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withering glare over at Lewis, who had somehow managed to get his mask on upside down. Lewis Bream, she calmly informed his classmates, would now be gassed to death.
    So, before the next wave of planes was summoned Mrs. Fog went through the four steps again: separating the straps between fingers and thumbs, tucking the chin into the ridge at the bottom, pulling the straps back over the head so that the mask was snug against the face and running one’s finger around the edge of the rubber to ensure there were no gaps for the gas to get in.
    The children stuffed their masks back into their boxes and the boxes back into their desks. Mrs. Fog reset her clock, then raised her hand and looked around the faces, as if almost daring someone to make a sound. Her forefinger floated before her face, with all the children’s eyes on it. At one point it seemed to be heading toward her lips, to tryand squeeze even more silence out of an already silent class, then at the last second changed its mind and shot toward the window.
    “Gas attack!” shouted Mrs. Fog.
    She wore an expression of bug-eyed asphyxiation—a theatrical touch which so impressed some of her pupils they almost ripped the lids off their boxes trying to get at their masks. The ensuing calamity differed from the previous one only in that it was over sooner. There was just as much shrieking and just as much clattering of desk lids, but when they were done and Mrs. Fog looked out at the rows of masked, anonymous children she was heartened to find that they had at least all got them on the right way.
    As her charges would happily testify, Mrs. Fog was not an easy woman to please, so when they saw her nod at them a wave of relief swept around the classroom and they began to pull their masks from their heads. But Mrs. Fog raised her hand and announced in a muffled voice that they must keep them on for two whole minutes—and held up two fingers to emphasize the point—to make sure they could breathe while wearing them.
    The children turned and peered through their visors at their neighbors. Some fiddled with the straps. Others studied their own hands and nodded at friends across the room. It made for an eerie sort of atmosphere. The only sound was the air being drawn in and out of all the gas masks and the steady ticking of Mrs. Fog’s clock. Then one of the Boys discovered that by exhaling with some force it was possible to produce a farting sound between his cheek and mask. This got all the other children giggling and trying to make farting sounds of their own. They couldn’t help themselves. They doubled up in fits of laughter but whenthey came to take a breath found it impossible to fill their lungs.
    Their eyes streamed, their chests dragged at the filters and if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Fog’s formidable presence they would have pulled their masks away. The straps caught at their hair, the smell of rubber filled their heads.
    This is what it will be like when the bombs are dropped, they thought.
    For a few precious seconds the war and its ridiculous paraphernalia had been humbled, ridiculed. Then all of a sudden it wasn’t funny anymore.
    The pull of the gas mask’s strap on their shoulders and the knock of the box against their hips were soon so familiar as to be unremarkable, and the only novelty, apart from swinging it at the head of an adversary, was in using the limited space around the mask to store something precious and sufficiently small. Lewis Bream achieved brief notoriety by squeezing a fieldmouse into his, but Mrs. Fog’s spot checks, instigated after the mouse had chewed a sizable hole in Lewis’ mask, put a stop to that and in the intervening years the gas mask boxes were opened only during the practice on the first Monday of each month and soon became nothing but another appendage, like their scarves or gloves.
    Bobby could see that the Boys were up to something. They had been in conspicuously high spirits all afternoon, glancing over at him,