they started asking questions and he couldn’t get the sound to work that we said we’d watch the Tom and Jerry anyway, and hoped it would finish and they’d go away. They didn’t speak like real people, he was pretending to be one of us and she talked down like she was being nice but had other ways of thinking about us than the ones she was saying. So it was a shock for my dad when he heard it.

‘I can see you keep them under control,’ she said. His smile stopped being charming.

‘Thank you for coming,’ my mum said. ‘My husband will see you out. Children, let’s go and brush our teeth.’ She came down the stairs with us to the backyard, and put a finger to her lips at the back door so we could listen to them going.

My dad was asking on the stairs how they heard of us and the woman was saying lots of agencies were involved to help people with the move and that we were well known to them. Johnny was telling my dad where the youth club was in the old Beaufoy Institute on Black Prince Road, and would we be coming? We could hear him getting open the front door and them lugging the equipment out. She was asking if he’d like to set up a meeting to discuss it. As the door closed we heard him saying, ‘Please, thank you, and don’t come back.’

He couldn’t wait till we’d gone to bed, he came straight out the backyard, ‘What are you doing letting them in?’

She had us around her and said, ‘The children need something to do.’

‘You can’t see they are targeting the children?’