But I werent going easy and I fought against it and hung on still and peered over the wall into the schoolyard to see the kiddies playing there all so happy and strong and free – and I wondered whether any on them was descended from me – and I thought I saw a familiar face then came the sound of a distant crump like they was blasting out at Abels Quarry – only I knew they werent

– and a voice a long way off saying some poor sods catching it – and I didn't want to blink though the sun was shining straight into my eyes – but I had to blink – and though it was only a second or even less when I opened my eyes again sun were gone and kiddies were gone and all I could see were the night sky through the window red and terrible as that old stained glass – and all I could hear were the rumble of the guns – and all I could feel was the straw from my palliasse pricking into my back…

Pascoe awoke. Had he been dreaming? He thought he had but his dream had gone. Or had it? Did dreams ever go? Our present was someone else's future. We live in other men's dreams…

He closed his eyes and drifted back to that other place.

… but I’ll try to keep them dream children bright in my mind my love – you too – and tell little Ada about them – I still cant credit a bible heaven spite of old padre preaching at me every other day – so unless this lots going to teach us summat about the way we live here on earth wheres the point of it all eh?

Wheres the bloody point? vi

Wanwood House had had pieces added to it in the modern Portaloo style, but basically it was a square solid Victorian building, its proportions not palatial but just far enough outside the human scale to put a peasant in his place. Thus did the nineteenth-century Yorkshireman underline the natural order of things.