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people who lived there back then. I saw Ephesos once, all tall white ruins and poplars and cypresses as shapely as paintbrushes.
    All that is gone now, just history in a book. But it was a real city. And the people in it were as alive as me. I lived there once upon a time, in that place which is now no more. We had been living there for three thousand years before the Turks came, Pa told me. And now it is as far away as a fairy story.
    There are so many echoes and shadows of memory I should like to have kept as clear and bright as fish in an aquarium. Not the horrible last days, but all that went before. But the pictures I want to keep are fading. The more I try to hold on to them, the fuzzier they become. And dreary old Oxford grows more real by the day. Perhaps that is part of growing up, this forgetting, and the pain of remembering the wrong things. If so, it is a hateful part.
     
     
    F OR THE NEXT few days I read newspapers, which I never normally do. Father gets the Times and the new local paper, the Oxford Mail , and I read both; even the advertisements for Palmolive soap and Bovril and tooth powder – every page. There is nothing in the Times about murderous gangs of marauding tramps, and there is nothing in the Mail about a body on Port Meadow. Skullduggery. Murder by moonlight. Not so much as a paragraph.
    I am oddly deflated, and there is a squirming part of me that is disappointed. Such a happening – such a horrible event should have been noticed and set on record by someone, anyone.
    Except that the anyone should really be me.
     
     
    S O ANYWAY, HERE I am, stuck here. Confined to barracks is what the soldiers call it, and the barracks is the house we live in, father and me. I know most of it so well now that I could walk into any room on the lower floors blindfold and not bump into a single thing. The furniture is ancient, from the last century mostly, and it is not ours, but came with the place
     
     
    T HE HOUSE ITSELF was built so long ago that it has no gas, so we use oil lamps as though Victoria were still Queen. And there is a hand-pump and a huge black range in the basement, and the stairs have no carpet on them and are very steep and narrow.
    Father rents the place from a man called Matthew Bristol, and I have heard him call Mr Bristol a greasy little oik under his breath. I know Mr Bristol as a short man with cheekbones sharp as the corners of a box, a waxed black moustache, and a bowler hat which is green with age. He has very pale eyes, as pale as a robin’s egg, and he almost never blinks, but his mouth smiles all the time, as though it has been frozen open.
    Sometimes he appears unannounced, unlocks the front door and walks straight through the house without so much as a by-your-leave, which infuriates father. And once he pinched my cheek and stroked me behind the ear when father wasn’t looking and I wanted to bite his fingers off, except they were yellow from smoking cigarettes and smelled horrible.
    The trouble is we never seem to have enough money. Always, father is hunting around for spare sixpences and thruppenny bits at the end of the month when Mr Bristol makes his visits, and there are usually a few bread-and-dripping days around that time, and no milk for tea.
    I like bread and dripping, but it gets tiresome after a while, and I begin to fantasise about eggs and bacon, crisp green apples, and toasted cheese. Toasted cheese and cocoa is the best thing to have in the world when the fire is lit and it is raining outside.
    When we first came here, father had investments which he could count upon to tide us over . It was just as well, because we brought nothing more to England with us than the clothes on our backs, and by the time we made Portsmouth most of what I was wearing had been given to me by the dear sailors, and they made us up ditty bags and sewed me some cotton nightshirts and were awfully nice, so that I almost forgave them for not blowing the Turks to smithereens with their