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with?’
    ‘Yes. Here. A pencil.’
    ‘All right, then. I’ll leave the candle lit and then come back again and watch you put it out the right way. We don’t want a fire, do we? Your mam wouldn’t like that.’ And she left us.
    ‘How many kisses?’
    ‘I vote three.’ I had no doubts.
    ‘Perhaps we should take one off cos we’re on the floor, not even a bed.’ Jack continued to take his older-brother responsibilities seriously.
    ‘I don’t care.’
    ‘There’s no taps in the house.’
    ‘It’s triffic here. Trains and everything.’
    I am sure he felt the same as I did but wanted to be sure. ‘What about no electricity?’
    ‘I don’t care.’
    ‘And no lavatory.’ It was his last try.
    I went on stubbornly, ‘I don’t care.’
    He relaxed. ‘Me neither.’ At last he said what we were both feeling. ‘It’s like being on holiday only there’s no sea.’
    ‘We could put four,’ I said. ‘The more we put, the happier Mum and Dad will be.’
    ‘D’you think so?’
    ‘Yeah.’
     
    We ringed the card with kisses and posted it next morning.

Chapter Four
    When Jack and I ringed that card with kisses there was an unintended symbolism: Jack and I were ringed with love, though we didn’t know it and would have been embarrassed to have used such words.
    Our foster-parents Rose and Jack Phillips were Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack to everybody in Doublebois. This was extraordinary: they were not Cornish; they had only lived in the tightly knit little hamlet for ten or fifteen years (a blink in rural timescales); he was neither church nor chapel, though she occasionally went to church and – even more occasionally – dragged him along. Yet even the ancient Mrs Moore next door and Granny Peters, two doors up the Court, a whole generation older than them, always called them in the broadest Cornish Ahn’ee Rose and Uncle Jack. It was clearly some sort of tribute to their characters. He was a South Wales miner turned platelayer on the Great Western Railway. Their own two sons and one daughter were grown-up. Uncle Jack had been in the trenches in the First World War, in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, involved in some very heavy fighting. He had been invalided out with shrapnel wounds. Our father had been too young to be conscripted for the First World War and was just too old for this one, while Jack and I were – as yet – too young. We were a lucky family. But Uncle Jack and his sons fell precisely into the wrong age groups.
    Two others who were in the wrong age group were a pair of soldiers, privates, who were the reason for Jack and me having to top ’n’ tail for a few nights on the mattress in the hall. They were up in the back, or I should say front, bedroom and were direct from Dunkirk, stationed in the grounds of Doublebois House, a large Victorian mansion which stood in its own substantial wooded grounds with two gated entrances just down and across the road from Railway Cottages. It had been turned into an Army camp, complete with Nissen huts up the twin drives to the big house, where the officers were. When we arrived, immediately after the Army’s retreat from France, the whole place was overflowing. Soldiers were billeted anywhere and everywhere. I don’t know how the local people had found room for us vackies.
    One of our two soldiers was bright and nervous, the other had undergone some sort of shock and just sat staring into space the whole time he was there. The bright one smoked a lot and winked at Jack and me about his companion, making light of something that clearly concerned him. He tended his comrade’s every need, taking him out to the wash-house to shave him and leading him to the outside privy. I felt simultaneously grown-up to be taken into his confidence and embarrassed about an adult taking so much trouble to reassure us boys. We watched them with childhood’s detached curiosity.
    I can see Auntie Rose’s concerned, unhappy face when she looked at the benumbed soldier and