Far From The Madding Crowd

We called it a home, but the building remembered it as a magazine. You could feel it in the way the dust settled—heavy, vertical, obeying a gravity that felt anxious.

Grandfather had chosen this place not for the view of the river, but for the thickness of the walls. He was a man who understood the physics of containment. “A room is only safe,” he once told me, “if it knows how to hold its breath.”

We lived inside that held breath. We were “bomb adjacent” not just in history, but in time. The silence in the flat wasn’t empty; it was pressurized. It was the specific, dense silence of a fuse that has been lit but is burning so slowly it spans generations.

I could feel it in the parquet floor. If you lay your cheek against the starburst pattern in the center of the room, you could hear the “Hum”. It wasn’t the wind, and it wasn’t the pipes. It was the sound of the building waiting. It was the static charge of eighty thousand shells that had once passed through these rooms, leaving behind a residue of pure, unspent violence.

My job—my “only” job—was to keep the vibration steady. That is why I arranged the books by weight. That is why we never slammed doors. We were the soft packing material placed around a volatile core.

Daniel understood this best. He didn’t play on the floor; he navigated it. He moved through the flat like a bomb disposal expert, stepping only where the wood didn’t creak, treating every teacup and shadow as if it were rigged.

“It’s humming, Mum,” he whispered to me once, pressing his hand to the fire door.

“I know, love,” I said. “That means it’s still working.”

“What is?”

“The suspense,” I told him. “As long as it hums, it hasn’t gone off.”

But I looked at his hands—smudged with graphite, trembling slightly—and I knew the truth. We weren’t living “after” the war. We were living in the long, silent second “before” the explosion resumed. We were living in the roof of a bomb, and the hum was getting louder.