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a miracle the house didn’t burn down,” Mr. Griffiths said, suggesting that someone more honourable than Bernie might offer to pay for a new best shirt for the morning out of his own wallet. It drove Bernie mad.
    On top of that the winter of 1973 was a hard one, and three or four times the train from the City to Kingston had failed. The first time, Bernie phoned Alice, who went to Morden Underground station to pick him up in their ancient black Austin, the same car they’d had when they first married, a cast-off from Bernie’s brother Tony. It had refused to start again in the car park at Morden, and Alice had had to phone Mrs. Griffiths, begging her to give the children something to eat while the garage came out; they didn’t get home until after midnight. So the second time it happened, even though by that time Bernie had bought a new car, the Simca, he only called to say he’d be a bit late, got the Tube to Morden and walked from there. The third and fourth time, too; it seemed to be going on all winter, like the winter.
    But by then he’d heard of a new job, a promotion, out of London. That would never have seemed like a recommendation before. “Bernard,” his widowed mother had said, when they’d gone to tell her in St. Helier, the ranks of crocuses lining up firmly along the path outside. “Bernard. You’ve never lived anywhere but London. You couldn’t stand it for a week.” She ignored Alice, apart from a savage glance or two; the whole thing, she could see, was the boy’s wife’s idea. In a corner, Bernard’s shy uncle Henry sipped tea from a next-to-best floral cup, not getting involved; he would have to stay and hear the worst of it afterwards. But if it was unfair of anyone to think it couldn’t have been Bernie’s idea, you could see why they believed that. His whole manner—the way he blew his nose, the way he ate with his elbows out, as if always demolishing a pie in a crowded pub, his soft London complexion, even—made it impossible to think of him outside London. But it was only Bernie who wanted to move. Alice had been born near the Scottish borders, and had moved to London at the age Francis was moving to Sheffield, nine, at the war’s end when no one was movinginto capital cities. It was Alice, though, who loved London; she dreaded the North’s forgiveness, the way it would look at her when she returned.
    But there was no arguing with Bernie and, it was true, the job was a good one. Bernie had been offered the deputy managership of a power plant. It was the best way forward, to take a hands-on, strategic role, Bernie said. He’d left it quite late; but the industry was expanding.
    He was like that: he could sell you anything with his enthusiasm. It was for her, however, to sell the move to the children, and she had nothing but her love to draw on there.
    Outside the car, the landscape was changing. London had gone on for ever, its red-brick houses and businesses clinging to the edge of the motorway, like small rodents to a balloon suddenly in flight. The soft green of the southern counties, too, had gone, with the cows and sheep, and now harder, more purposeful facts were looming across the landscape. A herd of vast-waisted cooling towers, steaming massively; a terrain untended, brown and barren; one town after another with no name, just a mass of black and brown smoke and soot. It was getting worse; Francis could see that.
    He had never thought that his mother would, one night, come into his bedroom and, sitting on the edge of his bed, explain that they might be moving to Sheffield. It was not that he had thought they would go on for ever where they were; it was simply that, at nine, no concept of change had ever entered his head. She had sat there, her face worried, when she’d finished, and he’d wanted to comfort her.
    “It won’t be so bad,” he said in the end. “We’ll all be there.” He’d wanted to say that they couldn’t make her move anywhere—not quite knowing