Crude brick pillboxes had been run up at seemingly random locations, often blocking busy footpaths and forcing shoppers to detour into the gutters. They passed a vacant lot, crisscrossed by slit trenches, some covered in thin sheets of corrugated iron, one with a single log thrown across it. And newsboys on every second corner shouted out the headline of the hour. Not news from Midway, but a scare involving tins of imported Japanese fish. It was feared they’d been laced with ground-up glass before the war.

Many shop windows had already been boarded over, with only thin slits for potential customers to peer through. More than once, the three officers were forced to step around lines of people patiently waiting their turn to do just that. Horse-drawn carriages vied with trams, old trucks, and U.S. Army jeeps on the narrow roads. The headlights of the motor vehicles were all hooded for blackout conditions.

Without the Manhattanized skyline that had begun to eat up the heavens in the sixties, you could still see the town hall clock from most streets. Indeed, it completely dominated the skyline. Captain Willet tried not to stare at the faces of the passersby, but she found herself unable to drag her gaze away from the children, often dressed in what looked like hand-me-downs from the Great Depression: ill-fitting sweaters, poorly cut short pants, odd socks, shapeless dresses, and cloth caps. She couldn’t help but wonder if any of them were her relatives.

For Judge and Prince Harry, who weren’t natives of the city, fascination lay in the dowdy fashions, the grand vintage cars, and even the doughy, Old World faces, unaffected by intermarriage with generations of postwar migrants from the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia. But for Jane Willet, who’d grown up in Brisbane, it was as though . . . well . . . there was no appropriate metaphor. She simply came to a halt outside the Tattersalls Club—a VR porn club in her day—stared at her companions, and croaked, “We’re fucked.”

A passing woman, dressed in a heavy, black fur coat that was entirely inappropriate for the increasingly hot day, almost tripped over as she threw on the brakes.

“No! I’ll not have it,” she protested, spinning on her heel and pointing at them with her parasol. “What bad language and poor manners! How dare you! And we’ll beat those heathen monkeys yet, I say. But not if young people like you give in to despair. You should be ashamed. My Charlie would turn in his grave!”

And with that she spun again and waddled off up the street. They watched her go, too surprised to say anything. After a moment, Willet apologized.

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Harry assured her. “I’m sure if it was London or—was it Dallas, did you say, Commander?—we’d be just as buggered. I could run into my grandmother for God’s sake . . . except she’d be younger than me.”