I walked up Castle Street, a fat man in sandals, at two in the afternoon. The engines in the station yard sighed and shunted behind me like hot asthmatic bisons. A raiding gull riding high on the harbour wind crossed invisible bomb sights on my floral shirt; then changed its mind and glided off to practise aerobatics over Anderson’s Bay. The sun bludgeoned down from a dusty sky on the new, black, puddled tar where the tramrails had lately been. Nobody else was out in the glittering afternoon, except one boy of five, bolstered and terrible behind a bath tub in a vacant section, and an elderly she cat mewing for admission outside Queen Mary’s Maternity Hospital.

Suddenly a quick wind, from a ten-year-broken bellows, blew down the pavement and scattered no leaves. A rocking tram clanged and bucketed down Castle Street in the curdled adolescent weather. A girl ghost stood on the kerb, brisk as a nanny goat, with check coat and skirt and orange lipstick. The tram screeched to a stop. With a backward smile she skipped on board. My floral shirt and the spare tyre under it were blown off me in a magician’s moment. Lean as a poker, nimble and blushing, I scrambled on to the moving tram and sat down beside her, afraid to say a word. The conductor, captain of the Castle Street tugboat, lurched up to us. I paid her two-penny fare.