Two women came up to Jelly to thank her, each with several children in tow. She asked them a few gentle questions and their stories came tumbling out. Nearby Newcastle, once thriving with shipyards and coal mines, lay with its wheels stilled and its furnaces cold. Their husbands had not worked for two years. She looked down at the little boys, who were pulling on their mothers’ hands, itching to get away from this dull grown-ups’ conversation. Their toes were popping out at the ends of their cracked shoes.

What prospect was there for the children, the women demanded, watching their fathers losing the dignity work gave them? All they had left was dole; and everyone looking over their shoulders to see who was worse off than themselves; and the Means Test men who would march into the house and force them to sell their chairs before allowing them a farthing of government support. The mothers talked, sentences falling over one another. Nobody was hiring, but the government, in faraway London, still blamed the unemployed for not wanting to work. Of course they wanted to work. No one would choose to raise a family on a handout of a few shillings a week. ‘But us, we can’t change the world,’ said the younger woman. ‘We can’t change anything.’ Jelly, clasping the neck of her violin, listened and didn’t know what to say.

She wanted to understand why; so did they. Was this the paying-off of debts incurred by the war that finished 15 years ago? The knock-on effect of the stock-market crash – the poor forced to fund the greed of the rich? Or something even worse: a loss of faith? And in the middle of that – an angel, a violin, the music of Bach.

‘Thank you, Miss d’Arányi. We’ll never forget you. We’ll never forget what you did for us tonight.’

Jelly could barely answer; she was in tears. ‘I am so moved. I am speechless… I had no idea it would be like this.’

A headline in The Times seized on the York Minster dean’s remark about ‘a pilgrimage of compassion’. That wasn’t her idea. She wanted to play for nothing to people who had nothing, because she had something to give. Their response was more precious to her than any financial return. This should be commonplace for a musician, she told Adila – but apparently it was extraordinary.