Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford describes how he was inspired by a London plaque:
[F]or the last twelve years, I've been walking to work at Goldsmiths College past a plaque commemorating the 1944 V-2 attack on the New Cross Road branch of Woolworths. Of the 168 people who died, fifteen were aged eleven or under. The novel is partly written in memory of those South London children, and their lost chance to experience the rest of the twentieth century.
Out of his contemplative pauses in front of that plaque, Spufford has created a resonant novel about what "might have been" for five young casualties of war, as well as a God's-eye meditation on mutability and loss.