Boxing Day and Susan’s family are gathered together to watch an old classic. It’s Daddy’s favourite movie and although she’ll never admit it, it’s Susan’s favourite too. Little girls aren’t supposed to like old movies and especially not old war movies, but it’s about Talented. There is nothing more fascinating than being Talented, except being Talented and heroic, because there is nothing better a Talented can be than heroic in Susan’s mind.

In The Belly Of The Beast. It’s based on a true story and Daddy says it’s from the 1950s. The colours are strangely vivid and unreal, as if an artist painted them. When Susan’s favourite character, Britannia, is on-screen, clad in her white uniform and clutching her huge broadsword in one hand and her even huger kite shield in the other, she is always excited. The Union Jack colours on the shield are jewel-like and the blade of the sword a brilliant silver. She’s not the big hero of the film, though. Quickstep is in charge.

At the start of the film, Britannia and Quickstep are sort of enemies. Britannia helps the Police fight criminals, both Talented and Normie, and there is no criminal quite as famous as Quickstep, nor one quite as hard to catch. Daddy once told Susan that Quickstep was a thief and a blackmailer, Robin Hood for the 20th Century. She’s heard all the stories, of how when courts cheated people out of justice and ruled in favour of the rich and immoral, Quickstep would find a way to make it right by finding the lost piece of evidence hidden in a palace, or by selling stolen jewels and giving the proceeds to the poor. The powerful hated him, Daddy said, because he threatened them in a way they couldn’t stop, because not even Britannia could stop him. Nobody ever could.

When the war started, the country needed all the Talented to help fight the Nazis and Quickstep was only too happy to help. Daddy told Susan about some of the missions Quickstep had done, deep in enemy territory, surrounded by soldiers and tanks. Quickstep rescued people, and planted bombs in important Nazi buildings, and one time even stole a submarine on his own, although Susan doesn’t believe that story is true. How can one person make a submarine go? But there’s a new mission for Quickstep. The Germans have invaded their former friends, the Soviet Union, and are going to defeat their army. The German generals are just too clever and the Soviet army can’t stop them.

So the Soviets have a plan. They have an agent in the German army who will help them kill the Generals and save Mother Russia. The Americans send along one of their Talented, Titan, the strongest man on Earth. Britain persuades Quickstep to lead the mission, but he knows he needs another Talented to help. Britannia. She doesn’t trust him, not with all their history, but somehow - Susan doesn’t understand how - he persuades her.

The film has got to the scene Susan knows best of all, as it’s the one she practices in her room when no-one is looking, words and all. The one that starts when the heroes are in a cargo plane flying into enemy territory. Britannia cocks her head, face half-obscured with a visor Daddy says is called a beaver or something. There are Nazi fighter planes coming to shoot the plane down and to kill Britannia and Quickstep and Titan. Britannia isn’t afraid. She’s strong and she can fly and she’s going to stop them.

“This is my fight,” she says, standing at the open rear door. Quickstep nods, tiny and frail beside her.

“Luck,” Titan rumbles, a mountain of a man, all muscle and no brain.

Britannia doesn’t need luck. She isn’t as strong as Titan, or as cunning as Quickstep, but she does all the really dangerous jobs, the ones that require brains and muscles, and that is why Susan idolizes her.

“I’ll catch you up,” Britannia says. The music swells into a dramatic crescendo.

Out she goes, out the door into the buffeting wind, shield slung on her back, sword in hand. The fighters are closing in, six Messerschmits. The pilots don’t know she is in the sky with them and their eyes shine with wicked determination, focused on the heroes’ plane. Britannia zooms through the heart of their formation and the fighters scatter in disarray. She closes in on one, landing on the fuselage behind the cockpit. Her sword slices through the hinges and the cockpit cartwheels away in the airstream and Britannia jerks the pilot out of his seat and tosses him screaming into the sky.

“Aaaaaaaaah!” Susan and her Daddy say together, the sound dwindling away as the pilot drops out of view. They do this every time they watch the movie. Mummy giggles and shakes her head.

The Messerschmit spins away from Britannia and she turns to see another one bearing down on her, its machine guns raving. Britannia twists and the bullets ricochet off her shield. The fighter plane banks on its side as it passes her and Britannia swings her sword up and across and through its tail, which hangs loose for a moment before flying free. The plane tips nose-down and spirals out of the sky. Britannia looks around for a fresh target and rockets towards it, sword raised. This plane she cuts a wing off of, and the next one she plunges her sword through the cockpit into the pilot.

“Aaaargh!” Susan and Daddy yell in unison before laughing.

Two Messerschmits left, the leader and his wingman. The leader barks something gutteral into his radio in German, subtitled on the screen.

“Hans, distract her. I’ll take the plane. For the Fuhrer!”

Hans is good, smarter and better than the pilots Britannia has defeated so far. Whenever she focuses on Hans, he dives away. Whenever she focuses on the leader, Hans buzzes her or chases her off with a burst of fire. Yet Britannia is smarter than him. She flies into a cloud and Hans scans the sky wildly, not realising Britannia is no longer in the cloud, but has shot out of its top, hiding herself in the glare of the sun.

Britannia descends behind and beneath Hans’ plane, drawing ever closer. Hans has no idea - his mirrors don’t help him. So when Britannia rises up level with the cockpit, face-to-face with the Nazi ace, his last expression is one of shock as she drives her sword through him and drags it the length of the fuselage out through the tail. Hans, as dead as his Messerschmit, slumps forward on his controls and crashes to Earth in pieces.

Just the leader remains. The pilot of the transport plane is doing his best to keep the Nazi away, swooping and jinking, but the fighter draws a bead on the heroes’ plane and strafes it brutally. Quickstep and Titan cringe on the floor as bulletholes appear all round them. And then, disaster, the leader has the transport squarely in his sights, Britannia still closing but too far away, the leader grins fiercely as his thumb hovers over the trigger-

Lightning, from nowhere, a true bolt from the blue, pierces the last Messerschmit. The leader twitches in his chair in agony, fried where he sits. A new figure soars past the transport, dressed in Wehrmacht camouflage, a huge thunderbolt patch emblazoned on his back, his blond hair standing on end. Blitzkrieg, the Electric Boy, blessed with the power to command storms. Only 14 years old and the most powerful and famous of all the Nazi Talents, turning his back on the Fuhrer. He joins the heroes and guides the transport to a safe landing.

They don’t trust him even after he saved them. Why would they? He is doubly cursed, a Nazi and a traitor. He never leads the heroes astray and always keeps his word, but he has plans of his own. The heroes follow Blitzkrieg to a camp, but it’s not a prison camp. This is the bit Susan finds hard to watch - the images of starving men, women and children in the death camp scare her, as does the grim look on her mother’s face. Mummy says she has to watch. Susan has to understand how evil people can be, and she thinks she does.

Blitzkrieg’s plan is one the Allied heroes don’t agree with, but Susan does. Blitzkrieg wants to free the prisoners, set them loose, because his Grandfather is trapped in the camp. Susan would do anything for her family too. Quickstep argues with him, saying how the Nazis will only catch them all again, and kill them on the spot. Blitzkrieg might be powerful, but he’s just a silly boy, because he challenges Quickstep to a fist fight, and whoever wins gets to choose. Quickstep, that mischievous smile always playing across his lips, is only too eager to oblige.

The first time she saw the movie, Susan thought Quickstep was meant to be the smart one. Nothing in the world is faster than lightning, she thought. Blitzkrieg would use his Talent and strike Quickstep with lightning. She was wrong. Nothing is faster than Quickstep. Wherever Blitzkrieg looks, Quickstep isn’t there anymore. Even though Quickstep is as small and light as the dancer he used to be, his punches erupt faster than Blitzkrieg can see. Susan loves this scene too, despite Britannia not being in it. They show the fight from Quickstep’s perspective, his Talent accelerating him faster than the eye can follow. The rest of the world is like a static photograph for Quickstep as he darts around the young German. When Blitzkrieg cheats, as he was bound to, the lightning bolt crawls to Earth, the finger of God slowly slowly descending from heaven, and Quickstep evades it. The fight continues until Blitzkrieg is knocked silly and admits defeat like the sulky brat Susan thinks he is.

Later on, after the heroes win and the Nazis lie dead in their bunker, the soundtrack swells again as the heroes sail out on a fishing vessel to a waiting submarine.

“What will you do, when the killing stops?” Quickstep says.

Britannia takes off her helmet and visor and shakes her brown hair loose. She is pretty when she smiles.

“If ever the killing stops,” she says as her smile turns sad. “Perhaps there will be a cottage in a green fields, or in a sun-dappled grove, or beside a musical stream. Peace is all I desire.”

Together they watch the sunset over the coast behind them.

“And you?” Britannia says. Quickstep smiles, but his smile is not as broad as hers, it doesn’t reach his eyes.

“And me,” he says, “there will always be work for me.”

The credits roll and Susan cheers, because you always cheer for the heroes.

“What happened next, Daddy?” she says. “Did Britannia get her cottage?”

“Nobody knows,” Daddy says. “Probably. Nobody heard from her after the war.”

“What about Titan?”

“He went back to his farm in Oklahoma and had a big family. I think he died in the 1970s.”

“And Quickstep?”

“Well, Quickstep,” Daddy says, stretching. “Every time there was a mysterious crime, people thought it was Quickstep. Some people think he worked as a spy, some think he was a Soviet spy. Sometimes he gave interviews to reporters. And one day, just like Britannia, he vanished, and that’s the end of his story.”

“He was a criminal,” Mummy says, “although he helped a lot of people who needed it.”

“Like you, Mummy.”

Mummy laughs.

“Susie, it’s just not the same.”

“Yes it is. You said you help people who no-one else will help.”

“I don’t break the rules to do it.”

“Yesterday, you told Daddy the rules are wrong. At dinner time.”

“That doesn’t make it OK to break the rules. It means we have to change them.”

They’ve had this conversation before and Mummy’s argument doesn’t make much sense to Susan. After all, doesn’t Mummy complain about how hard it is to change the laws, even when they’re wrong? Doesn’t Mummy sometimes wish she could just press a button to make things right? Although Britannia is Susan’s favourite Talented, Mummy is the hero Susan wants to be like. Mummy and maybe a bit of Quickstep. When she’s old enough and powerful enough, Susan knows she’ll use her Talent for good just like Mummy and Quickstep combined.