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herself.
    So we tell her. She must have been about ten years old. We tell her not to tell a living soul we've told her, but we tell her. It sounded half like a fairy-tale, after all, half like what you'd make up to tell a kid.
    How years ago when they first got married Uncle Jack and Auntie Amy, who weren't her real aunt and uncle, of course, but she knew that, had this little baby girl called June. But it wasn't a proper baby, it wasn't born right, it had to be looked after special. It happens sometimes, not so often, hardly ever, but it happens. And Auntie Amy knew she couldn't have another baby, at least not without running the same risk, so she wasn't a happy woman. Jack wasn't too chuffed either.
    Then there was the war. Bombs dropping on Bermondsey and one of 'em drops on your ma and pa's old home, but that's a different story, because there's another bomb which drops on the house where the Pritchett family has just had a new arrival, called Vince. Vincent lan Pritchett, if you want to know: V.I.P. Blame his parents. This was in Powell Road, where the flats are now, just round the corner from Wheeler Street where Auntie Amy lived then. It was June '44 - a flying-bomb. Another week and Mrs Pritchett and Vince would have been evacuated - taken somewhere safe. And it was five years to the month since June was born. That's how she got her name. Mr Pritchett was home on leave, which was bad luck, or perhaps not, depending how you look at it. And your dad and Uncle Jack were both away fighting Germans, though we hadn't even set eyes on each other then.
    Well, there aint much left of the Pritchett family. Except Vince, who, being a little bouncy baby, bounces clear away without a scratch. And, if you haven't worked it out, it was Amy who took Vince in and looked after him and started to bring him up just like her own baby. Maybe you can work it out too, or you will one day, that she had more than one reason.
    There's rules, there's laws about how you should bring up an orphaned baby, but this was wartime, remember, when rules get forgotten. So when the war's over a year or so later and Uncle Jack comes home, no one argues over the fact that he and Amy have got themselves an adopted child and Vince has found himself a new mum and dad. So you could say it all ended up neat and happy ever after. Except there's still June, who shouldn't be a baby any more but she is. You still following this? And Am/d always wanted, she'd specially wanted, a girl.
    'You aint to breathe a word of this,' we say.
    But it was only a little while after that she tells us they'll be off again to Margate next Sunday but they don't want her to come with them. Joan says, 'What you gone and said?' getting all in a panic. And Sally says she aint said nothing, only it was getting to be a tight fit in that van, even with Vince travelling now in the back. I say, 'They put Vince in the back?' She says, 'Yes.' And a little while after that she comes home from school, tears in her eyes, and says that Vince knew now, anyway. They'd gone and told him themselves.
    Well it had to happen sooner or later, and search me how you pick your time.
    So now Vince has got some real beef to chew. He says to Sally so now he knew what they said in the playground was true, and she says it didn't matter, he was still Vince, she'd stick by him. So Vince goes and knocks her down.
    I reckon every generation wants the next one to make it all come better, to make it seem like there's a second chance.
    I should have known she was the type to get more trampled on the keener she got. Fact is, she was soft on Vincey, sweet as sugar, and I reckon she'd have made a good wife for him, it wasn't every woman would have taken him on, knowing the score. She could've done worse, too, than hitch up to Dodds and Son, all things being as they were. You could say it wasn't much to set your sights on, a butcher's shop, but when all your old man had was a fruit-and-veg stall, it was a notch up. Except Vince