Because in fact, I was too much of a coward to go and see my sister in June 1940. I never made that journey to Balham. So the scene in which I confessed to them is imagined… invented. And in fact could never have happened because… Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray-Dunes on June the first, 1940, the last day of the evacuation. And I was never able to put things right with my sister Cecilia because she was killed on the fifteenth of October, 1940, by the bomb that destroyed the gas and water mains above Balham tube station.

So… My sister and Robbie were never able to have the time together they both so longed for, and deserved. And which ever since I’ve… Ever since I’ve always felt I prevented. But what sense of hope, or satisfaction, could a reader derive from an ending like that? So in the book I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life. I’d like to think this isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness. I gave them their happiness.