The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets

Men, I thought, were more trouble than they were worth. Really, one should stick to books where one sees the hero coming a mile off.

Like all intelligent people, she functions very well in extreme disorder.

Mama was amazing like that; I spent most of my teenage years assuming that she knew nothing about me, and all of my twenties realizing that she knew everything.

There's never any warning that something extraordinary is about to happen, is there?

If I could take people out of their heads for a little while, if I could give them a dose of fantasy, that was all that mattered. You can't put a price on escape.

Would it ever, ever leave? I had become used to the ache now; it was with me all the time, and never seemed to lessen. Time was no healer, I decided, but it was a great accommodator.

As he started 'Whisky and Gin' and the cheering and the shrieking filled my senses, I thought of Mama, shattered by the war and Papa's death and I wished with all my heart that she could understand how it felt to be us that night - how it felt to be eighteen and unbeaten, eighteen and alive.

I didn't hear you come in. I was away with the ghosts of my beautiful youth.

The odd thing about Mama was that she liked to think of herself as a doomy sort of person, but there was a natural optimism in her that refused to be defeated, however hard she squashed it down, and I know that she never lost faith completely.