“I didn’t say not allowed. I said last resort.” Kim adjusted his position, returning to lying with his head on Will’s stomach. Will found his hand and held it, and they watched the clouds move in silence some more.

“Question,” he said after a while. “Your brother, Henry. He was, what, five years younger than you?”

“Yes.”

“Because I was reading about your family in the Mail the other day, and it said your brother joined up in 1917. He must have been eighteen by then, right?”

“Yes. Why?”

Will propped his head on his other arm. “Your family all seem to think your brother had to join up because you didn’t. But the Military Service Act had been around for a year or more. Everyone aged eighteen was meant to go. So how is it your fault?”

“Because ‘meant to’ is a flexible concept to people like my father,” Kim said. “He got Chingford a back-room job in the War Department as soon as he realised that it wouldn’t be over by Christmas. He intended me to be the family contribution to the war effort, but I declined, and worse, did so in public. Speaking at anti-war meetings and being aggressively Bolshevik and so on. I was brought to a tribunal in late 1916, where I refused to either fight or do war work, and more or less invited them to gaol me. God, my father was furious. Even a conscientious objector carrying stretchers at the Front would have been better, but I wouldn’t. I wanted to be a martyr to my cause. Well, I wasn’t permitted that. If I was to be disgraced, it should be on Father’s terms. He pulled strings by the handful, and the board was given a private medical report that convinced them of my mental and moral unfitness to serve in any capacity. I don’t know exactly what it said, but I can guess.”

So could Will. “Christ.”

“It was somewhat trying,” Kim agreed. “And it also left him out of options for Henry. So many of his peers had lost sons and heirs by then, and he had his elder two safe and sound. He couldn’t find a way around it, so Henry had to go. Which he did without protest. He had been brought up to do his duty, and he did, and he was dead a week after he set foot on the Continent.”

“Just like a few million other men who didn’t have anyone to get them out of the war. And it’s your fault because your father pulled strings you didn’t ask him to, but it’s not Chingford’s fault for taking a cushty office job?”

“It’s never Chingford’s fault.”

Will snorted. “War Department. Doing what?”

“Supplies,” Kim said. “Procurement of goods, I believe—what?”

Will had sat up. “Supplies? They put him in Supplies?”