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English boat from the royal yacht to fishing smacks cooperated in evacuating 340,000 British, French, and Belgian troops through Dunkirk and other Channel ports.
    Paris was declared an open city. The Germans walked in without firing a shot. On the radio we heard Churchill announce that Britain would fight on alone. “This is our finest hour,” he said, while London was being pummeled by dive bombers. He vowed to defend the city street by street and house by house. Children and the aged were dispatched to the countryside. England was crying in the night.
    Mama Kathy quietly joined the Ladies’ Defense Society and began knitting socks. Evenings we huddled around our radio and looked at each other bleakly. For the first time it was conceivable England might lose the war.
    â€œThis is it,” Georges said, “I’ve had it with sitting on the sidelines.”
    We three women, Mama Kathy, Connie, and I, stared at him mutely. He left for Ottawa right after Sunday services to join the RAF. But Saturday evening to cheer us up he gave a farewell magic show.
    That brought back the famous magic show when I was seven. Georges rigged a curtain, one of Mama Kathy’s blankets, strung on a wire along the living-room rafters. And he gave me a part. I was to open the curtain in the beginning and in the end draw it. We rehearsed all week. The day of the performance Old Bill came and played his Irish bagpipes. Mama baked cookies, which she passed around. Papa’s contribution was to applaud. He was an enthusiastic applauder. He showed us how to cup our hands to make twice the noise. And if you jump to your feet and clap your hands over your head, it makes for a deafening ovation, especially if you add cries of Bravo!
    I was seized by stage fright and when the time came for me to close the curtain, I pulled the wrong way. Of course I was only pretending to pull. Connie was actually making it move, which it did—the other way.
    A huge laugh from the audience made me realize my mistake. I had ruined the show. Disgraced and in tears, I ran from the room.
    Georges was after me in a flash and took me in his arms.
    â€œIt’s all right, Kathy. It’s like the curtain is magic and goes its own way. We’re going to keep that in the show from now on.”
    Connie came and gave me a hug. “Are you crying because of that stupid curtain?”
    â€œI used to be crying about that. Now I’m crying because . . . because . . .”
    â€œBecause why, honey?”
    â€œJust because!”
    She placed her cheek against mine.
    This sent me into a fresh paroxysm. “Why can’t I be a twin?” I wailed. “Everybody else is.”
    If Georges wanted to smile, he didn’t show it. “It’s like this, Kathy. Most people, God gets right the first time. He did with you. He looked at you and said, ‘This is a good kid.’”
    Georges, where are you? His hope of the RAF didn’t work out. Myopia was enough to disqualify him. But he applied for and was accepted into officers’ training, somewhere in England. Connie whispered not to worry, he wasn’t in the front lines.
    Connie would know. They had stayed up the night before he left reviving the Twins’ Code.
    THE WAR HAD been going on for two years. But it took Pearl Harbor to make me realize it was my war too. My war, because there was a push to corral the dark and dusky peoples of the world, to force them into labor camps—who knows, perhaps they were death camps. And my skin was copper.
    I’d thought a good deal recently about being dark. In Germany the gypsies, along with the Jews, were rounded up, arrested, stripped of their possessions. Gypsies, because Hitler hadn’t any Indians. But the civilized world couldn’t allow the Nazis to declare themselves a master race and the rest slaves. Here in Canada we weren’t all fair-skinned. We played and sang and worshipped in dozens of