When we got off the Tube and walked through the snowy twilight of Regent’s Park to Cumberland Place, it felt as though it was us who had pushed our way through the wardrobe door and got into Narnia.
It was hard to believe the difference between where we’d just been and where we were staying. I had to admit to myself that I felt completely safe walking across Regent’s Park in the near dark, and had none of that prickly, edgy feeling I’d had walking through the Limehouse Estate in broad daylight. It was then that I truly understood what Missy Morgan had been saying. The things you wanted for your family were not only material. You wanted safety too. How could two boroughs of the same city be so different? How could one family have so little, and another have so much? This afternoon I’d been drinking tea from a Sports Direct mug. Tonight I’d be drinking Veuve Clicquot 1984 from a crystal glass. Not for the first time that day, I began to believe that all those anti-Establishment protesters we’d seen at Speaker’s Corner, wearing the face of Guy Fawkes, had a point.