Briony: “I never made that journey to Balham. So the scene in which I confess to them is invented, imagined. And, in fact, could never have happened… because Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes on the first of June 1940, the last day of the evacuation… And I was never able to put things right with my sister Cecilia… because she was killed on the 15th of October, 1940 by the bomb that destroyed the gas and water mains above Balham tube station. So my sister and Robbie never had the time together they both so longed for and deserved, which, ever since, I’ve…always felt I prevented. But what sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader derive from an ending like that?”
Atonement, 2007
