In the winter she and Fritz went there often and walked the paths. He let her go first so she could leave the first crunching tracks. Slight depressions in the forest, 100satisfying, like cracking an egg. She drew a veil of dry cold behind her. Loved him, no doubt. That was the way it was in those days; it was new, and everything happened suddenly. Fritz already had a kind of home with his uncle and fellow students, who yelled his name from their bicycles. Raised a hand. Invited him for coffee or a game of cards. She had only him; it made him easy to love. She slipped untroubled through the days, the transformation. She forgot to write home. Slipping forwards, instead, she took new shape through the long white hours at the hospital, the mealtimes, the smoky dances at the restaurant, the frost-white afternoons crammed with slowly passing light.

‘Don’t you miss anything from home?’ he asked, and ‘I miss everything,’ she lied. He needed that. Sometimes he pined. She didn’t think he should be alone in that longing.

The days found direction. In them were functions. Fritz became one of these, gradually, a seamless transition. Work became another. She came to know the hospital, grew practised.

Spring came early, abruptly; that’s how she remembers it. At the end of March, winter simply fell off like a scab. Just before, one Sunday morning, they’d cycled out to the ruined castle. The month of March was bony, the weather lockjawed.

They rested their bicycles and walked around the tower.

Fritz blew on his hands. At the top was the golden goose, facing the Hanseatic cities, flaunting the king’s 101fearless scorn for the trade embargoes, the Germans, the war. Now, in late summer, no one is flaunting anything. The city is full of soldiers. She doesn’t hate them. The war has dammed them in, every one. The bridge is shut, the forest a borderland. They don’t go out there any more.

The soldiers’ bayonets twinkle in the fields, bristling above the winter wheat. They’re practising, says Fritz.

The Germans came from the air out by the fort. Eighty men came crashing down onto the heads of three sleepy guards. Marita has forgotten the weather that day, but she pictures the big parachutes like airy meringues drifting silently down to the ground.

Ragnar’s letter says the British came by sea. That for the most part they wage war against the order of things. The letter came first to Fritz, who passed it on. This is the only letter that has come.

Just think, writes Ragnar, now we’re getting bombed to smithereens under our own flag.