The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

in the restaurant himself, he spent most of his days there, sitting at the bar in the afternoon talking to the customers, eating his meals there in the evening and staying until closing time, laughing with his friends.
    Grandmother never seemed old in comparison to the other boys’ grandmothers. In fact when Bruno learned just how old she was – sixty-two – he was amazed. She had met Grandfather as a young woman after one of her concerts and somehow he had persuaded her to marry him, despite all his flaws. She had long red hair, surprisingly similar to her daughter-in-law’s, and green eyes, and she claimed that was because somewhere in her family there was Irish blood. Bruno always knew when a family party was getting into full swing because Grandmother would hover by the piano until someone sat down at it and asked her to sing.
    ‘What’s that?’ she always cried, holding a hand to her chest as if the very idea took her breath away. ‘Is it a song you’re wanting? Why, I couldn’t possibly. I’m afraid, young man, my singing days are far behind me.’
    ‘Sing! Sing!’ everyone at the party would cry, and after a suitable pause – sometimes as long as ten or twelve seconds – she would finally give in and turn to the young man at the piano and say in a quick and humorous voice:
    ‘ La Vie en Rose , E-flat minor. And try to keep up with the changes.’
    Parties at Bruno’s house were always dominated by Grandmother’s singing, which for some reason always seemed to coincide with the moment when Mother moved from the main party area to the kitchen, followed by some of her own friends. Father always stayed to listen and Bruno did too because there was nothing he liked more than hearing Grandmother break into her full voice and soak up the applause of the guests at the end. Plus, La Vie en Rose gave him chills and made the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
    Grandmother liked to think that Bruno or Gretel would follow her onto the stage, and every Christmas and at every birthday party she would devise a small play for the three of them to perform for Mother, Father and Grandfather. She wrote the plays herself and, to Bruno’s way of thinking, always gave herself the best lines, though he didn’t mind that too much. There was usually a song in there somewhere too – Is it a song you’re wanting? she’d ask first – and an opportunity for Bruno to do a magic trick and for Gretel to dance. The play always ended with Bruno reciting a long poem by one of the Great Poets, words which he found very hard to understand but which somehow started to sound more and more beautiful the more he read them.
    But that wasn’t the best part of these little productions. The best part was the fact that Grandmother made costumes for Bruno and Gretel. No matter what the role, no matter how few lines he might have in comparison to his sister or grandmother, Bruno always got to dress up as a prince, or an Arab sheik, or even on one occasion a Roman gladiator. There were crowns, and when there weren’t crowns there were spears. And when there weren’t spears there were whips or turbans. No one ever knew what Grandmother would come up with next, but a week before Christmas Bruno and Gretel would be summoned to her home on a daily basis for rehearsals.
    Of course the last play they performed had ended in disaster and Bruno still remembered it with sadness, although he wasn’t quite sure what had happened to cause the argument.
    A week or so before, there had been great excitement in the house and it had something to do with the fact that Father was now to be addressed as ‘Commandant’ by Maria, Cook and Lars the butler, as well as by all the soldiers who came in and out of there and used the place – as far as Bruno could see – as if it were their own and not his. There had been nothing but excitement for weeks. First the Fury and the beautiful blonde woman had come to dinner, which had brought the whole house to a standstill, and then it was this new business of calling Father ‘Commandant’. Mother had told Bruno to congratulate Father and he had done so, although if he was honest with himself (which he always tried to be) he wasn’t entirely sure what he was congratulating him for.
    On Christmas Day Father wore his brand-new uniform, the starched and pressed one that he wore every day now, and the whole family applauded when he first appeared in it. It really was something special. Compared to