She negotiated huge craters in the road, her hands sticky with sweat on the handlebars. Where would Ilse have gone for bread and the much-trumpeted crisis rations? Was it going to take Lotti an age to find her? Furious with herself for having made such a mess of things she pedalled past a seemingly endless food queue, and as she did so planes screamed in from the eastern outskirts, guns firing.

She slithered from the bike, running with it for the shelter of the nearest doorway. Gunfire ripped across the pavement behind her. Women who had been standing in the food queue were hit. Screams and gunfire and engine noise blasted her eardrums until she thought they were going to burst. Certain she was going to be hit, she pressed herself flat against a door leading to a dentist’s, a door that bore the message ‘Away Till Further Notice’. It was too late to find any other shelter. On either side of her, windows shattered beneath the storm of Russian bullets, flying glass embedding itself in the first soft flesh it encountered.

Instantly, she dropped into a crouch so that her heavy army greatcoat gave her all the protection it could.

‘Please God, let it be over,’ she prayed, protecting her face with her hands. ‘Please God, let Ilse be safe. Please God, don’t let them do this in Charlottenburg. Don’t let my mother be in a food queue. Don’t let any of us die now that the war is so very nearly over!’

As suddenly as it had begun, the raid came to an end, plane after plane peeling away to continue their murderous blast of gunfire elsewhere. Unsteadily, she rose to her feet and, ignoring her bicycle, ran across to the injured.

It was another two hours of being hampered by barricades and troops and tanks before she reached her and Ilse’s apartment and it took another four hours for her and Ilse to make the nightmare journey by bicycle to Charlottenburg, a journey that in normal times would have taken them no more than an hour.

When they walked exhaustedly into the apartment it was to find Zelda standing tensely by the window, smoking. She was dressed in a vivid scarlet 1930s-style art deco dress, cinched at the waist with a flamboyant purple cummerbund. That her mother was dressed as exotically as always, even when about to face the Russian onslaught, filled Lotti with both exasperation and admiration.

For a moment, she thought that Zelda was going to break the habit of a lifetime and open her arms to hug them tight, but instead, exerting a self-control that was visible, she cupped one arm with the other and said waspishly, having read the expression in Lotti’s eyes: ‘I thought red an appropriate colour under the circumstances and at least I don’t look like a refugee.’ She made an expressive gesture with her ebony cigarette-holder. ‘You do. It’s April. I smelled lilac yesterday. And you’re still wearing that ghastly army greatcoat.’