‘When the Allies came, we welcomed them in triumph. They were our saviours! We were free!’ Her voice drops. ‘But Fern, you see, it wasn’t over. We were still dying. The horror camp, the British called it, repelled by the inhumanity that had done this to us, made rubbish heaps of human beings, living, dead, the infected and the infectious, lying in our own filth.’ She looks from me to David, and we flinch. ‘Do you understand? Nothing had changed.’ David rubs the bridge of his nose.

For both of us, it’s hard to listen to and impossible to comprehend. We’ve grown to love her. We’d assumed that she and Moss were refugees who’d managed to get themselves here before it got too bad; the ones who’d found a home here before war broke out, the lucky ones.

Dinah shrugs and her mouth turns down. ‘There was no great deliverance, after all. We were still hungry, still dying.’ She gives a faint smile. ‘Then the Red Cross came.’ She claps her hands. ‘Hooray! We needed medication and food. You know what they brought?’

I shake my head.

‘Something that was better than food, and better than medication!’ She pushes her sharp little face into mine, puckers her red lips, traces her mouth with her finger and holds it up for me to see. ‘Look! This is what they gave us! Red lipstick!’ And she bursts into gleeful laughter. ‘Red lipstick!’

David and I stare at each other, and then we start laughing feebly with her, not getting the joke.

‘They brought lipstick for you?’

‘Hundreds of them! The Red Cross brought them! Of all the things that we needed, well, we got these scarlet lipsticks. So now the British medics are grumbling. Well, you can imagine – how crazy is this? Who would send something so trivial as this? So now,’ she grips my wrist tightly, jerking me closer to her, ‘and this is the important thing I want to tell you, Fern, so listen to me. Those lipsticks were better for us than medication and they were better than any food! We forgot about our hunger altogether. My friend died of typhoid in my arms two days after liberation clutching her lipstick in her hand. Those lipsticks did more for us than all the doctors put together.’ She reaches out and pinches my cheek. ‘You know why?’ Her eyes are eager, willing me to understand. ‘Because they made us human again.’

Her eyes are shining with tears. She is silent for a moment, staring into space.

Blinking, I look towards David. He is rubbing his jaw grimly.