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second tried to storm it. Snowballs stood in for Mills bombs and grenades. Boys who were hit anywhere above the waist were declared casualties, and forbidden to throw snowballs. Once all the boys on one side or the other had become casualties, that army had to raise the white flag.
    On the morning of the day on which Tobruk fell, Leo had not yet spoken to Justin since returning to school. They had eyed one another from a distance, but, when close to, had passed by without speaking.In the war game, Leo found himself on the same side as Justin, defending the trench.
    As the attackers advanced, their corduroy jerkins filled with snowballs, the defenders had to rise clear of the sheltering rampart to throw their bombs. Leo was hit on the head early in the action, and then organised a snowball factory to supply the boys still fighting.
    Justin was incredibly quick at throwing and ducking down again behind the snow wall; so while boys were hit on every side, he remained unscathed. As Leo supplied his friend with snowballs, he could not help fondly remembering him jumping from bed to bed after their beating. A double bomb finally knocked Justin in a heap at Leo’s feet. Out of breath and laughing, they lay in the snow as the attackers stormed the rampart.
    A few days later, Justin told Leo that his father had been burned alive, strapped in his seat, before he crash-landed. The day after that, Leo invited Justin to stay with him ‘on a river somewhere’ for the Easter holidays.

C HAPTER 3
    Behind Andrea, in the back of Peter’s battered little Standard car, Leo and Justin were chattering away. It was only half an hour since she had collected them from Truro Station, and already she was starting to feel a little like a chauffeur on the wrong side of a glass panel. But to give in would have been feeble, so Andrea pointed out things that appealed to her: primroses scattered in the hedge banks, stunted oaks stretching gnarled limbs across the road, the finials of a Norman church thrusting skywards through a haze of new greenery.
    Not that any of this impressed her pink-blazered passengers as much as her ability, after a week in Cornwall, to negotiate a labyrinth of lanes without the help of signposts, all of which had been removed during the invasion scare. By studying the Ordnance map, she had memorised many of these magical missing names: Poltesco, Ruan Minor, Goonhilly, Trezebal, Treworgie, Manaccan in Meneage, and Landewednack, where the last sermon in the Cornishtongue had been preached in 1678. A few miles away, a regiment of dragoons, homeward bound from the Napoleonic Wars had been shipwrecked, and, even now, the bleached bones of men and horses were sometimes washed up. With an urgency that surprised her, Andrea wanted the boys to share her latest enthusiasm.
    For several days, Andrea had imagined stopping the car at a particular bend overlooking a secluded creek on the river’s upper reaches, so the boys could gaze through the branches of ancient oaks at the jade-green water flowing seawards. If the tide were out, there would be nothing but a narrow channel meandering between tall mudbanks, so Andrea was relieved to find the water up. She cut the engine and wound down her window. They couldn’t fail to love what they saw.
    ‘The Polwherne River,’ she announced like a showman.
    ‘I’d imagined it wider,’ muttered Justin.
    ‘Won’t be good for swimming,’ sighed Leo.
    ‘How come?’ asked Andrea, determined to stay cheerful.
    ‘That pea-soup colour means a muddy bottom, mum.’
    ‘Like the school pond,’ agreed Justin.
    Andrea said very firmly, ‘The river’s blue downstream , and a lot wider.’
    As they descended to the creek, the road squeezed between the flanks of an old granite bridge before twisting upwards again through more oak woods.
    ‘A civil war battle took place near here. Somekids found a cavalier’s shoe and a musket last summer .’
    Justin pointed to the main arm of the river beyond the