I may be some time
ON his regular walk to work, teaching creative writing at Goldsmiths College in south London, Francis Spufford passes a memorial to the 168 people killed by a V2 bomb falling on a Woolworths store in 1944. Sixteen of them were young children, brought by their mothers on a Saturday shopping trip. Prof Spufford began thinking about those children: what if they hadn’t died, what would their futures have been? He imagined five of them, gave them names and characters, and dropped in on their lives every 10, 15, 20 years to see how they
