Chapter 3
About the new house, the new child and the new king
THIS is how it happened.
Violet was pregnant. His father told Adam as they ate chips by the Thames, boats passed and the smell of oil and seaweed mingled in the air. It was November 1939. There were more police on the streets than before, and men in uniform everywhere. Sandbags were piled in front of the windows, and long lengths of barbed wire lay about like malicious feathers. The hunchbacked Anderson protects punctured gardens, and ditches had been dug in parks. White posters seemed to be hanging in every available seat: reminders of lighting restrictions, proclamations from the king, all the instructions for a country at war.
Most of the kids Adam knew were out of town now, cramming through train stations on their way to
