‘Mind me asking if you’re stationed near here?’ a young woman with peroxide-blonde hair asked cheekily as she came to a halt behind him at the ticket barrier.

‘Nope,’ Paul said good-naturedly as the return half of his ticket to Liverpool was handed back to him. ‘Sorry.’

‘So am I,’ the girl said glumly. ‘You don’t have any chewing gum on you, do you?’

Paul obligingly fished in his pocket and handed her an unopened packet.

Her face brightened. ‘Ta very much. It may have taken you Yanks a long time to get here, but it was worth the wait.’

As Paul walked away from her, he was grinning. Her last comment was one he, and all the other American soldiers now stationed in Ireland, were well used to. ‘What took you so long?’ was a favourite remark, usually given by a weary-looking Tommy on leave.

‘There’s no train today to Little Ridding,’ he was told when he inquired after one. ‘Don’t you Yanks know there’s a war on?’

Being referred to as a Yank all the time, when he’d grown up in Yorkshire, was something it was taking him a little while to get used to. Another thing he found it hard to reconcile himself to was the expression of savage hate not only for Nazi Germany—something he was in full accord with—but for every single German without exception.

He didn’t tell people about Eva. Eva was too special and precious for him to want her name bandied about by people who couldn’t understand that not every German was a Nazi.

‘Well, if they’re not, why don’t they rise up and bury Hitler ten feet under?’ Mitch, one of his buddies at camp had once asked him.

He’d tried explaining that in a totalitarian state, where people could be executed for even making a joke about the Führer, rising up against him wasn’t the easy option people living under a democracy thought it was.

‘Why not?’ Mitch had said belligerently. ‘I betcha I’d have done it.’

‘Maybe you would,’ he’d said to him, ‘but it would have cost you your life and though you may have that kind of bravery, the majority of people don’t,’ and he’d gone on to tell him of how, after Hitler had come to power in 1933, his first priority had been to ensure that everybody did as they were told—or paid the price. ‘And that price was brutal beatings, torture and ritual humiliation, Mitch. One word of dissent and, pow—you were in Dachau.’

‘Yeah, well. Someone should get rid of the son of a bitch. And it’d be easier for a German to put a bullet through him or a bomb under him than it would be for anyone else.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he’d said grimly. ‘Some Germans have been risking their lives for years trying to do just that.’ He’d thought of Nicholas and Ilse and their friends. ‘And one day soon they’re going to succeed—and then this bloody war will be over.’