Aware that the water was now too cool for comfort, she got out of the bath and hurriedly towelled her goose-pimpled body dry. She was going to go straight to bed for she had a five o’clock start in the morning, a twelve-hour shift to work and then, in the evening, she was going to Isle and Nicholas’s to help them celebrate Nicholas’s thirty-sixth birthday.

It was going to be a rather special celebration because Nicholas was now very rarely in Berlin. Staff from all the main ministries had been moved out of the city when RAF air raids had first begun making themselves felt. Ilse, who was still making films at Babelsburg, had been unable to accompany him. As an actress appearing in propaganda films, her work was classed as essential war work. Which, as Ilse said, was better than having to slog twelve hours a day in an ammunitions factory even if the lines she had to say did often make her want to vomit.

She was just getting into bed when the sirens went. None of the recent raids had been particularly severe and she hesitated for a moment, wondering whether the bother of getting dressed again and going down the street to the public shelter was worth all the hassle.

As flak barrage noisily erupted she decided that perhaps it was. Sitting out a raid when you had someone to sit it out with, was one thing. Sitting it out alone was quite another.

Hurriedly, she scrambled into layers of clothing, put the photograph of Max that stood on her bedside table into the small carry-all she now kept permanently packed and ready for such occasions and, gripping it tightly, rushed out of the flat and down to the street.

By the time she got to the shelter that served the street, it was already full. She squeezed past an elderly neighbour who was clutching a bag of documents to her chest—presumably precious family papers—and settled herself next to a young mother with two children.

The flak was now in full throttle and over and above it came the sound of the first approaching planes.

Lotti clasped her hands together. For her, the worst part of these nearly nightly scenarios was the knowledge that Hugo was a pilot and that he could very well be in the cockpit of one of the planes.

Even after four years of coming to terms with the fact, she still found it impossible to imagine Hugo at the controls of a bomber. He’d always been a quiet-spoken, bookish kind of person, not a man of action. Or he had been a quiet-spoken, bookish person. Hester’s death had no doubt changed him drastically. He would no longer be the same Hugo he had once been, just as Claus was no longer the same person he had once been.

From the sound of it, the approaching planes were flying in low—always a bad sign. To take her mind off the bombs that would shortly be falling she thought about the rest of her family. Of Nancy, who had always been more of a sister to her than a cousin. Where was Nancy now? The last news she’d had of her had been when both sides of the family had still been able to communicate by letters sent via contacts of Paul’s in America. That had been nearly two years ago. At that time, Nancy had been working for Reuters, but whether she was still doing so, Lotti didn’t know. Somehow, because it was so easy to imagine Nancy in uniform, she rather thought Nancy might now be in the WRENS or the WAAF.