“A whole Empire, walking”

On January 29th, 1916, Paul Tian-Kermode and Daffy the sheepdog are living above a Chinese grocer’s shop in Liverpool’s Chinatown and neither have been anywhere much apart from the Clwyd Valley, and Paul’s late mother Mary’s family farm in Gellifor.  This map provides you with the geography that Paul and Daffy traverse during the next fourteen months!  Their modes of transport include on foot, trains, trams, escalators, public buses, ferries, battleships, a submarine, donkeys and the US manufactured ‘Liberty’ truck – and their odyssey includes traversing the war-torn but newly independent Republic of Ukraine.  Sadly, I thought that the description of ‘a whole empire working’ of millions of refugees displaced by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire had been consigned to history.  Sadly, even more Ukrainian refugees are on the move due to the machinations of one delusional man in Russia, and thus the echoes of history reverberate to the present day.