Curfew

Notes on Curfew.

Ondaatje's Warlight begins in London in 1945, the year peace arrives on paper but not yet inside a house. A boy of fourteen watches his parents leave for what he's told is business abroad, and finds himself in the care of two men his sister nicknames for a moth and a bird, men who turn out to have spent the war in ways nobody thinks to explain to a child. The curfew has technically ended. It survives anyway, in the boy's habits: streets he learns to read for which windows still hold a light, doors he learns not to ask about.