Over those months, once the brother and sister could see they had a safe, loving listener in Katie, the two of them talked more and more. Experiences came pouring out that they could talk about to no one else. Katie began to appreciate the enormity of what had happened to Poland: the war, the invasions of the Germans from the west and Russians from the east, the gross brutality of both, had been like an explosion that scattered a country and its people into smithereens. Soldiers and others had fled west so that the Polish government itself was in exile in London, many of its forces scattered across Europe. Through Marek and his family, she took in the scale of the Russian deportations east into slave labour, the deaths upon deaths in the Siberian snows or in central Russia. The Jewish population had been almost wiped out in Nazi death camps. And now, thanks to the border agreed by Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences in 1945, the district surrounding Lvov, where the Wozniak family had lived, was no longer Poland, but Soviet Ukraine. And the government of Poland was no longer Polish – it was under the command of Soviet Russia. To return now would mean almost certain death.

Katie began to feel haunted by it herself. She knew Marek had terrible nightmares from time to time. She thought of his mother, his sister, of the corpses left in piles in the snow. Knowing that she was soon to carry a Polish name by marrying Marek, she felt passionately that she wanted to understand, to be a part of these people who had travelled so far, so terrifyingly and with such suffering and loss. She felt as if her world had expanded, and she had a fierce pride in knowing them, in living with and loving and going to Mass with them. The Church was a vital link with Poland. They learned that the church in Duddesdon, St Michael’s, which had for years been in the Italian quarter, was attracting more and more Poles and sometimes they made their way there for Mass on Sundays. Katie and Michael would go too.

And there were lighter aspects of her Polish education. Agnieska taught her how to cook various dishes, like pierogi, little flour-and-water patties with a filling of potatoes or cabbage or meat.

‘These are delicious!’ Sybil enthused when they proudly brought out their first plateful, which Piotr, Marek and the others fell on with wolfish enthusiasm. ‘So tasty with such simple ingredients – good rationing food.’

‘You like?’ Agnieska was delighted. ‘You eat – I make more!’

‘They’re marvellous,’ Sybil said, and Katie agreed. She and Sybil had joked that they needed to double the garden’s beetroot crop, as the Poles liked them so much.

The memories were not all sad. Marek told them one night that on the ship, the SS Atlantis, that had brought him and Piotr from Naples, no fewer than eight babies were born on the voyage.