EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE

Prague when I knew it as a boy was a city of fear and spies and sooty fogs. It was behind the Iron Curtain, that much I understood at seven. We would drive through its barriers of concrete block houses, barbed wire, and no-man's-land in the big grey Morris with a six-cylinder engine and red leather seats, bought because my father deemed it tough enough for duty on the other side. That other side was spooky — spooky in the exciting way of stories we read in adventure magazines. It's strange the things you remember. The roads were rougher, and there was danger of some kind because we were going into enemy territory. I knew about enemies as this was 1957, and you could not be growing up in England in 1957 without knowing about enemies. There had been the War. In London it had left gaps in the buildings with half-hidden rubble behind rusting corrugated fences, empty holes that Granny blamed on people called Bosch, Krauts, and Bloody Germans. They had tried to kill Granny with bombs, and while they hadn't killed her they had killed a lot of other people. They wore jackboots. We knew what they looked like from the illustrations in those magazines and comic books.

The soldiers at the red-and-white barrier that blocked the road to Prague wore similar jackboots. They had guns and, I think, grey uniforms. They may have been khaki green. There were woods in the background. Dad would stop the car and roll down the window. He would tell us kids to be quiet while he handed over a bundle of passports and let the soldiers know that he was a diplomat, on his way to the British embassy in Prague. Vienna was to the south, behind us, another city of spies. Vienna and Prague both; one city on our side, one on the other.