My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.

I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.

I think the recent cluster of WWII novels is so good because we have reached an optimal distance from the war. Just as a lens has its focal length, the novel also has its best distance from the action.

[My maternal grandmother ] was a teacher in London and elsewhere during the war, although the children she taught were not the "lost children" who feature in the novel - those come from my research.

What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream off things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.

Yet war doesn't end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.

That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.