There were lots of toys. Oxfam-style toys identified as Institute property in crude marker pen lettering. The usual mean and shabby stuff. All except the dolls’ house. At that point, we didn’t realise that the doll’s house was telling us something. And yes, if we’d been brighter, stronger, less beaten, we’d have taken one look behind its façade then gathered up our belongings and made a break for it there and then.

   It was the most beautiful doll’s house I’d ever seen close up.

   It must have been about four foot tall and just as much wide and it was a Georgian townhouse rendered in incredible detail – pillars, porticos, friezes, mouldings, window surrounds, chimney pots. It looked wonderfully well maintained and immaculately painted. The whole frontage opened on hinges that creaked substantially, like a cupboard door.

   But, oh, the horror inside. 

   It was a squat. A dosshouse, a thieves kitchen, a shooting gallery. There’d clearly been interior detail at some stage but hardly anything remained. Not a mantelpiece nor a mirror nor a light fitting. All torn out. It was grimy throughout; and the floor in one of the rooms was charred, the walls patterned with ugly black flame licks.

   But it was the furniture that was most unsettling – an ugly collection of crude woodblocks and lumps of hardboard nailed together. That rough cube with battens like ice lolly sticks nailed to it was meant to be a chair, that slab of hardboard was a bed.

   And the scale was horribly out too – this furniture was huge as well as crude and clunky. You will say there are worse things in this naughty world, and you will be absolutely right, but there was something grotesque about opening up that beautiful façade and seeing what we saw. At that time, in that place. There was something hideous and doom-laden about it.

   Its only inhabitant was a huge knitted woolly lamb and this woolly lamb was crammed, absolutely stuffed, into one of the smaller rooms. It wasn’t easy extracting it. It had been wedged in there good and proper. Not by a child either. Or a freakishly strong child if it was a child.