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parents about market prices. The Great War has been succeeded by other conflicts or schisms of the same bad spirits. There are occasional grey photographs of Flappers in bell hats with faces like flowers of war. The recent papers are bought from local towns, the Gazette from Kendal, the Cumberland and Westmorland Herald from Penrith. In the city of Carlisle they are bought from the man who stands in the market square near the citadel shouting ‘Ther’s nit miny lift’ over the groaning stack of three hundred or more broad folded sheets. Hazel Bowman rides the mainline train up to the city to visit the library and the Roman museum, to collect news for her children. But in these papers history is less dramatic and their region seems uncomplicated. London papersshipped north are the real treasures, the ones that her class will devour and squabble over.
    In them there are stories and events which fascinate and captivate the class, and so the pupils will cut out the articles, paste them into scrapbooks or on to the walls of the school building. Janet has her choices, already her mind is settling on fractures within tradition, the painful underbelly of the sick, elderly world as it rolls over in surrender to a new one growling above. In the year of her brother Isaac’s birth Clyde Tombaugh discovers the ninth planet in the solar system and christens it Pluto. Such an old, extraordinary sounding name. She searches for it in the night sky, eyes blinded by the million other stars and deaths of stars in space, mouth slow over the long vowels. Pl-u-to. Twelve years old and sitting on the pointed roof of the cattle shed. Most of all she wants a telescope, like the one in the Greenwich observatory, with all its scientific precision, its ability to suck in long tunnels of the night sky, so that she can magnify location, lift out the erratic planet from the darkness and with certainty say it exists. In 1930 also, fragrant May, Amy Johnson, the pioneer aviator, arrives in Australia after twenty days of flying. Hazel Bowman smiles, compliments the girl’s interests, the back of her eyes filled with sparkling grey light. In 1932 De Valera becomes president of the Irish Free State. October that same year and hunger marchers fight the police in Hyde Park, blood is spilled on the brown grass of London. And, a favourite, tragic article, almost two years later, Bonnie and Clyde are killed in an ambush in Louisiana, America. And the British press loves it, loves the simple unlikeliness and animation of it.
    In the following months, close to the end of her schooling, Janet becomes aware of the dark figure emerging in Europe, across the icy North Sea, tightening the belts of his philosophy as he does so, purging his party of suspected traitors; this is ‘the night of long knives’, the papers announce, and the girl carefully cuts along the borders of Hitler’s rise.
    The changing world is illustrated on the walls of Mardale school, murder and hatred and valour and a stratum of ideals find their way into the quiet countryside of the Lakeland, like silent modern friezes set against the slow lap of the lake, the patter of rain. It is strange that the children should be familiar with the clockwork cogs and wheels of the outside world, as familiar as with their Latin verbs or Homer, Keats and Shakespeare, though their parents also are now reminded daily of the world’s machinations, the airwaves lit up with news. Dislocated voices chip into their lives, issuing statements, reporting unrest, uniting the county. Bringing husbands and wives into the same room for long minutes before they move off towards the separate corners of their convenient lives.
    Hazel Bowman has no husband, and though she is endeared to many in the area she has chosen a single life. She lives alone in a bungalow in Bampton Grange, with four baying otter hounds and towering bookshelves. Hers is a passionate and self-fulfilling existence. She brings the bouncing, troubled light