It was in his tenth year when everything was taken away that George Carveth realized he’d actually been happy for most of his life. On a cloudy November Saturday, with the remains of Bonfire Night scorched on the ridge, the house telephone rang like an alarm.

Until then, home had been a crowded house on a hill, a run from the school. A climb from the village. There had been a day last summer in 1955 when George flooded with a sense of fortune, the sea a jeweled expanse, the billowing land salted with houses. He’d seen an opposite life in newsreels—gray cities where children huddled in damp rooms with empty bellies. The war had stopped a year before his birth. No air raid siren ever sounded.

Dad whistled on that summer day, a typical Saturday for the Carveth clan with the uncles bringing out the bicycles.

I had my first ever “Law & Order” moment. You know… the arrest at the bottom of the hour?

Yeah.

Cuffs. Miranda rights. My usually docile Labradors turned into Cerberus behind my hastily closed kitchen door, their confinement being “an order” from a pair of nervous, threatened cops, who are not unlike nervous, threatened dogs.

Outside, the neighborhood comes alive! Imagine the diversion of a cop car pulling in. Officers badged and holstered pound the door of an end-unit townhouse. Even better, they drag out the short, snarly white bitch who lives there—me.

Upon my departure, neighbors swarm like hens to feed…