‘No,’ I said, ‘the old woman won’t allow it–or she’ll have to share them out among the whole house.’

‘We’ll go and buy some buttons,’ said the Princess. ‘I’m sure I’ll find something. Come on, Billie! Forget about my hat!’ We went.

Frau Collin had written. She was very grateful to us, and we should go to Frau Adriani and talk with her, and then report back on the telephone. The expenses . . .

‘Not huddan! Ladi!’ shouted the Princess. Billie looked flummoxed, and I had to explain to her that that meant ‘left’ and ‘right’ – that was how they drove donkeys in Platt German. God knows how those old drovers’ calls originated.

Yes, the child, the ‘little thing’ . . . I reminded myself of how she was tormented and beaten, because of what was now imminent . . . As a boy, I had always suffered from a fear of thresholds, that wild fear of setting foot in a strange, completely unknown house. And when I finally went in, I was cowed and apprehensive, and naturally came a cropper. Animals smell fear. People smell fear. Things only improved when I learned that everybody has to die. But that took twenty years. The Platt German expresses the matter more pithily and with less pathos: ‘What’s he then? His bum’s only got two halves!’ Which is true.

And now I was a strange man going to a wicked, strange woman. I quickly played through the different scenarios of Hansel and the witch; ‘but I’m so shy’ . . . and then I recovered. It took much less time to happen than to write. It was over. A wise Indian said, ‘You have to kill the tiger in your mind, before the hunt–the rest is a formality.’ And Frau Adriani? I thought of my sergeant-major, and of the beaten, crying child . . . All right.

‘Shut up!’ the Princess shouted into a window where a parrot was squawking in his cage. ‘Shut up! Or you’ll be stuffed!’

The bird must have understood German, because it shut up.

Billie laughed. ‘You wanted to buy some Worcestershire sauce as well,’ she said, in one of those associations of ideas of which only women are capable.

‘Oh, yes! Come on, we’ll get it in Fructaffair, they’ve got everything.’

The Swedes spell some of their foreign words phonetically, which can be very funny. So we bought Worcestershire sauce. The Princess sniffed suspiciously at the stoppered bottle, and generally made the shop assistant’s life as hard as she possibly could; Billie knocked over a jar of gherkins, which survived the experience and escaped with a shock, foaming briefly in their vinegar . . .

‘Look, such a lot of salt!’ I said.

The Princess looked at the barrel, ‘As a child, I always believed that a single drop of water in a salt warehouse would consume the entire stock.’