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when you were seven years old.) The biggest upheaval came at the very beginning of the war, when hundreds of thousands of children – more than a million, even – were taken away from their parents by train in the space of a few days. I did not experience that phase, myself. That turned out to be something of a false alarm, and most of those children were back with their families not long after Christmas. And then, in the late summer of 1940, when the Blitz started, the process began again, although less systematically than before. This time my father knew that the threat was real, and something had to be done. But I was one of the lucky ones, having family in the country. The people who took me in were not strangers, absolutely. Whereas poor Gracie was not so fortunate.
    A photograph is a poor thing, really. It can only capture one moment, out of millions of moments, in the life of a person, or the life of a house. As for these photographs I have in front of me now, the ones I intend to describe to you… they are of value, I think, only insofar as they corroborate my failing memory. They are the proof that the things I remember – some of the things I remember – really happened, and are not phantom memories, or fantasies, imaginings. But what of the memories for which there are no pictures, no corroboration, no proof? I’m thinking, for instance, of that day not long afterwards, the day the evacuees walked past, the day that Gracie left. Our house was on the route between the school and the railway station, so we were able to watch the whole sorry procession. They came early in the morning, at about nine o’clock, I suppose. How many children? Perhaps fifty (although I’m merely guessing), led by their teachers. None of the children were wearing school uniform, and all they were carrying were their gas masks in one hand, and little suitcases or knapsacks in the other. They also had labels tied around their necks. Gracie was near the front of the procession, walking side by side with another friend of hers, a boy of whom I was wildly jealous, someone she often chose over me in the school playground. I’ve forgotten his name now. They were laughing and playing a silly game together, seeing who could walk backwards for the longest, or something like that. I felt a terrible pang of envy but at the same time I couldn’t understand why they were looking so happy, because my mother and father had told me what evacuation was all about, and for some reason – even though I was no older than Gracie – the meaning of it had sunk in, and I knew that something terrible was happening, that she really was going to be leaving home that day and nobody knew when she would be coming back. My mother was standing next to me, perhaps with her hand on my shoulder, and then something happened, something to do with the fence, which is really why I remember all of this so well. Where I was standing, the fence had a hole in it, a little knothole, and I was exploring this hole with my finger as the children walked by. And then suddenly I realized that my finger was stuck. A panic took hold of me and for the next few seconds (it can’t have been longer than that, although of course it seemed an eternity) all I could think of was the horrible prospect that I might be there for ever, that I would never be able to pull my finger free. I pulled at my finger desperately and forgot to look at the children walking by, until my mother shook me by the shoulder to draw my attention to the fact that Gracie was waving at me, and then at last I raised my left arm – my free arm – to wave to her, but of course it was too late, Gracie had gone by, and was not looking at me any more. I didn’t wonder then, but I wonder now whether she was hurt by the way I ignored her, whether she felt rejected because I didn’t wave to her at the beginning of this great adventure. Certainly, when I saw her again – three or four years later, it would have been –