I was crying for a past that had never really existed, some terribly British notion of the previous land, where things were better, and all deaths were noble, and the twilights were presumably golden. My family is British, after all, so I have a right to sob about what was lost. Loss is my heritage. Before the war that took Mum, before all the wars, before the Fall, I suppose, we were comfortable and happy and glad. And then They came, and They had some sort of big plan that We didn’t really understand, and just Them being Them made us, who had been all sorts of things, into We.

Same old story, and it is full of its own terrors, and flawed, and has that terrible male triumphalism about it that causes boys to line up and be slaughtered. But it can still make me cry.

And that night it connected with my own situation, and it affected me, rather.

The night lasted about ten days.

Diary Entry Ends

Dr Smith ignited the oil lamp, settled down at his desk and picked up a pen. He tapped his teeth with it thoughtfully.

It would have been good if Joan had stayed for dinner that night. She was different.

Full of life. She made him happy in strange ways. She made him want to write.

He’d always thought he’d had a novel in him, ever since he and Verity had walked down to the shore and they’d danced on the rocks in the moonlight. She’d kissed him then, and whispered something in his ear. Both ideas seemed odd: the whisper and the kiss. He couldn’t remember what she’d told him, or what being kissed had been like.

All that was because he’d got his Uppers results that day. It looked certain that he could be a teacher.

He pulled a blank piece of paper from the drawer and stared at it. Very white. Very blank.

He thought for a moment. He could show the story to Joan. She’d suggest changes, they’d work on it together. That would be good.

He put his pen to paper and began to write.

The Old Man and the Police Box

Long ago, and far away, in the reign of Queen Victoria, there lived a silver-haired old man, who had a very good idea. He had thought of a shelter for policemen, with a telephone, so that anybody who was in trouble could call for help. And that was clever; because nobody knew what a telephone was, back then.

Because there had to be a lot of room inside the shelter; the old man invented a way to make a lot of space fit into it. Because the shelter had to be able to chase criminals, he made it so it could disappear and then appear again somewhere else.