[F]or the last twelve years, I’ve been walking to work at Goldsmiths College past a plaque commemorating the 1944 V-2 attack on the New Cross Road branch of Woolworths. Of the 168 people who died, fifteen were aged eleven or under. The novel is partly written in memory of those South London children, and their lost chance to experience the rest of the twentieth century.
But what has gone is not just the children’s present existence…It’s all the futures they won’t get, too. All the would-be’s, might-be’s, could-be’s of the decades to come. How can that loss be measured, how can that loss be known, except by laying this absence, now and onwards, against some other version of the reel of time, where might-be and could-be and would-be still may be?
–quoted by yours truly in last week’s sermon
The Anglican writer Francis Spufford has made the longlist for the 2021 Booker Prize for his second novel, Light Perpetual. The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams is among the judges of this year’s prize https://t.co/g3SOGZaao9
— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) July 31, 2021