“Sir… when it’s winter, do the lights go out?”
The question stopped Harvey in his tracks.
The tennis ball rested in Jake Green’s hands as he stood beneath the weak glow of a gas lamp in Warren Street station. Around him, a small group of children waited silently. None of them could have been older than ten.
Harvey looked at the boy for a moment before answering.
“What’s your name?”
“Jake Green.”
“Listen, Jake. The lights have nothing to do with winter. The cold comes anyway.”
The boy nodded slowly.
“And the others?” Harvey asked. “Do they know what winter is?”
“No, sir. I asked them. Nobody knew.”
For a brief moment, Harvey and Fiona exchanged a glance. Then they laughed quietly, not because the question was funny, but because it revealed something they had almost forgotten.
These children had been born beneath the earth.
They had never seen snow.
Never watched frost gather on a window.
Never felt freezing air on their faces or walked through a city covered in white.
Harvey crouched down.
“Winter was one of the four seasons. Spring, summer, autumn and winter. It was the coldest of them all. Snow would fall from the sky and cover everything. The streets, the buildings, the trees. The whole world would turn white.”
Jake listened carefully, trying to imagine something completely outside his experience.
“A world that turns white?” he asked.
Harvey smiled.
“Yes. A world very different from this one.”
The children eventually ran off into the station, their voices fading among the tents and flickering lanterns.
“What’s tennis?”
“I don’t know…”
Harvey watched them disappear into the darkness.
For the first time in a long while, he found himself smiling.
Not because things were getting better.
But because somewhere beneath the ruins of London, hope still existed.
