People in the town centre are advised to listen out for Mrs. Tachyon, a bag lady who has been in the town for over seventy years, and has appeared sixty throughout them.
He goes back to his town, Blackbury, during the time of The Blitz with his friends Stephen, aka Wobbler, Bigmac, Kirsty and Yo-less (possibly because Johnny has been obsessing about the destruction of Paradise Street in a German raid).
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The action of the novel revolves around an incident during World War II in which Johnny's inoffensive home town of Blackbury was hit by a bomb during an air raid intended for an industrial complex at another nearby town.
The story starts with Johnny Maxwell, a twelve-year-old boy, taking a shortcut through the local Blackbury cemetery to reach his home.
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Part of the story deals with the last surviving member of the Blackbury pals, a Pals battalion with obvious parallel to the Accrington Pals.
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Later, Johnny meets all the deceased occupants of the cemetery and discusses with them the council's sale of Blackbury's neglected cemetery to a faceless conglomerate, who plan to build offices on it.