‘Good morning,’ Josef Remer said tersely as she entered the breakfast room.

‘Good morning, Uncle Josef,’ she said dutifully, wishing there was someone else at the table. Where was her father? Where were Max and Hugo? Where were her aunt and Claus and Lotti and Ilse?

As usual in the Remer mansion, there was no sideboard from which she could help herself to bacon, eggs or sausage. Instead, a maid dressed in black and wearing a lace apron and a coronet of a cap, waited on her.

She asked for hot chocolate and for eggs served with Bratwurst and fried potatoes.

Her uncle did something unheard of. He put down the newspaper he had been reading and looked across at her.

Nancy wasn’t to know it, but he was curious. His habit was to ignore the annual visits Berthold’s children made to Berlin and to never exchange more than half a dozen formally polite words with them.

That he was on the verge of breaking this habit—at least where his niece was concerned—was because Zelda’s partiality for her had become impossible for him to ignore. ‘She reminds me of me,’ she had said the previous evening. ‘She’s got grit and a stubbornness mountains couldn’t move.’

Watching his niece tuck into a breakfast that would have satisfied a German farmer, he was well aware that Zelda could not possibly have been talking about a similarity of looks. Berthold’s daughter was sturdy enough and fair-haired enough to pass for a Bavarian peasant. It made the suspicions Zelda’s words had aroused in him seem ludicrous. His wife could not, in a million years, be priming him for the suggestion that Berthold’s daughter would make a suitable daughter-in-law.

Satisfied that he had been letting his imagination run away with him, he said abruptly, ‘Do you feel German, Nancy? If your mother hadn’t returned to England when war broke out, you would have been born in Germany and been just as German as your cousins.’

His manner was intimidating, but as Nancy never let anything intimidate her she laid down her knife and fork and gave the question due consideration. ‘No,’ she said at last, knowing it wasn’t the answer that was wanted, but being blisteringly truthful as always. ‘I’ve too much Yorkshire in me ever to feel all-German. I like the fact that I’m half-German, though I don’t actually think of it quite like that. I usually think of myself as being half a Berliner.’

‘Do you?’ Despite himself, Josef was intrigued. There was a no-nonsense forthrightness about his niece that was immensely appealing and he was beginning to see why Zelda had long ago taken such a shine to her.

‘And what does that mean to you? Being half a Berliner?’

Nancy flashed him a smile that transformed her from being a plain girl into a pretty one. ‘It means that though I was born in Yorkshire and live in Yorkshire and love Yorkshire, I’m not a parochial Yorkshire girl. I’m a city girl. I like to be where things happen. And they happen in Berlin. Which is why I will live here when I’ve gained experience on the Yorkshire Post.’