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gardens by the town hall, an alarming construction like an egg-box.
    “We’ll have to come back here,” Alice said to Bernie. “This is where the education department is. To see about schools.”
    Francis’s dad bought him and Sandra a Coke each, and they sat on a bench in the dry city heat. “This will have been cleared by bombs,” Bernie said, “these gardens, in the war. See where the old buildings stop and the new ones start? They’ll have been bombed during the war because of the steel, see?” Francis looked around and it was right: a ripped-out space had been created, a kind of shapeless acreage, and into it, dropped in as exactly as false teeth, were new and extravagant buildings, the egg-box, a building with brass globes protruding from its top floor, others whose smoked mirrors for windows made no allowances towards the church-like blackened solemnity of the old town hall, a figure poised heroically above the entrance like Eros.
    Two boys his own age had sat on a bench directly opposite theirs. It was term-time, Francis knew that, but they had not been taken out of school for a week because their families were moving—a licensed absence that had nevertheless caused him unspoken worry in the course of the week, even while clambering over Burbage Rocks, in case an inspector should materialize from behind a dry-stone wall. These were real truants, their hands dirty, and Francis looked at them in the way he would have studied photographs of Victorian murderers, possessors of a remote experience that would never be his. He sucked at his Coke, and lazily, one of the boys pulled out a packet of cigarettes, offering the other boy one. He felt childish with his fizzy drink and already the object of contempt. Their conversation drifted over with its incomprehensible freight of words—“Waggy nit,” one said, and “Scoile,” the other said; a long story began, about Castle Market—the Cattle Market, did they mean? Why didn’t they say “the”? “Mardy,” “gennel;” one punched the other, hard, and the other said, “Geeyour.”Francis tried not to look at them. He feared their retribution, or their mockery; he feared the idea that his father would take it upon himself to say something to them, something inflammatory and adult, and Sheffield would turn upon them.
    His parents had planned to spend the next day going round and finding a new house to buy. Although Francis had inspected the pile of agent’s particulars in his parents’ hotel bedroom with fervour and wonderment at the sums—£16,000—involved, he and Sandra were to entertain themselves for most of the day. His ideas of entertainment were few, and he knew they were not allowed to stay in their room, the cleaners demanding access every morning after breakfast. But his mother had done a little research, and had discovered that a public library was to be found in a Victorian villa at Broomhill, only three hundred yards away. They were to spend the morning there, and find their own way back to the hotel, where they could order lunch themselves as a special treat. Of course, they could not take anything out of the library, not having an address, but if Francis wanted a book to read—there was no suggestion that Sandra was likely to share in this desire—there was a bookshop, only fifty yards further on, where he could buy something. Alice gave him two pound notes, an unheard-of advance on pocket money, and, it seemed, not even an advance: she did it when Sandra and his father could not see, a little squeeze of the hand pressing the money into his fist.
    The library filled the morning, but it was short. He sat under the wooden bookshelves that, even in the children’s section, bore the intimidating municipal heading “Novels.” It took him a moment to recognize some familiar and favourite books there, and it was a surprise to discover that he had been reading “novels” when he thought he had been reading Enid Blyton, or a book about