Free Shadow of a Hero by Peter Dickinson

in Romania and watching the television reports, the swirling crowds in the streets of Bucharest, the snipers and tear gas, the lurch of the picture as the cameraman ducked for cover, and the exhausted faces of ordinary people tense with excitement or weeping with joy while they stammered in smattered English into the microphones. Poppa, who was in England for once, would get home and shout before he was through the door, ‘What’s happening? Anything new?’ and Letta would gabble out the news. Momma, astonishingly, started coming home before half-past six, though usually before Christmas she was working till all hours to get her desk cleared, and she didn’t stop to shop and sent out for pizzas instead, though every now and then she would laugh, and shake her head as if she was shaking away tears and say, ‘It’s nothing to do with us any longer, you know.’
    Neither telephone stopped ringing, with old Varinian friends, unheard of for years, wanting to swap excitements, and almost everyone in England, it sometimes seemed, reporters and politicians and historians and mysterious people who seemed to have no connection with Varina at all, anxious to know what Grandad thought.
    The rest of the family arrived on Christmas Eve, Mollie and Steff and Nigel and little Donna from St Albans, and Letta’s other brother, Van, and his Scottish girl-friend Susan from Glasgow, where they both worked in TV studios. The house throbbed with excitement and tension and the frustration of being so far away. There was so much electricity in the air, Steff said, that if they could have found a way of plugging the cooker into it they could have cooked their Christmas dinner for nothing.
    On Christmas Day itself came the news that the Ceau ş escus had been caught and executed, and Poppa opened the champagne then and there, and Momma, incredibly, turned on the oven but forgot to put the turkey in, so they didn’t have lunch till half-past five, and Letta and Nigel tripped Poppa up and held him down with Van’s help and wouldn’t give him any more champagne until he’d taught them the missing verses of ‘The Two Shepherds’ and they sang it all over the house and made up English versions to tell their friends, and still the telephones were ringing and ringing, Varinians all over the world now wanting to talk to Grandad and wish him a happy Christmas and saying, ‘Next year in Potok.’
    Then, while the dust of the old year’s explosions settled greyly onto the new year, and the days went by, Romania and the countries round about dropped out of the news, mostly. The United States had invaded Panama and there was a revolt in Liberia and trouble between Russia and Lithuania and a civil war starting in Azerbaijan, and so on. Still, the people you met, kids at school, even – because Letta had a foreign name and some of them knew that her family came from around there – often talked about Romania, shiny-eyed and romantic. The uprising had been so obviously a Good Thing, because Ceau ş escu and his gang had been such horrors. And then the news started coming through about things like the orphanages where all the kids were tied into their cots because there weren’t enough people to look after them, and they all had AIDS from transfusions of infected blood, but still people talked as if all that was over, and there was going to be democracy and foreign medicine and emergency aid and everything would be all right. Of course there were terrible problems still, but now that Ceau ş escu was gone they could all be sorted out. Letta found this depressing. First, she knew from Grandad it wasn’t like that. And second, Varina was one of the problems.
    About three weeks into the term she got back from school and found that Grandad had visitors, two men in heavy dark suits. Grandad introduced them as Mr Kronin and Mr Dashik. Mr Dashik said, ‘How do you do?’ in English, with a strong accent, as he shook hands. Letta answered in English so as