ABSTRACT
Trevor is eight years old and his mother, Edna Morris, is forty-one. At the kitchen table, she tells Trevor and his sister Lovene, thirteen, how their father was arrested by Special Branch in 1940 and sent to prison because of his refusal to fight Hitler in the war. In mid-1940, a fatherless family of three is sent to London to live in a one-room flat in St John’s Wood. At night, they hide in a cupboard as doodlebugs rain down on London. Sidney is released from detention in 1944, and to his own surprise is given a lease by the LNER to run a bombed-out Victorian house behind Marylebone Station. Mosley’s number one man after the war, Jeffrey Hamm, is allowed to live in the basement rent free. When the family and their fascist friends meet to discuss Mosley’s comeback, Trevor is allowed to stand on a chair and place the needle onto a 78 rpm record made in German, which is the Nazi anthem, the ‘Horst Wessel Lied.’
