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Maddie could not get across the Stockport Road. (I don’t know what it’s really called. Perhaps that’s its right name because it’s the main road in from the south. You should not rely on any of my directions.) Maddie waited and waited on the edge of the simmering crowd, looking for a gap. After twenty minutes, she began to get annoyed. There were people pressing against her from behind now, as well. She tried to turn her motorbike round, walking it by the handlebars, and ran into someone.

‘Oi! Mind where you’re pushing that bike!’

‘Sorry!’ Maddie looked up.

It was a crowd of thugs, black-shirted for the rally even though they could get arrested for it, hair slicked back with Brylcreem like a bunch of airmen. They looked Maddie up and down gleefully, pretty sure she would be easy bait.

‘Nice bike.’

‘Nice legs!’

One of them giggled through his nose. ‘Nice —.’

He used an ugly, unspeakable word, and I won’t bother to write it because I don’t think any of you would know what it means in English, and I certainly do not know the French or German for it. The thuggish lad used it like a goading stick and it worked. Maddie shoved the front wheel of the bike past the one she had hit in the first place, and knocked into him again, and he grabbed the handlebars with his own big fists between her hands.

Maddie held on. They struggled for a moment over the motorbike. The boy refused to let go, and his mates laughed.

‘What’s a lass like you need with a big toy like this? Where’d you get it?’

‘At the bike shop, where d’you think!’

‘Brodatt’s,’ said one of them. There was only one on that side of town.

‘Sells bikes to Jews, he does.’

‘Maybe it’s a Jew’s bike.’

You probably don’t know it, but Manchester and its smoky suburbs have got quite a large Jewish population and nobody minds. Well, obviously some idiot Fascists do mind, but I think you see what I mean. They came from Russia and Poland and later Roumania and Austria, all Eastern Europe, all through the nineteenth century. The bike shop whose customers were in question happened to be Maddie’s granddad’s bike shop that he’d had for the last thirty years. He’d done quite well out of it, well enough to keep Maddie’s stylish gran in the manner to which she is accustomed, and they live in a large old house in Grove Green on the edge of the city and have a gardener and a daily girl to do the housekeeping. Anyway when this lot started slinging venom at Maddie’s granddad’s shop, Maddie unwisely engaged in battle with them and said, ‘Does it always take all three of you to complete a thought? Or can you each do it without your mates if you have enough time to think it over first?’