Dedication Page

Two definitions:

Mau Mau: possibly from Kikuyu; name for militant nationalist movement against British rule in Kenya. For the British of the 1950s, a word associated with terror and atrocity.

Mā mā: Japanese; an everyday word meaning so-so, OK, comme ci comme ça.

He sent her a photo in the spring, of daffodils and trees without leaves, and the house behind the trees. She couldn’t see much of the house in the photo, only a stretch of brick wall and a tiled roof, and two lines of windows reflecting sunshine. The point of the picture was the brilliant yellow of the daffodils in the foreground that was meant to tell her that, whatever England was, it was not always grey.

He was standing in the midst of the daffodils. Grinning and holding out his arms.

Come and see me, he wrote. Just that, in soft pencil, on the back of the photograph.

Already she had imagined the place he came from, from things that he had said before. When she got the photo she imagined it differently. When she finally went there it would be different again. Nothing, when you saw it, was quite as you imagined.

And people, she would think, wasn’t it like that with people? That they were not as you imagined, or even as you remembered them? Or so it seemed to her, after that summer. That people weren’t as you thought they were – or even, you weren’t quite who you thought you were yourself.