So she had gone to London and, though wild horses wouldn’t have made her admit it to her family, London wasn’t working for her. Despite having made friends with a couple of fellow journalists, her social life hadn’t got into gear. Life was dull. In Berlin, hideous though the political situation had been, at least it had kept the adrenalin flowing and she had been in the thick of things.

She wanted to be in the thick of things again and had got into the habit of going to Speakers’ Corner on a Sunday, listening to the left-wing agitators and finding herself in sympathy with them. Only they, it seemed to her, had the sense to see Hitler’s New Germany for what it really was. Even though Hitler had now nailed his colours to the mast, declaring a few months ago at Nuremberg that all Jews were to be deprived of citizenship and no longer had any legal rights, many British newspapers were still clinging to the opinion that, overall, because of the improvement he had made to the German economy and because his Nazi troops were acting as a bulwark for the rest of Europe against communism, Hitler was a good thing and the unpleasantness being meted out to the Jews was something that would eventually die down and that would, while it lasted, simply have to be lived with.

They, though, were not the ones living with it, and she had found it almost impossible to get her colleagues in London to understand the enormity of the violence or just how terrifying life now was for Germany’s Jews.

Hugo, Hester and Lotti arrived next day in the middle of the afternoon, having journeyed from Berlin together.

‘And we did all manage to squeeze into one of Little Ridding’s taxis together,’ Hugo said, leading the way into the hall and stamping snow from his shoes, ‘squeeze being the operative word, because I’ve never seen so many parcels and packages as Hester and Lotti have brought with them.’

As Hester and Lotti struggled from the taxi to the house, weighed down with Christmas-wrapped gifts, he gave his mother a fervent hug.

‘God, but it’s good to be back in England,’ he said, his face looking almost as strained as Nancy’s. ‘Life in Berlin is getting grimmer by the minute.’

‘Presents!’ Emily Elise shouted gleefully as Hester and Lotti crossed the threshold, so heavily laden they could hardly see where they were going.

‘Merry Christmas, you three,’ Nancy said, heartily glad to see them and not at all abashed that, unlike them, she had barely given present-giving a thought.

‘Don’t close the door, Max,’ Lotti said as he moved to do so. ‘There are stacks more things to bring in yet.’

As Max walked out to the taxi to begin bringing them in, Lotti dropped all her packages onto the nearest chair and opened her fox fur-coated arms wide for Emily Elise to run into them.

‘My goodness, but you’ve grown!’ she said, swinging her round and round until the two of them were both dizzy. ‘And I’ve brought you so many presents that when Santa Claus sees them he’ll think you don’t need any more and he’ll leave your Christmas stocking empty.’