‘Says here,’ Yo-less squinted, ‘it’s the Blackbury Old Pals Battalion. They’re just going off to fight. They all joined up at the same time . . .’

Johnny stared. He could hear people’s voices, and the background noises of the library. But the picture looked as if it was at the bottom of a dark, square tunnel. And he was falling down it.

Things outside the picture were inky and slow. The picture was the centre of the world.

Johnny looked at the grinning faces, the terrible haircuts, the jug-handle ears, the thumbs all up.

Even today nearly everyone in the Blackbury Guardian had their photo taken with their thumb up, unless they’d won Super Bingo, in which case they were shown doing what the photographer thought was a high kick. The newspaper’s one photographer was known as Jeremy the Thumb.

The people in the picture didn’t look much older than Bigmac. Well, a couple of them did. There was a sergeant with a moustache like a scrubbing brush, and an officer in jodhpurs, but the rest of them looked like a school photo.

And now he was coming back from wherever he’d been. The picture dropped away again, became just an oblong on a page on a screen. He blinked.

There was a feeling, like—

—like on an aeroplane when it’s about to land, and his ears went ‘pop’. But it was happening with his brain, instead.

‘Anyone know what the Somme is?’ said Yo-less.

‘No.’

‘That’s where they went, anyway. Some place in France.’

‘Any of them win any medals?’ said Johnny, struggling back into the real world. ‘That’d be famous. If there’s someone in the cemetery with a lot of medals.’

Yo-less spun the wheels of the viewer.

‘I’ll look ahead a few issues,’ he said. ‘There’s bound to be something if— Hey . . . look at this . . .’

They all tried to get under the hood at once. Silence came back as they realized what he’d found.

I knew it was important, Johnny thought. What’s happening to me?

‘Wow,’ said Wobbler. ‘I mean – all those names . . . everyone killed in this big battle . . . ’

Without saying anything, Johnny ducked into the other reader and wound it backward until he found the cheery photograph.

‘Are they listed in alphabetical order?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Yo-less.

‘I’ll read out the names under the photo, then. Um . . . Armitage, K . . . Atkins, T . . .’

‘Yes . . . no . . .’ said Yo-less.

‘Sergeant Atterbury, F . . .’

‘Yes.’

‘Hey, there’s three from Canal Street,’ said Wobbler. ‘That’s where my gran lives!’

‘Blazer . . . Constantine . . . Fraser . . . Frobisher . . .’

‘Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . . yes . . .’

They carried on to the end of the caption.

‘They all died,’ said Johnny, eventually. ‘Four weeks after the picture was taken. All of them.’