But this time, it was to seek a place to settle down. It was as if these two deaths had convinced us that there was nothing on this planet that was perhaps not Earth. We wanted a river not too far from a bunker that would fulfil our needs: just like the spot we were leaving, but, of course, we didn’t want to stay so close to the place where one of us had had to kill herself to end her suffering. Dorothy’s death had saddened those who loved her, but she’d been old and it had been a very gentle end. Mary-Jane’s death had been a shock, it frightened us. The older women didn’t want to talk about it. That was no doubt why we left almost at once.

After a few weeks, we found what we were looking for: the river was wide, in the middle the water came up to our thighs, and there were plenty of trees on the banks. We decided to build houses with large stones and a kind of mortar made of mud. For the roofs, we would use sawn tree trunks. We’d noticed that in some places where the current wasn’t so strong, there were water weeds growing. These could be dried and woven together into a rope which we could use to tie together bundles of twigs in a thick layer to make what we called thatch, without being too sure what the word meant. Then we realised that if we mixed those same weeds with the mortar, they made it stronger. We were unpretentious: the sides of the first house were four metres long. It took two months to build and it was very pleasant to shelter inside when it rained. Of course, we couldn’t all fit in at once, but the women who stayed outside huddled together to keep warm, as we had always done since our escape, knowing that next time it rained it would be their turn. The second house took less time. We decided to make it rectangular. The trees weren’t high and we couldn’t support the entire length of the roof with one beam, but we managed to intersect the trunks by supporting them on stone columns, and the whole structure held together very well. Also, we knew that there were never any strong winds.

Perhaps it is still standing.

We brought up chairs and tables from the nearby bunker and, accompanied by four of the strongest women, I went to fetch furniture from the others. We also took mattresses. We often found some along the sides of the cages, which we simply pulled through the bars. We never took mattresses that couldn’t be moved without disturbing the dead. When the mattresses had been aired for a while, the smell vanished and they were perfectly usable. Sometimes we made a discovery: a piece of fabric, a store of thread and a bag of sandals which came in handy because, even though we now all had a pair of boots thanks to our pillaging, when we stopped walking we preferred to wear shoes that didn’t encase our feet. We’d ditched the trolley because we knew there was one in all the bunkers and that there were lots of bunkers. We found a new one, dismantled it, brought it back and used it to carry our construction materials from one place to another. Altogether we built five houses, and the first became the kitchen. We installed a chimney because we’d managed to make a sort of stove: we hammered empty cans flat, then we bent over the edges with pincers to fit them together and then hammered them down again, thus making a big metal hotplate which we supported on stone walls. We lit the fire underneath and were able to heat several saucepans over a single hearth. I became skilled at sawing and could make planks for building shelves to store our food, as well as benches.