Along the way, I peered into the shop windows. Some were well stocked with winter clothes that could keep the cold out and the warm in. My shoes would do for another year, but I needed a new pair of leather boots and I hoped Nick could find me some. One of his patients could get hold of good clothes – the yellow woollen overcoat he had somehow come up with was the best I had ever had. Even before the War, I could barely have afforded it and there was certainly nothing in the shops now that came close. I thought about asking if he could buy another one and keeping it in a box until needed – you never knew when you would see anything like that. Nick said the man had connections with the factory, that’s how he had first go at what they turned out.

Looking in one misted window, I found myself staring into a baby-goods store. Its sole display was a wooden cot, painted bright pink for a girl and my eyes traced the delicate flowers etched up its sides. But then the migraine that I had felt brewing all morning seemed to worsen and I knew that I needed to sit down and let it pass. I thought of the little café around the corner where the coffee was ersatz but the staff were friendly and didn’t bother you if you ordered something small from time to time. The owner was a plump and matronly woman who seemed to treat customers like members of her family who had dropped by for a chat, and she served little scones for five new pence, which was good value. ‘All I can charge, love,’ she had told me, although I didn’t think that was true. They were edible too, unlike what was offered by some of the places around there. Or Nick’s surgery wasn’t far – I could go there instead and sit in one of the soft armchairs and he would tell me a silly joke he had heard that day, busying himself while I let the pain subside.

‘Are you just going to stand there?’

I looked around to see a cheaply dressed woman my own age staring at me. ‘Sorry,’ I said, my cheeks flushing red as I stepped aside to let her enter the shop. ‘Miles away.’

‘Hard enough as it is,’ she muttered. ‘Probably nothing in there anyhow.’

‘Oh, I’m sure there will be.’

She looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘And you would know all about it, would you?’

‘I mean –’

‘Don’t matter what you mean, do it?’

She pushed past me into the store and I blushed again, embarrassed, before hurriedly edging into the flow of muffled people descending the steps into Oxford Circus Tube Station.