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sticking in a twelve-year-old mind. But two stories on page two remain with me to this day: one was of a suicide of a rather horrible kind – a man who drenched himself in petrol and then set light to himself with a match, and the other dealt with what was called a gang robbery. Gangs were a feature of my imagination: the Amalekites were a gang. Apparently this gang had tied up and gagged a jeweller in a district called Wimbledon. He had been working late, ‘taking stock’, when a man of ‘military bearing’ had knocked on the door and asked the way to Baxter Street – a street unknown in Wimbledon. After the man had turned away and before the jeweller had time to close his door the gang had arrived, and with them when they left went the whole stock , valued at several thousand pounds. There was no evidence that the man with ‘the military bearing’ was concerned in the robbery and the police appealed to him to come forward and help in their inquiries. It was believed that the same gang had been concerned in another robbery some weeks before.
    I crept down and replaced the paper, and afterwards, lying on the sofa with sleep a long way off, I wondered at the strange coincidence that the street which was said not to exist bore my own name. My adopted mother next day seemed harassed and apprehensive. I had an impression that she was in fear of a strange caller. Twice there was a ring at the bell and she sent me to answer it, while she waited at the bottom of the stairs with that anxious look on her face. The first time it proved to be only the milkman and the second time someone who had got the street number wrong. In the middle of supper that night – as usual, my favourite dish, a hamburger with an egg on top – she spoke up suddenly apropos of nothing at all, with a kind of ferocity as though she were contradicting a remark of mine (but I had been as silent as herself). ‘He’s a good man,’ she said. ‘He’d never do anything that was really wicked. It’s not in his nature. You should know that.’
    ‘Know what?’
    ‘Sometimes I think he’s just too kind to live. He makes me scared.’
    It was during the prolonged absence of the Captain which followed that Liza began to worry about my education. ‘You ought to be learning things,’ she told me over a cup of tea.
    ‘What things?’
    ‘Pretty nearly everything,’ she said. ‘Like sums.’
    ‘I was never much good at sums.’
    ‘Spelling.’
    ‘My spelling’s not bad.’
    ‘Geography. If only the Captain would return he’d teach you that. You see he’s a very travelled man.’
    ‘Is he travelling now?’
    ‘I expect he is.’
    ‘You don’t think he might have set himself alight?’ I asked, remembering page two.
    ‘Good heavens no. What makes you say that?’
    ‘It was in that
Telegraph
he sent you.’
    ‘So you read that paper?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And you said nothing. That wasn’t straight of you. The Captain wants you to be straight. He says that one day you’ll look after me when he’s gone.’
    ‘He’s gone now.’
    ‘He means gone away for ever.’
    ‘You’d miss him badly, wouldn’t you?’
    ‘It would be like dying – only worse. I want to be the one that goes first. But he says I’ve got to look after you. I think that’s why he brought you here. To make sure I don’t go first.’
    ‘Are you very sick?’ I asked with the cold curiosity of my age.
    ‘No, but I was once. That was the first time he saw me – he came with your father to the hospital. Sometimes when he looks at me – he looks at me in a scared sort of way. As though I were still lying sick in that bed … Then I get sore at him. I don’t want him scared because of me. He might do something rash.’
    This conversation was perhaps my second lesson in what love might mean between two grown-up people. Love, it was quite clear to me now, meant fear, and I suppose it was the same fear which made Liza go out very early each morning to buy a
Telegraph
so