Millions had died to produce the world Alec had grown up in. This he had been told at school on every Remembrance Sunday before the bugle sounded and silence fell over the ranks of schoolboys who would not be asked to play their part because others had done it for them, had laid down their lives like so many garments of tissue and silk, so that in England at least, cars did not arrive in the middle of the night to take dissidents to basement torture chambers, and democracy, ‘the dear old dog’, could go on slumbering in its long after-dinner sleep. And this was a great success, of course, a triumph, because everyone knew, or had been told, that war was hell. He had watched the World at War series twice – once on television, once on video – Laurence Olivier reciting the horrors of the Russian front, Hiroshima, the Camps. And there was no shortage of more contemporary evidence. Iran and Iraq. Afghanistan. Chechnya. Endless wars in East and Central Africa. Wars like ‘Desert Storm’, carried out with textbook brutality, with press briefings and generals from Central Casting. Wars full of astonishing neighbourly murderousness, such as those that had ended uneasily in Croatia and Bosnia. Fighting was still a consuming occupation for large parts of the planet. But Alec was in England, and had only ever witnessed, from a safe distance, the kind of flailing, closing-time violence that all British cities vomited up at the weekend. For this he knew he should be grateful. Road kills upset him. The sight of a fishmonger ‘cleaning’ a fish made him queasy. He was delicate, prone to colds. His own front line had been four years teaching French at a South London state school, at the end of which (one pitiless Tuesday lunch-time after the Christmas break), he had simply run away. But still, he could not quite free himself from certain naive and powerful daydreams in which he fought at the barricades with a man like Lázár, or ran under a fiery sky with Grandpa Wilcox to haul some bleeding comrade to safety. It was comically depressing, the realization that there would never be a picture of him standing gravely on Tooting Common with the legend, ‘As a young man Valentine knew how to handle a tommy-gun’. That wasn’t his kind of life.