For Henry and Selina, nearer to the turnpike of the twentieth century, what happens next is that they send their several children off to Spring Lane School that’s right across the street from where they live, crowded amidst the mess of public houses, businesses and homes all fitted in a huddle there between Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street. When he cycles out upon his rope-wheeled chariot to look for odds and ends each morning Henry likes to hear the boys and girls all giggling and shrieking in their playground that’s away behind the red brick schoolhouse somewhere, if it happens to be the right time of day. He’ll be coasting on down towards Saint Andrew’s Road that’s got the railway track beyond it, past The Friendly Arms, the little shops and houses, and he’ll listen for the youngsters kicking up a noise to see if he can pick out his own offspring’s voices from amongst them. Far as Henry knows, his and Selina’s kids are the first ones of any colour at the school, but still they never hear about no bullying or teasing, or at least none that’s about their skin. On more than one occasion when he struggles up Black Lion Hill into Marefair with the lit-up shop windows, or he coasts down Bath Street where they got that big dark chimney — that Destructor — it occurs to Henry that despite appearances him and Selina picked exactly the right place to raise their family. It’s taken him a while to fathom it, but Henry reckons that relations over here between the black folk and the white folk is a little different to the way that things are over in America. The business about class has got a lot to do with it, as Henry sees things. Back in Tennessee, even the humblest white folk still look down on coloured people, maybe because in their eyes a black man’s always going to be a slave. But here in England, even though it’s mostly the rich English people doing all the trading, they don’t personally keep no slaves themselves. So down in someplace like the Boroughs, where the people and their parents and their grandparents back to the knights-in-armour days are always on the bottom of the heap, they look at Henry and the first thing that they see it’s not a black man, it’s a poor man. If you want to know the difference that’s between the countries then you only got to look at their respective civil wars as far as Henry sees it, living here in the place that supplied the boots for both of them. In England back there in the sixteen-hundreds, old man Cromwell, he pretends as how he’s fighting for to liberate the poor from their oppressions. Meanwhile, over in America when Henry’s just a small child, old man Lincoln, he pretends as how he’s fighting for to liberate the slaves from their plantations. Speaking from his own experience, Henry reckons Mister Lincoln only wants to get them slaves out of the cotton fields down south so that they can be put to work in mills and factories up north. And from what Henry hears about the English Civil War, it seems like Mister Cromwell’s only after power and glory. Once he’s got that he starts killing off the leaders of the common people what supported him, and in both England and America the civil wars end up with those that they were meant to liberate no better off than what they were before, blacks over there, poor over here. Now, put like that the wars sound pretty much the same, but it appears to Henry that while both of them most probably have grabs for power at the bottom of it all, in England it’s put to the people as an uprising against the better-off, just like the business that’s in all the papers about Russia at the minute. In America, they have to make out that their Civil War has got to do with liberating slaves, because Americans are never going to want to overthrow the wealthy when becoming wealthy is the idea their whole country’s stood on. There’s the difference right there, that’s what Henry thinks. In England they don’t barely understand the hate that’s between folks of different colours when what’s on their mind is all the hate between folks come from different classes. Rope tyres rumbling on the cobblestones Black Charley runs around the Boroughs like a song what everybody knows. As long as he keeps to this part of town he don’t get any trouble, but then that’s the same for all the white people down here as well. He likes it here, and privately he marvels at all of the big and little things what tie it to the country that he come from. There’s George Washington and old Benjamin Franklin too, their families leaving Northampton to escape one civil war and heading for America to help set up the makings of another. There’s Confederate boots, and Henry hearing about Mr. Philip Doddridge’s considerable influence on the reformer William Wilberforce, and then of course there’s Pastor Newton writing his “Amazing Grace” out there at Olney. There’s a Mr. Corey who’s baptised at the round church in Sheep Street, goes out to America and gets tortured to death in Salem, caught up in that Cotton Mather witchcraft foolishness. The stars and stripes, the flag of the United States, that’s some old village crest the Washingtons took out of Barton Sulgrave with them when they left, and then there’s Henry George himself, another link there in the ugly chain connecting one land to the other. Henry judders on the Boroughs’ stones and loves the dirty mysteries of his adopted district, with all the cast-off centuries just lying heaped in bundles on the streets like unsold newspapers. He likes the convolutions of its paths and alleys — what they call a jitty here — and even though the whole place isn’t any bigger than a half square mile and he’s been living there for nigh on twenty years, Henry can still discover passages and short-cuts he don’t know about. Then come the war’s end in 1918 he sees it all begin to change, with Walter Tull filling an unmarked grave somewhere away in France and the commencement of the Boroughs’ slow and painful demolition, all the interesting yards and alleyways and complications at the back of Marefair just knocked flat and turned to rubble that weren’t neither interesting nor complicated, all the lives and history in those narrow lanes just wiped away like they were never there. More and more ground he sees fenced in with sheets of corrugated tin, more and more women widowed from the war reduced to peddling fornication in the graveyard by Saint Katherine’s Church and the almighty tower of the Destructor fuming up into a noonday sky that’s near as black as he is. A great heaviness begins to take up home in him, and Henry notes with puzzlement that amidst all the alterations Scarletwell Street seems to gradually be getting steeper.