Just as, for years, all through the eroding streets of the poor, empty houses had been taken over by squatters settling in families or groups of families, so that for a long time it had been impossible to say: This is a working class area, this is homogeneous — so, too, in these great buildings once tenanted only by the well-to-do, by the professional and business people, were now families or clans of poor people. What it amounted to was that a flat, a house, belonged to the people who had the enterprise to move into it. So, in the corridors and halls of the building I lived in you could meet, as in a street or a market, every sort of person.

A Professor and his wife and his daughter lived in the twin set of rooms to mine down the corridor; immediately above me was a family of Indians with many relatives and dependants. I mention these two sets of people, because they were closest to me, and because I want to make the point that it is not as if an awareness of what went on behind walls and ceilings had been lacking before the start of — what? Here I do find difficulty, because there is nothing I can pinpoint, make definite… now I am talking not about the public pressures and events we encapsulate in words like 'They' 'Them' 'It' and so on, but my own private discoveries which became so urgent and which were making such a claim on me at that time. I can't say: 'On such and such a day I knew that behind the wall a certain quality of life was being lived.' Not even: 'It was in the spring of that year that…', No, the consciousness of that other life, developing there so close to me, hidden from me, was a slow thing, coming precisely into the category of understanding we describe in the word realise, with its connotation of a gradual opening into comprehension. Such an opening, a growing, may be an affair of weeks, months, years.