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returning.
    After a moment he looked up and followed the direction of his mother’s eyes until he found himself staring at the framed portrait of his father, Georgie, that stood on the table next to his bed. He wasn’t wearing a soldier’s uniform in it; instead he was standing in the yard at the dairy with a very young Alfie sitting on his shoulders, a big smile spread across his face, and Mr. Asquith standing next to both of them, looking at the camera with an expression that suggested that this was an indignity he could do without. (Alfie always said that Mr. Asquith was a very proud horse.) He couldn’t remember when it had been taken, but it had been standing on the table by his bed since the day Georgie had left for Aldershot Barracks four years earlier. Granny Summerfield had put it there that same evening.
    â€œOh, Alfie,” said Margie, kissing him on his head as she stood up and made her way toward the door. “I do my best for you. You know that, don’t you?”
    *   *   *
    After she left for work, Alfie went downstairs, ran outside for the scoop that sat behind the back door, and filled it with ashes from the base of the kitchen range. Then he ran down to the privy at the end of the garden as quickly as he could, trying not to feel the ice in the air or spill any of the precious cinders. He hated going there first thing in the morning, particularly now, in late October, when it was still so dark and the air was so frosty, but there was no way around it.
    It was freezing inside, seven different spiders and something that looked like an overfed beetle crawled over his feet as he sat there. He could hear the scurrying of rats behind the woodwork, and he groaned when he remembered that he’d forgotten the squares of yesterday’s newspaper that he meticulously cut up every night before going to bed—but fortunately Margie had taken them outside earlier, pinned a hole through their center, and hung them from a piece of string off the hook, so he didn’t need to go back indoors.
    When he had finished his business, he poured the ashes down the toilet and hoped that the compost heap around the back of the outhouse—the worst place he had ever seen in his entire life—would not get clogged up again. It had happened a few months before, and Margie had to pay the night-soil men two shillings to clear it all away; afterward, uncertain whether they would have enough money for the rent, she had sat down in the broken armchair in front of the fireplace and cried her eyes out, whispering Georgie’s name under her breath over and over again as if he might be able to come back and save them from possible eviction.
    Alfie ran back inside, washed his hands, and sat down at the kitchen table, where Margie had cut two slices of bread for him and left them on a plate next to a small scraping of butter and, to his astonishment, a tiny pot of jam with a muslin lid held in place by a piece of string. Alfie stared at it and blinked a couple of times. It had been months since he’d tasted jam. He picked it up and read the label. It was handwritten and contained only one word, written with a thick black pen.
    Gooseberry.
    Sometimes the parents of the soldiers in the hospital brought in a little something for the Queen’s Nurses, and when they did, it was usually a treat like this: something they’d made themselves from the fruit they grew in their gardens or allotments. That must have been where Margie had got it. Alfie wondered whether his mother had eaten some herself or whether she’d kept it specially for him. He stood up and went over to the sink, where his mother’s breakfast things were sitting, still unwashed, a small pool of cold brown tea sitting at the base of her mug. In the old days, before the war, Margie would never have left things like this; she would have rinsed them out and turned them upside down on the draining board for Georgie