You must remember that there was a war on, when we were born. If we made her happy, then we didn’t add much to the collective sum of happiness in the whole of South London. First of all, the neighbours’ sons went marching off, sent to their deaths, God help them. Then the husbands, the brothers, the cousins, until, in the end, all the men went except the ones with one foot in the grave and those still in the cradle, so there was a female city, red-eyed, dressed in black, outside the door, and Grandma said it then, she said it again in 1939: ‘Every twenty years, it’s bound to happen. It’s to do with generations. The old men get so they can’t stand the competition and they kill off all the young men they can lay their hands on. They daren’t be seen to do it themselves, that would give the game away, the mothers wouldn’t stand for it, so all the men all over the world get together and make a deal: you kill off our boys and we’ll kill off yours. So that’s that. Soon done. Then the old men can sleep easy in their beds, again.’
From Wise Children by Angela Carter.
Biblioklept 