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fingers lumpy and calloused.
    â€˜Why do I have to go to school?’ Emil whimpered. He wished his voice were stronger, deeper.
    â€˜Because your education is the most important thing in the world. It is worth more than gold. That teacher, he’s an idiot, but he has something you need. He has learning. You need to get it from him. You show him. You are poor, but you are strong and clever. Any boy might be the one to change the world. I would give anything to go back, to be your age again, to have this chance. You will be a good, clever boy. I know you will.’ Emil remained still, eyes closed. ‘Can you smell that ham?’ He nodded. Father kissed him. ‘Mama will have it on the table in a minute. We’ll have a feast. And luckily, I know this Walter fellow. His apartment is not far. We shall go round after dinner and throw horse manure at his window. What do you say?’
    Emil nodded into his father’s chest. Something eased and shifted. He imagined bringing back his arm, flinging the clod against the window, the teacher in his nightgown opening it to investigate, peering out onto the street. Emil was a clever boy, Papa had told him. When he heard the window drawn up in its frame, he would have another handful ready.

Hannah
    LONDON, 1915
    My earliest clear memory, and it is so very clear. Childhood is around me, before my eyes, happening now. I live in that room again. My brothers are with me, and Mother and Father. We shall all live forever.
    It was a year into the war. I was eight. In my father’s desk drawer, in the box room where he kept his bolts of fabric, my brother Geoffrey found a revolver. I took it from him, felt its cold weight in my hand. Geoffrey grabbed it back and pointed it at me. ‘Die, marauding Hun,’ he whispered coolly.
    â€˜ You are the Hun,’ I replied. ‘Give it to me.’ And he did. I was the elder and could be frightening, if I wished. I pointed it at his head and moved it around a little, as though he were a German I had spied over the lip of a trench, and I must find my mark. It was a thrilling, heavy thing to hold, as though potential and power had heft. ‘Bang.’
    He threw himself against the propped-up bolts of cloth, clutching his chest. Lolled his head and stuck his tongue out on one side.
    I heard the creak of the floorboards in the hall and then the little one was calling for me: ‘Hannah, Hannah! Where are you hiding?’ I laid the gun back in the empty drawer and put a finger to my lips. Geoffrey opened the door and Benjamin looked from one to the other of us, small and glowering, excluded.
    The gun was not the only reminder of the war across the water. A parade marched past Father’s shop door on Tottenham Court Road, dressed in khaki. There were redcoats before the war: smart though less impressive. I could imagine the mud of the trenches on the khaki jackets passing endlessly outside, as though they had marched all the way from France into London, their vast number somehow overcoming the obstacle of the Channel.
    When a soldier broke off from the mass in the street and came alone into the shade of the shop where I sat on the high stool behind the counter, I lifted my gaze from the pennies I was piling up on the wooden bench and looked him over slowly from his boots to his strange hat, pinned up on one side. I was prone to staring as a child. It is possible I never quite lost the habit. People are so very interesting. Besides, I wanted to be a writer. You had to be sure what people’s faces looked like if you were to go away and describe them in your notebook afterwards. That took staring. The soldier did not smile. It seemed he was a starer too. Outside, the band was passing right by the shop with its brass and drums, and the crowds were cheering. But it was muffled in here, as I studied the man’s hands for signs that they might have strangled a Hun. If the silence lasted much longer, I determined I