As she began the long bike ride towards the city centre she knew that not telling her mother or Ilse had been a grave mistake, for Ilse had submerged her grief by talking incessantly about Max. It had been then that the fear she always lived with, the fear for his safety, had been joined by another fear. Would Ilse seek to be reconciled to Max when the war was over? And if she did so, what would Max’s reaction be?

The bitter cold wind stung her face and made her eyes smart. Her deepest fear was that it had been gratitude and relief that had catapulted him into her bed. Gratitude at her having saved his life and the lives of his friends, and relief at her having walked out of Gestapo headquarters with no worse injuries than broken fingers. What if, on returning to a Berlin in which Ilse was a widow, Max resumed his affair with her? Perhaps even married her?

She swerved to avoid a pothole and narrowly avoided falling off her bike. What would she do if, when the war was over and they were reunited, he was no longer in love with her? How would she endure it? How would she live with the pain?

She struggled to block the thought by focusing on the route she was taking. The streets she was now bicycling through were so bomb-damaged as to be unrecognizable and it needed a lot of concentration to ensure she was still heading in the right direction. Walls were blown in and blown out. Whole sides of houses were ripped off, leaving rooms and furnishings open to the elements. Rubble lay everywhere and every now and again there came a sinister smell of gas.

And amid all this devastation her fellow Berliners were courageously trying to carry on with their daily lives. A hairdresser’s shop was open for business. A cinema was still miraculously unscathed and had a large queue outside it. Women were walking the streets with shopping baskets over their arms, stoically heading for a ration queue or a blackmarket food contact.

The bottles of schnapps in the bag hooked over the handles of her bike were her and Ilse’s passport for a few extra rations. With luck she would be able to barter one of them for flour to supplement the meagre weekly bread ration. Another bottle she intended exchanging for real coffee and another for cigarettes for her mother.

On the fringes of the Tiergarten the sirens started wailing and howling. She skidded to a halt. The enormous ZooTiergarten air-raid shelter was too far away for her to reach it before the planes came and she was unsure of where the nearest shelter to her was. Looking back over her shoulder she saw that the cinema queue was speedily dispersing, with nearly everyone scurrying in the same direction. Hastily, she wheeled her bike around and began peddling after them. They were locals who knew the area and, wherever they were going for shelter, she was going too.