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of the Central Committee to the Communist League
.’
    Mr Hepple beamed as he showed off his knowledge. He paused to gulp down some more coffee, and Kathy, seeing that Brock was showing no sign of wanting to interrupt him, made to speak. Hepple sensed this, however, and got in first.
    ‘Cramped, cold and spartan as their accommodation was, it at least had the advantage of being only a short walk to the British Museum, for which Marx gained a reader’s ticket in the June of that year, and where he spent the next three months immersed in back numbers of the
Economist
. Soon after they moved into Jerusalem Lane, Jenny became ill and, fearful of losing her as they had lost their fourth child not long before, Karl sent her to stay with friends for over a month. It was during this period that the maid became mysteriously pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy towards the end of that year. Soon after, around Christmas time, the family was evicted for not paying their rent, and, with the help of Marx’s friend Engels, moved on, firstly to lodgings in Soho, and later, when they inherited money, out to the new suburbs of Kentish Town and Hampstead.
    ‘A hundred years later, in the period after the Second World War, Jerusalem Lane was largely unchanged, and was still providing shelter to refugees from European upheavals,as waves of Latvians, East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs and Poles made their way westward. For most it was, as for the Marxes, a temporary stage on their route to prosperity in the suburbs of the Home Counties, but others stayed, setting up small businesses in the buildings which had once housed the Russian-Jewish clog maker, butcher and lace trader. The key to the success of these small businesses (and I would count my father’s practice among them) was Jerusalem Lane itself, which provided a short cut for people travelling from the tube station at its north end to the northern parts of Holborn and to the hospital of Great Ormond Street. Each day the ebb and flow of these travellers have irrigated the cash registers of Witz’s Cameras, Kowalski’s Old and New Books, Brunhilde’s Flower Shop and all the rest, while the Balaton Café and Böll’s Coffee and Chocolates have tempted people to linger before moving on to the noise and traffic of the surrounding streets, where a somewhat greyer style of trading—office supplies, photocopy services and travel agencies—has taken over.
    ‘However, none of the children of these refugees of the 40s and 50s have remained in the Lane; they have moved out to the suburbs, returning occasionally to visit their now ageing parents, still living above the shop, still without cars (for there is nowhere to put them), and still performing their good-natured, if sometimes fiery and increasingly eccentric, revue of Central European politics of a generation ago.’
    Brock roused himself. ‘Mrs Winterbottom had children?’
    ‘A son, yes.’ But Mr Hepple hadn’t quite finished the broad picture. ‘The Winterbottoms didn’t really fit this pattern. They weren’t refugees, unless from Australia,’ and he gave a self-deprecating little laugh to avoid the possibility of offence. ‘They weren’t Central Europeans or Jews. They were simply Londoners returning almost by accident to this area. But they became, and Meredith especially, the linchpins of the place.’
    ‘I met the son yesterday evening, sir,’ Kathy said. ‘Terry Winter. Lives in South London. Eleanor phoned him and he came to the house.’
    ‘Winter?’ Brock queried.
    ‘Yes, he was particular about that.’
    ‘He dropped the “bottom”,’ the solicitor interjected, anxious to resume his role as principal storyteller. ‘Meredith was rather annoyed when he did it. Quite disgusted in fact. I rather gathered it was his wife who was behind it, so to speak.’ They all showed their appreciation of his little joke.
    ‘No other children, then?’ Brock asked.
    The solicitor shook his head.
    ‘And the sisters? How