She’s gone. I can barely bring myself to write the words. Mother and Father have taken her from me. My darling, sweet girl, Lara, with her twinkling eyes and treacle-coloured curls has gone. When we got to the cottage there was no answer to my knock on the door; the house was shut up and so Giovanni went to the manor house across two fields at the other end of the country estate to find Father’s friend. Lord Montague does important work for the Home Office and was rather terse when he arrived back at the cottage with Giovanni. But on seeing my distress, which was so terribly hard to hold in, he agreed to open the cottage door so that I could look inside for myself.

I tore through every room, checking inside cupboards, looking underneath and behind all the furniture like a wild woman, I even opened the door of the grandfather clock in the hallway, lifted lids off chinaware on the mantelpiece and thank heavens I did or I wouldn’t have found Lara’s tiny silver baby bangle. But I knew. As I frantically searched, I knew that it was pointless. Mother had taken my baby. The baby she never wanted me to have. The baby that she had brought up in the countryside and passed off as her own, as I later discovered from Lord Montague when he referred to my sister, little Lara. All that was left of my sweet, dear girl was the silver bangle, the pink teddy from her daddy, Jimmy, and the matinee set that I knitted for her, both forgotten in the airing cupboard on the landing. Of course, Lara is too big for baby clothes now, but I really can’t help feeling it a cruel act by Mother and Father to leave behind the only things she has from her proper parents, Jimmy and me.

Hugging the little jacket, hat and bootees to my chest, I can still smell her beautiful baby scent and will treasure this for ever until I see my cherished Lara again. Dear Giovanni managed to persuade Lord Montague to spill the beans during a man-to-man discussion, on the proviso that I waited in the car, him not wanting to distress me further, and so I did, clutching the pink teddy that Jimmy had won at the fair.

Lord Montague told Giovanni that Mother and Father have gone to take care of Aunt Rachael in Manhattan. America. They said it was their duty to assist Aunt Rachael as her health is ailing and the children of their society friends in Germany and Poland are relying on her to help them secure safe passage to America and so cannot be expected to endure further suffering, for they are orphans now. Persecuted by Hitler for being Jewish, they have already experienced unimaginable pain and horror in the death camps the Allies have liberated them from.