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she treated me differently. But there may have been other reasons for that.
    What was waiting for Gracie at the other end of her train journey? I can only imagine. I seem to remember her telling me that she was taken to somewhere in Wales. I can picture a big, draughty room – a church hall, perhaps – and a crowd of children huddled together in the centre, tired after their long train journey, frightened now, the morning’s excitement having long since worn off. They would probably have been asked to line up, and then the grown-ups would have stepped forward, strange, severe-looking women who would have scrutinized the children’s faces and clothes before picking them out one by one, like customers at a Roman slave market. No words would have been spoken. But slowly the crowd of children would have got smaller and smaller, and Gracie would have seen all of her friends disappear, whisked away through the door to the unknown, darkening world outside, even the little boy who made me so jealous and whose name I can’t remember, until she was one of the few left, and then it would have been her turn, at which point an exceptionally forbidding face would have loomed over her, made no less forbidding by its unnatural attempt at a smile, and she would have felt herself gripped by the wrist and led away, out into the unfamiliar dusk.
    The last thing I can imagine is Gracie standing in a hallway. The hallway is dark and she has put her suitcase down beside her. The woman has gone upstairs somewhere, on some mysterious errand, and she is left alone. She thinks of this morning, already a fickle, distant memory: how she tried to wave at me, and I never waved back. She thinks back further than that, to the moment when she said goodbye to her parents: her mother’s last, stifling, frantic embrace. She realizes now, with a terrible certainty, that she is not going to see her mother again tonight. She does not realize, yet, that she won’t be seeing either of her parents for weeks, months: a lifetime, in a child’s mind. But even the thought of one night’s separation is enough to make her start crying. She looks up at the sound of footsteps descending the stairs and hopes that this strange, silent woman is going to comfort her and be kind.
    Of course, I’ve no idea if it was like that at all. All I know is that Gracie had changed, when I saw her again, towards the end of the war. She told me nothing about her time away from home. As I say, she treated me differently. We never became playmates again. And she spoke, by then, with a terrible stammer. I wonder if she ever lost it.
    Number two: a picnic.
    A family group. Aunt Ivy, and Uncle Owen, in the background. In the foreground, three children – including me. But I will come to the children later. Let me tell you about Ivy and Owen first of all.
    I don’t remember this picnic, and I can’t identify the landscape in which the picture was taken. But it is recognizably Shropshire – I can feel that, just by looking at it. And probably not far from Warden Farm, the house in which they – we – were all living at the time. I certainly don’t remember being taken on many excursions far afield, during those months. Most likely this was taken somewhere near the edge of the grounds, and the fields in the background belonged to Owen himself. It was taken in late autumn or winter because there are no leaves on the trees: they stand out black and skeletal against a sky which time has bleached white. I don’t know why we were having a picnic at this time of year: everybody in the photograph looks cold. I suspect it was one of those sunny but bitterly cold autumn days, because Ivy is wearing sunglasses and yet her hair is being blown out of shape by the wind.
    What can I remember about her, from looking at her face in this photograph?
    Ivy, you should know first of all, was my mother’s sister. There was not much family resemblance, however. She is smiling here, a good open-mouthed