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nodding and raising her eyebrows as if she found it very interesting.
    “Now, I’d say that some of these pictures look like they could do to be cut out,” she said.
    Bobby agreed that they did. She turned the page and pointed at one or two photographs she liked the look of and encouraged Bobby to do the same.
    “I shall leave you in charge,” she said and got to her feet. “But take your time. We want them nice and neat.”
    By the time she stepped into the bath she could hear Bobby busily snipping away behind the sofa. He had already cut out a British soldier guarding the wreckage of a downed Me 109, a tram on its side in a tangle of overhead wires and a bearded sailor leaning on a harbor wall with a Capstan Full Strength wedged between his fingers and the same dreamy expression as the Captain when he talked about shipwrecks or Marjory Pye.
    “I’ll put them in a pile,” Bobby announced from behind the sofa.
    “Good boy,” said Miss Minter and slipped down, so that the water came right up to her chin.
    On the first Monday after the outbreak of war Mrs. Fog stood at the front of the class in her gas mask. The straps clamped her hair to her head—made her look like a muzzled bear. She stood with her hands on her hips, defiant, staring at one desk then another until the only sound in the classroom was the air wheezing in and out of the filter at the end of her snout. The children were beginning to find her behavior deeply disconcerting—were beginning to wishshe would stop staring and open her mouth—although Aldred Crouch thought it quite possible that she had been talking for several minutes but they just couldn’t hear what she had to say.
    When she finally peeled the mask back from her face her hair sprang back to life. She pulled a handkerchief out from the sleeve of her cardigan and blew her nose. She had it on good authority, she said, that Mr. Hitler had plans to drop gas on the village. And as the idea of Hitler’s gas coiled around the children’s ankles Mrs. Fog added that if any boy or girl needed proof of the terrible damage gas could do, they need look no farther than Joseph Stewart of High Cross Farm, uncle to their own Connie Barlow, who was blinded by mustard gas in France in 1917 (which came as quite a shock to young Connie, who’d always been under the impression that her uncle Joe had been blind since he was a baby and deeply resented the poor man being paraded before the class).
    When the Germans dropped their gas on South Devon, the children learned, their only refuge would be the gas mask at their side, and the time it took them to get it out of its box and over their face would determine whether they lived or died. Mrs. Fog opened her desk drawer and took out the clock she used on the annual sports day. Then, row by row, the children were directed over to the coat hooks to collect their gas masks and told to find a corner for them in their desks.
    Mrs. Fog folded her own mask back into its box and slotted the lid back down on it. Then the children watched as her hand crept toward the clock.
    “Is everybody ready?” she said.
    They could hardly have been more so—could alreadymake out the distant rumble of German bombers—but had to wait for what felt like an eternity, with Mrs. Fog’s hand hanging in the air, before she finally called out, “Gas attack!” and hit the clock.
    The only children not holding their breath were the ones screaming. There hadn’t been this much excitement in the classroom since Hector Massie had set fire to his coat. Children were struck in the face by their neighbors’ elbows, gas masks and boxes went flying and in no time the boys and girls found themselves choking on the imaginary gas.
    But within a minute or so they all managed to get their masks on, and when the last child was finally sitting bolt upright Mrs. Fog hit the clock again. She turned its face to her and shook her head.
    “Too slow,” she said, “and much too sloppy.”
    She cast a