The police came the next day, a Monday, “investigating an assault on three minors.”

I say “police.” It was a policeman on a bicycle, a young one. (The uniform had changed slightly, but he still reminded me of Jack in his WRC tunic during the war.) Mam and I had sort of known the previous one, a portly, incurious man with the unlikely name of PC Sargent, who accepted Mam’s assurance that I was visiting from Hexham and had a growth disorder. He simply was not interested so long as we caused no trouble, and we did not.

This one, PC Armitage, asked too many questions, and looked far too interested in everything. We sat in the backyard: me, Mam, and him. Amy the goat (who had replaced the previous Amy) bleated and the chickens pecked around. The policeman looked uncomfortable: a townie. He even flinched when Biffa brushed against his leg. He took his pointed helmet off to reveal his shiny, bald head. He was only about twenty-five.

“How old are you, son?” He was writing everything down in a little notebook.

“What’s your date of birth?”

“Where do you go to school?”

“How long have you been here?”

“Tell me what happened yesterday.”

I told him the lies I had practiced. I was fourteen, I said. I had left school. Back then, you could leave school at that age.

“You’re a little lad for fourteen, aren’t you?” he said.

I shrugged.

“And the fight? What happened?”

I told him the truth.

“So, it was you against them three, was it?”

I nodded. I did not mention Biffa.

I think the man even looked a little bit impressed. “You know one of them went to the hospital? Fractured knee.”

I shrugged again.

There was not a great deal more he could ask, but I could tell he was not satisfied. It was the way he kept looking round the yard, looking at me, looking at Mam, as if saying to himself, There’s more to this than meets the eye.

Trust me: I have lived long enough to recognize that look when I see it. Mam had seen it too. It always means that more questions will follow.

Some official, somewhere, will decide that “something’s not quite right” and start finding reasons to pry. When that happens, we normally find that it is useful to move away for a while.

And so it was. A week later, Mam was questioned by a woman from the Local Education Authority while I hid upstairs. Then the policeman came back with another officer, and someone from the local council’s social services department.

Which was why, six weeks later, if anyone had come to check up on my age, or schooling, or anything else, they would have found the old cottage securely locked up, its windows boarded over, and it would remain like that for almost thirty years.

Then we came back, and things were fine. Honestly they were; they were really fine. A new housing estate had been built on the other side of the woods toward the golf course. Whitley Bay was quieter in the summer, because people started to go to Spain instead, but there were lots more people generally, and they all, it seemed, had a motor car, but still—no one really bothered us, apart from the little nosy girl, and that was not what you would call “bother.”

And then…the fire happened, and I discovered, for the first time ever, what it was to be totally alone.