In the central atrium she was immediately overwhelmed by the bright colours flooding her view from every angle. The noise level rose exponentially, amplified by the towering space. A crying baby seemed to have been stationed at every intersection, and a shop girl to her left was frantically replacing an avalanche of stuffed animals cascading from a mountain of them on a display table, while a pair of twin girls wrestled for a bear dressed as Churchill that each wanted, not caring that there were dozens more exactly like it right by them.

The stuffed animals were thinner than she remembered, she observed. Even they had suffered from rationing. They bore up under the deprivation of their cotton innards quite bravely, under the circumstances.

She climbed the stairs to the Boys’ Department and was rewarded by the sight of an entire Western section. Mannequins dressed as cowboys and Indians stood ready to go to war on top of the shelves and giant posters of Tom Mix, Roy Rogers, and other American actors smiled benevolently down from the walls, hands resting on the butts of their guns.

The aisles were filled with boys, many of whom were waging some kind of range war, galloping about while screaming and shooting at each other with their index fingers while the mothers and nannies minding them might as well have been bound and gagged and tied to railroad tracks, for all the good they were doing.

Whoopee ti yi yo, Gwen thought, and she plunged into the aisles, sidestepping ersatz Indians in short pants shooting invisible arrows with invisible bows while their counterparts clutched their chests dramatically and fell to the ground.

“May I help you, madam?” said a young sales clerk. “Or should I say, howdy, ma’am? What kin ah do fer ye?”

“Oh, you poor thing,” Gwen laughed. “Is that required here?”

“Ah reckon,” said the clerk. “What might you be prospectin’ fer?”

“A birthday present for a young boy,” said Gwen.

“Cap pistol, perhaps? We’ve got some mighty fine replicas. Gen-you-wine six-shooters, pearl-handled like General Patton’s. Or these here Colt revolvers, the same what used to be carried by Pony Express riders through the Badlands.”

“I’m trying to win my way back into his mother’s good graces,” said Gwen. “I don’t think a cap gun will do that, although they do look quite authentic. What about a play set?”

“They went thisaway, ma’am,” he said, leading her to another aisle. “This here’s a popular choice.”

He showed her a boxed set of die-cast metal figures—a bright red stagecoach pulled by a pair of brown galloping horses, plus four cowboys and three Indians in various combative poses, three of them mounted.

“You can vary the scenarios, which is what I like about them,” he explained, momentarily dropping the accent. “The cowboys could save the stagecoach from an Indian attack, or they could be highwaymen and the Indians could come to the rescue, or whatever the young lad wants it to be. The young feller, I should say.”