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poulterers, lugging geese that weighed almost as much as he did, their beaks and feet tied with a loop of bass and their wings pinioned. Harold had also recalled the new streets even then being laid out across fields of buttercups. The heaps of London bricks waited on each plot, the blond skeletons of roofs stretched their bright pine trusses in perspectives a hundred yards long waiting for the tilers with pads of sacking on their knees to cover them up. This was the work of men like Cameron Corbett, who built estates over large parts of Eltham and Hither Green and became the first Lord Rowallan on the strength of it.
    Somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century the goose farm beside the Effra was bought and it, too, quickly disappeared beneath brick and asphalt just as the river itself was destined to vanish. Harold’s father did well out of the sale of his land and thereafter the family moved briefly to Tulse Hill before fetching up near Well Hall station at the foot of Eltham’s modest hill. Well Hall itself was an eighteenth-century house built on the remains of a Tudor manor and here at the age of fifteen Harold became an all-purpose knives, boots and jobbing boy. If Jayjay were to be believed he also became the clandestine lover of Well Hall’s tenant, Edith Nesbit. E. Nesbit had moved to the Hall in 1899 and stayed until 1922, a good deal longer than Harold’s association with her household. He had certainly left her employ, and supposedly also her bed, well before 1906 when she published the book that made her famous, The Railway Children. By then Jayjay’s father had become apprenticed as a ship’s broker and settled into the career that was to sustain him and his family for the rest of his working life. Why that line of business, particularly? Maybe he was responding to a force of nature that in one way or another still influenced the life of every Londoner of the time. The buttercups, orchards and paddocks of Herne Hill and the rest of suburbia might be fast disappearing, but the River Thames was at the full flood of its vitality. From Eltham’s eminence there were views northwards (fog permitting) towards Woolwich and Greenwich. The Royal Dockyard was not three miles away. Just across the river lay Silvertown and the great commercial hub of the docklands. The port and its shipping were London’s heart as well as the Empire’s.
    When his son was born in 1918 Harold was already thirty-three and had been married seven months. The Great War put normal life into abeyance where it had not stopped it altogether. Harold was lucky. His knowledge of ships, their cargoes and insurance had earned him a desk in a crowded Admiralty office instead of a posting to France. It was while he was there that hemet Olive, who was working in the Censorship. AWSCD * was the department whose job was similar to that of the civilian censorship: checking the letters of RN personnel for inadvertent breaches of security as well as for signs of a more intentional espionage.

    – I will tell you about my mother (said Jayjay early on) in the hopes that I shan’t have to refer to her again. When they met it seems she was by no means a beauty though apparently very jolly. By the time I can remember her she was anything but jolly, having lost a favourite brother in the last week of the war and then fallingvictim to a terminal attack of religion. This was a particularly crippling strain where any sense of irony was concerned: Methodist or Wesleyan or Congregationalist, I forget which. Really, I’ve blotted it out completely and it would take a hypnotist to recover the memory. Somewhere I must know the answer perfectly well. The house was full of tracts and she was always going to church meetings. You never met such dreary people as her friends. They had in common a worthy dowdiness, or possibly a dowdy worthiness. Not unkind to me as a child, certainly, but the sort who would practically faint with horror if ever someone offered them