Suddenly she feels terribly weary. Remembering is exhausting. What she would most like to do now is lie down with her cheek resting on the stone flags and stay there, until the cold seeps into her body with a heavy forgetfulness and she can slip away to join Father and Jimmy, wherever they are.

Bella’s voice comes from somewhere far away. ‘You look as though you could do with a bite to eat, Mum.’ The window slips from view as Molly’s chair is turned, and she is being wheeled back down the aisle towards the church door.

Later, when they are sipping soup of the day in the warm recesses of the pub, Bella says, ‘Tell me about that window, Mum. Whatever is a crocodile doing in an English country church?’

Molly puts down her spoon. Where on earth to start?

PART TWO:

DECEMBER 1949

3

We arrived in the village in early December. The countryside was like a foreign land to me and Jimmy, you understand. Until then we’d only ever lived in the city.

He was ten, I was fourteen, and we were only just beginning to get used to life without Mum. I say ‘getting used to’ but we never really got used to it. The word ‘cancer’ had been whispered when the adults thought we were out of hearing, but we had sharp ears. Whatever it was that killed her took a long, long time. But even with all that warning, when the end came it was a hideous shock.

At first I simply couldn’t believe it, nor could Jimmy. Someone had told him that Mum had gone to heaven and he sobbed every day because he didn’t know his way there. How do you respond to that? To say that to go to her, he’d have to die as well? That Pa and me wouldn’t be coming with him, not just yet? Or that we all have to die, sometime? There is no consolation. Death is final, and they are gone forever.

I wept too, of course, and got angry, stomping around the flat and cursing God with all the worst swear words I knew. But mostly I just felt numb. Everyday activities, like getting dressed and making toast, going to school and coming home, felt like wading through thick fog. For a long, long time I was sure I’d never properly feel anything ever again.

Pa dropped his bombshell barely nine months after that. Since returning from the war he’d been one of several curates at St Martin-in-the-Fields, the beautiful church on the corner of Trafalgar Square, right in the centre of London. I loved it for its great columns, the light from its tall windows, the cheerful sound of its bells and those enormous bronze lions in the square. And I always imagined it having once been in the centre of green pastures, for why else would it have been given that name?