Bombs had begun to fall and the people around her fidgeted restlessly. One of the children began crying.

Steeling herself to remain calm, Lotti turned her thoughts to the one person who was never far away from them. Max. It was now a little over two years since they had been together. In the weeks after he had engineered her release from Gestapo headquarters they had been together constantly. Even despite the tensions of the war, it had been the most blissful period of her life. Then he’d received orders to go back to Munich.

‘And from there, I rather think it’s going to be a passage across Lake Constance into Switzerland and on to London and an entirely different kind of posting,’ he’d said to her as they had lain in bed together in the glorious aftermath of love-making. ‘It may be a long time before I see you again, Monkeyface, but I will see you again—and until I do, I won’t fall in love elsewhere, that I promise you.’

He had kissed her long and lovingly and then he had taken her hand and kissed each and every one of the still swollen, malformed joints of her fingers. Since then she’d received only one communication from him, a hasty telephone call in which he’d said that his intuition had been correct. After that, there had been nothing.

A bomb fell so close that the shelter shook and plaster from the roof rained down on them. The crying child began to scream.

The noise was now deafening, the air pressure almost unbearable. A woman seated opposite her took out her rosary and began to pray. A little girl could be heard saying tearfully, ‘Can’t you make it stop, Mutti? It frightens me. Please make it stop.’ There were no men in the shelter. Lützowstrasse had become a street of women. Some, like her, were engaged on essential war work, others had young children, others were elderly and infirm.

As another bomb fell near by and dust from falling masonry seeped into the shelter in billowing clouds, she wondered what Max’s new posting had been. As an intelligence officer he could have been sent anywhere.

It never occurred to her that he could be dead. Somehow, she was quite sure that if he’d been killed she would know, that her sixth sense would scream the fact at her—and it hadn’t done so.

The masonry dust was now so thick people had begun to cough and choke. The lady who had been clutching a bag of documents to her chest unearthed a bottle of schnapps from beneath them and, after taking a gulp from the bottle, generously handed it around.

When it was Lotti’s turn to take a swallow she did so gratefully. Her love for Max and Max’s love for her was still something that was secret. She had never spoken of it to Ilse, or to her mother. Claus she never saw now and assumed him to be no longer in the city but in the Ruhr, and living in his apartment at the steelworks.