Re: UK Gun Crime Escalating

Perhaps it was the
time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the
raid itself, but he did remember his father's hand clutching his own as
they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and
round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so
wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest.
His mother, in her slow, dreamy way, was following a long way behind them.
She was carrying his baby sister -- or perhaps it was only a bundle of
blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether his sister had
been born then. Finally they had emerged into a noisy, crowded place which
he had realized to be a Tube station.
There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor, and other
people, packed tightly together, were sitting on metal bunks, one above the
other. Winston and his mother and father found themselves a place on the
floor, and near them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by side
on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap
pushed back from very white hair: his face was scarlet and his eyes were
blue and full of tears. He reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his
skin in place of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling
from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he was also
suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish
way Winston grasped that some terrible


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