Stranger Than Fiction

[poliphilo]

So Karl and Eddie are scraping away at the wall and they find a fragile layer of plaster with graffiti on it.

The first thing that jumps out is the royal mongram:  GR, with the date 1921.  I can't find anything outstandingly significant about the year so I guess this is just some lazy plasterer making a loyal gesture- a bit like Sherlock Holmes decorating his study wall with V.R. in bullet holes.

I dismiss the suggestion that George V himself dropped by for tea.

Above the monogram are some much  fainter pencil scrawls: two names ? Kirkbride and J Buckley in a circle, with the date 1940 and, very hard to decipher, the message, "The year written about in the Book" signed  JB"- presumably the same J. Buckley . I suppose many people living in the opening years of WWII  must have thought they were witnessing the Biblical End Times.

But here comes the twisty bit. Karl's wife had a  great uncle called Jimmy Buckley who, she knows, did a whole lot of building work on our street.