To begin with the youngest.
“Me an’ the war’s the same age,” said Jasper, for Jasper was born on August 4th, 1914.
Perhaps that was why he manifested such a decided and independent disposition almost from his earliest months.
It may have been that everybody was so busy he was more thrown upon his own resources than are babies in more leisurely times. But whatever the reason, he ran about when he was one, talked fluently—if in somewhat impressionistic fashion—when he was eighteen months old, and by the time he was two he had attained very definite characteristics.
Barbara came next, four long years older than Jasper. She had a round, rosy face and kind brown eyes that readily filled with tears, and her little heart overflowed with love and pity for the wounded.
Alison was quite old when war broke out. She could remember times when sweets “were nothing so very much—everybody eat them,” when “gentlemen often had two eggs for breakfast and lots of other things as well,” when “Mummy could buy anything she liked in shops, and nearly everybody had motors.”
Alison was six when Jasper was born.
Tall and pale was Alison, with straight black hair that reached her waist. She took the war very seriously indeed, and was implacable in her conviction that nothing else mattered. She was even rather shocked that mummy could take comfort in the thought that it would probably be over before Jasper was old enough to join up.
Then there was George.
He was an American and the same age as Alison and lived quite near, though after the unfriendly fashion of London, they might never have known him but that it happened his mummy and theirs worked at the same hospital.