Flustered on the pavement, Jelly spotted a road sign pointing to the train station. But this was a part of London, though not far from her home, that she wasn’t convinced she’d seen before.

All around, disused shops sat black-windowed and deserted. A patina of soot clung to glass, walls and doorways; men, workless, though of working age, stood smoking in clusters; a group of passing women, faces pale and pinched – with hunger, perhaps – were hauling along grubby and recalcitrant children, and Jelly winced as one mother lost her calm and cuffed a squalling lad across the ear, which only made him cry even more. Sweating with alarm in her clean coat, tailored blouse and tulip skirt, plus those wretched heels, she felt overdressed and seriously anxious about the time. She imagined hostile eyes following their every step across the road. A symbol caught her eye, scrawled on the filthy wall under the railway bridge: the crooked flash logo of the British Union of Fascists. Beside it, in ill-formed white-painted letters, were the words JEWS OUT.

Wandsworth Town station was set back from the parade of what used to be shops and it was busy; people who had jobs were still on their way to work. They joined the stream on the stairs to the platforms, hemmed in on all sides, closer and closer, by an army of clambering feet and swinging, pointed umbrellas. Jelly felt the inadvertent thump of a heavy leather briefcase against her leg. Anna, just in front of her, was clutching the banister hard. Her chest was moving up and down, and Jelly, glancing at her hands, was struck by them: were they really so skeletal? Why hadn’t she noticed before? Above them, a train clattered in across the bridge and she was wondering how to reach its doors despite the crowding when Anna stood still, swayed, then crumpled.

Jelly let out a cry in Hungarian, so shocked was she.

Anna was struggling to get up, racked with uncontrollable coughs, gasping out, ‘Oh, sweet Jesus… ’ Her face was the colour of the clouds.

‘Darling!’ Jelly put her arm around her to lift and guide her to the side of the landing halfway up the stairs, where she keeled over to the ground. ‘Speak to me!’

Why was everyone walking by without even looking? Anna had bent double like a piece of cardboard, trying to muffle her desperate spasms in the folds of her clothes. When she paused, heaving for breath, her coat had acquired a soot stain from the station floor. Along the grimy mark were bright red blotches of blood.

‘Someone, please help us!’ Jelly shouted. Looking at the blood, she was beginning to feel faint herself.

By now they had attracted the stationmaster, who took one glance at Anna with Jelly cradling her prostrate form, and ran for a telephone.