"Mrs. Talbot sighed and sat back in her chair. Very faintly in the background there was the sound of a single-engine plane, perhaps a Spitfire, Geoffrey thought, on a training exercise from one of the grass airfields in Sussex. Considering the war for civilisation they were daily waging with the Luftwaffe, the noise was oddly peaceful, not much more than the buzz of a distant bee in the hot afternoon.
For the moment the three of them, the small family unit, looked at one another and Geoffrey had the sensation of time stopping, as though all his childhood summers were rolled into that moment: the slow days when the sun glowed on the brick of the village almshouses with their fiery beds of dahlias and wallflowers tended by old men in cardigans; the bubbling white of the water that ran beneath the bridge by the church in which, flat on the grass, he would dip his hands to cool them, then splash his face; the road when he bicycled past the cottage hospital on his way home from school and saw the patients wheeled on to the grass to lie in the drowsy afternoon with a wireless faintly playing through an open door."
That passage, from A Possible Life
