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lay there curled up in a ball with my eyes shut, feeling gobs of seawater splash over me, and I clutched my arms round my shoulders and cried like a baby. I didn’t care who heard me. I wanted my mother, I wanted her arms round me, I wanted to be at home.
    By the time we reached the towering side of a great ship I could neither see nor hear what was happening, what with the rising and falling of our boat, which now seemed so small, and an enormous eerie sound overhead that was the whistling of the wind in the ropes of the ship’s rigging. One by one we were sent up the huge side of the ship, clinging to a kind of rope ladder; it was hard to catch hold of it from the tossing boat, and I would have fallen into the sea if my uncle had not been close behind me, helping.
    And once up on the deck of the ship there was no relief, nor any care for us, for we were herded down a narrow stairway into a miserable space where we were shut behinda grating, with about a dozen others who were there already. There they left us all night, with only a leather bucket of water and a panikin to share it with, and a basket of what was called bread but was biscuit hard as wood. If they counted us they must have noticed one was missing, which meant trouble for someone in charge. I hope it was the fat young officer, though I never saw him again.
    My uncle said to the sailor who locked us in, “What ship is this?”
    The man stared, then laughed. “Damme, what loons have they sent us? This is Captain Sutton’s ship, cully—HMS Victory.”

Molly

2006
    Molly is crying. Very quietly, so that nobody shall hear her. The tears run down her cheeks and drip from the sides of her chin, and once in a while she blows her nose. But she goes on crying. They are tears of hopelessness, shed for something that she knows she cannot change.
    She is homesick. She sits hunched on the window-seat of her pretty bedroom, specially decorated for her by Carl (not with his own hands, but on his orders) before she arrived. Its walls are pale yellow and its many bookshelves are white; it has a white wicker armchair and a beautiful ash-wood desk, and a roomy bed with a flowered quilt. On the two bedside tables are two lamps, their shades perched over the cheerful papier-mâché shapes of a high-collared Victorian gentleman and his demure wife. It is apicture-book room, much larger and more comfortable than her room in the London flat, and she is crying because she wants to leave it and cannot. She wants to go home, but home is no longer there, even though it is not here either.
    She misses England. She misses the grey streets and green parks of London; she misses her friends, and the neighbors who were so familiar even though they exchanged no more than a faint smile each day. She misses Grandad and Granny, and the red double-decker buses, and even her school uniform. She is overwhelmed by America, where everything seems bigger and louder and more confident, and she is terrified by the prospect of being launched into the seventh grade at the enormous local school in a month’s time. Part of the terror is due to the fact that Molly is epileptic.
    It is a very mild kind of epilepsy, an occasional short-circuiting in the brain, and she has had no symptoms for so long that the doctor thinks she has grown out of it. Molly is a perfectly normal girl, physically and mentally, but she knows that there have been times, now and again, when she has seemed to lose track of what is going on around her. Sally, her best friend, used to describe it as “going sideways.” She said once, “You get that vague look in your eyes. I can always tell—you don’t hear what I’m saying, you’re like some whizzbang genius solving a problem in her head. Only you aren’t a genius, you’re just old Moll going sideways.”
    Molly smiles at the remembered voice. She blows her nose, and decides to write Sally an e-mail. What will she