John and Mary Bishop left London by train in the spring of 1940 to stay with an old widow in the country. John had just turned thirteen and his sister, who cried the entire trip, was nine. The platform had been full of tearful mothers, but Alice Bishop was not a sentimental woman. She handed her teenage son a roll of pound notes and shook Alice by the shoulders and told her through gritted teeth to “stop yer bawlin.’” She didn’t wave. The pair shared a compartment with four other children, two boys and two girls, who politely ignored Mary’s sobbing. The oldest brother, a few years older than John, stared out the window, rising a little in his seat as they passed a muster of soldiers on one of the platforms. “Our dad’s in France,” said the youngest of the girls sitting across from John and Mary. “Where’s yours?” John just shrugged and Mary began crying harder. John fought back tears himself, unwilling, like his mother, to let the others see him cry.

The six children disembarked at the same platform, a rickety, sunbaked wooden structure surrounded by trees and a muddy cart path. The widow arrived for the Bishops. She was not as old as John had suspected, but much fatter. She was walking, with a basket on one arm, and after a terse greeting, gestured to the two of them to fall in behind. The young girl from the train waved at John as he looked back at the four children, alone on the platform. The widow proved nice enough. She would save up her sugar and butter rations and then let Mary choose from a battered old cookbook what they would bake for Sunday tea. Her little farmhouse was warm and no bombs fell there. She even had a typewriter, where John plunked out transcripts of the wireless reports in the evenings. The widow’s favorite topic of conversation was her eccentric neighbor, a professor of antiquities who, she claimed, had a vast collection of sinister artifacts. She once told the children that her husband had helped him collect a large parcel from the train platform. The professor claimed it contained a magical wardrobe. “Nuts, I say,” she’d exhale. John enlisted at eighteen when the war was winding down. He spent his enlistment sitting in an office in Southampton typing up discharges for returning soldiers. After the war, he worked in a canning factory, but fell to drinking. He committed suicide in 1959. Mary got very into the sixties. Later she moved to Majorca and opened a dog grooming studio.