Then there was Kitty. Even before the illness hit him, he’d decided to lie low. He could have sworn that with an extra few minutes he would have worked out a way of getting into her house that night, but that bloody interfering Pop Feeny had come along to spoil his fun. The real problem was, Pop might have recognised him. Alfie had scarpered as fast as he was able, but he knew Pop was no fool. He didn’t know if the self-righteous old ARP warden would have said anything to Kitty. He knew they were close, that Pop was almost like a second father to her, so on the one hand he might have felt obliged to warn her, but on the other he might not have wanted to frighten her.

He was fairly sure Pop hadn’t reported him to his boss down at the docks, or to the police. Alfie had prepared his excuse: that he had just been dropping round to see Tommy and check if the new bike he’d got through Frank was all right, or if the lad wanted Alfie to go ahead and get him a better one. He figured this would be plausible – Tommy could back him up that he’d made the offer in the first place. He hadn’t needed to use it, though. This was the one advantage of being laid up for so long. The odds were that by the time he eventually made it back into the outside world, everyone would have forgotten the incident.

He hadn’t though. He craved news of Kitty, but no matter how much salacious gossip his mother repeated when she got home from shopping, she never mentioned her. He was all too familiar with the progress of the Feeny twins, whose unexpected arrival was the talk of the neighbourhood, and the never-ending sorrow of old Mrs Kerrigan, missing her POW son Sid and now mourning Eddy Feeny too, despite her never having had a good word for him as far as anyone could remember while he was alive. There was the report that Mr and Mrs Mawdsley had had a goose for Christmas dinner and invited lots of their neighbours to share it. Alfie had not appreciated that titbit – it had been stuck-up Mr Mawdsley who’d led the complaints about the poisoned meat that had got him banned from the Sailor’s Rest and forced to go up to Clydebank.