Lloyd looked around. This was his family: mother, stepfather, half-sister, uncle, aunt, cousin. He did not want to leave them and go away to die somewhere.

Lloyd looked at his watch, a stainless-steel model with a square face that Bernie had given him as a graduation present. It was eleven o’clock. On the radio, the fruity voice of newsreader Alvar Lidell said the Prime Minister was expected to make an announcement shortly. Then there was some solemn classical music.

‘Hush, now, everyone,’ said Ethel. ‘I’ll make you all a cup of tea after.’

The kitchen went quiet.

Alvar Lidell announced the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.

The appeaser of Fascism, Lloyd thought; the man who gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler; the man who had stubbornly refused to help the elected government of Spain even after it became indisputably obvious that the Germans and Italians were arming the rebels. Was he about to cave in yet again?

Lloyd noticed that his parents were holding hands, Ethel’s small fingers digging into Bernie’s palm.

He checked his watch again. It was a quarter past eleven.

Then they heard the Prime Minister say: ‘I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at Ten Downing Street.’

Chamberlain’s voice was reedy and over-precise. He sounded like a pedantic schoolmaster. What we need is a warrior, Lloyd thought.

‘This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that, unless the British government heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.’

Lloyd found himself feeling impatient with Chamberlain’s verbiage. A state of war would exist between us : what a strange way to put it. Get on with it, he thought; get to the point. This is life and death.

Chamberlain’s voice deepened and became more statesmanlike. Perhaps he was no longer looking at the microphone, but instead seeing millions of his countrymen in their homes, sitting by their radio sets, waiting for his fateful words. ‘I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received.’

Lloyd heard his mother say: ‘Oh, God, spare us.’ He looked at her. Her face was grey.

Chamberlain uttered his next, dreadful words quite slowly: ‘. . . and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.’

Ethel began to cry.

Part Two

A SEASON OF BLOOD

6

1940 (I)

Aberowen had changed. There were cars, trucks and buses on the streets. When Lloyd had come here as a child in the 1920s to visit his grandparents, a parked car had been a rarity that would draw a crowd.

But the town was still dominated by the twin towers of the pithead, with their majestically revolving wheels. There was nothing else: no factories, no office blocks, no industry other than coal. Almost every man in town worked down the pit. There were a few dozen exceptions: some shopkeepers, numerous clergymen of all denominations, a town clerk, a doctor. Whenever the demand for coal slumped, as it had in the thirties, and men were laid off, there was nothing else for them to do. That was why the Labour Party’s most passionate demand was help for the unemployed, so that such men would never again suffer the agony and humiliation of being unable to feed their families.