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downstairs striking two. Then suddenly she was dreaming, and she couldn’t think how.
    In the morning, she found her exercise books back on her desk, with Mr Bunzum lolling on top of them. There was a note beside them, on her father’s Candlewood Press notepaper. The note read, ‘I have read all of Mr Bunzum’s adventures and agree with you that he is a real person, still alive, and not to be buried. You are a writer of wonderful talent and imagination, and one day much grander publishers than me will be proud to publish your books. – All my love and XXXX, your father.’

 
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Three
    When father opened their curtains on the morning of the funeral, they could see that the snow was falling thick and hurried. He was already dressed in his black trousers and his black jacket and his starched white shirt. He looked very tired and old, as if he had aged a hundred years in a week. His face looked
papery
, Elizabeth thought. He had trimmed his beard and he smelled of that spicy cologne that mommy had given him for Christmas; but he looked like a fastidious old man, rather than father.
    â€˜Breakfast’s ready,’ he told them. ‘Make it quick as you can. The guests will start arriving at a quarter past ten, or thereabouts.’
    After he had gone, Laura bounced out of bed in her long pink nightgown and went to the window. ‘It’s really deep!’ she exclaimed. ‘We could build a snow-angel!’
    â€˜What do you mean, a snow-angel?’ asked Elizabeth.
    Laura pressed her hands together as if she were praying, and closed her eyes. ‘You know, a snow-angel. Like the angels in the graveyard, only snow.’
    Elizabeth climbed out of bed and stood beside her. The snow was whirling down so furiously they could scarcely see the garden. ‘Yes, we could,’ she said. ‘And we could make it look just like Peggy.’
    Laura looked up at her, her eyes still sticky with sleep, her blonde curls tousled. ‘Do you think that Peggy will be an angel?’
    â€˜Of course,’ said Elizabeth, although she didn’t feel completely certain about it. ‘She never did anything mean or nasty,did she? And she was only five. You know what Jesus said about suffer the little children to come unto Me.’
    â€˜Why did they have to suffer?’ asked Laura. ‘I thought Jesus was supposed to be kind.’
    â€˜Everybody has to suffer sometimes,’ Elizabeth told her. ‘That’s what Mrs Dunning said at Sunday school.’
    â€˜Succotash has to suffer, too,’ said Laura.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜That’s what they say in the funnies. “Suffering succotash!” ’
    They put on their slippers and their cuddly woollen robes, Elizabeth blue and Laura pink, and went downstairs to the kitchen. It was so gloomy that Mrs Patrick had switched on the lights. It wasn’t a quiet breakfast. Fifty people were expected for lunch; and Mrs Patrick was punching seven kinds of hell out of a huge batch of bread-roll dough; while a brown cauldron of chicken chowder was quietly blabbering to itself on top of the range, next to a boiling stuffed ham sewn up in muslin, which rhythmically rose and fell in its seething pot like somebody’s boiling head.
    Mrs Patrick was listening to the radio, too. There was news from Europe, where the Russians were having horrendous difficulties invading Finland. Leland Stowe of the Chicago
Daily News
was recounting what he had seen. ‘In this sad solitude lie the dead . . . uncounted thousands of Russian dead. They lie as they fell – twisting, gesticulating and tortured . . . beneath a kindly mask of two inches of newly-fallen snow.’
    Mrs Patrick suddenly realized that the girls were listening and switched the radio off.
    â€˜What is it?’ hissed Laura.
    â€˜It’s the war,’ said Elizabeth. They knew that there was a war in Europe but Elizabeth found it difficult to imagine what