“I know, ” I said. “It’s changed all of our lives.”

“Here!” Carruthers called from the Drapers’ Chapel. He was on his knees. “I’ve found something.”

He was in the wrong direction for blast, and at first all I could see was a tangle of timbers, but Carruthers was pointing at something in the midst of the tangle.

“I see it!” the verger said. “It looks like metal.”

“Use your torch,” Carruthers said to the new recruit.

The recruit, who’d forgotten how to switch it on, messed with it for a bit and then switched it on in Carruthers’ face.

“Not on me,” Carruthers said. “Under there!” He snatched it away from him and shone it on the pile of timbers, and I caught a glint of metal. My heart leaped.

“Get those timbers off there,” I said, and we all went at the pile.

“Here it comes,” the verger said, and Carruthers and the new recruit hauled it up out of the rubble.

The metal was black with soot, and it was badly crushed and twisted, but I knew what it was, and so did the verger. “It’s one of the sand buckets,” he said, and burst into tears.

It was physically impossible for the verger to be suffering from time-lag, unless it was somehow contagious. He was giving a good imitation of it, though.

“I saw that bucket only last night,” he blubbered into a very sooty handkerchief, “and now look at it.”

“We’ll clean it up,” Carruthers said, patting him awkwardly. “It’ll be as good as new,” which I doubted.

“The handle’s blown clean off,” the verger said. He blew his nose loudly. “I filled that bucket with sand myself. Hung it up by the south door myself.”

The south door was at the other end of the church, with the full length of the nave and rows and rows of solid oak pews between it and the Drapers’ Chapel.

“We’ll find the handle,” Carruthers said, which I also doubted, and they knelt as if in prayer and started digging through the timbers.