I found we were in a little side street facing Liberation Square, site of the People’s Hall of Solidarity – the great grey dome of which had dominated London’s skyline for four hundred years. But the golden cross that had once adorned the former cathedral had been melted down and turned into the hammer and compass on the main door; and inside you could see the bullet holes that the trigger-happy Soviet troops had made when they tore into the city. There were no priests there now; those licensed by the state conducted their services in grey concrete basements, regularly harried and harassed by the authorities but clinging on to what they could of the old ways. For how much longer? It was anyone’s guess.

With a hum, the NatSec van pulled away and I collapsed on a wooden bench to catch my breath. I had never been so close to one of these men before; I had never been able to smell their sweat. I wish I could say that it had demystified them, that up close they were just flesh and blood, no more terrifying than the local drunken bully in a pub. But he had been just as inhuman as the pamphlets or the broadcasts on Radio Free Europe portrayed them. I wondered what had made him like that. We had seen it with the staring-eyed Nazis who had marched through our streets in ’44, but that had taken years of brutalizing propaganda. I couldn’t understand how it had come down on us. The Marxism that I had read, and of which Blunt spoke, was about peace and cooperation. It said nothing of such savageness.

From where I sat, I could make out the northern side of the former cathedral, which now seeped stone blocks twenty metres into the square. The blocks formed a platform where the high and mighty would stand to give all the Liberation Day speeches tomorrow, marking the seventh anniversary of the day that the Soviets arrived to drive out the Nazis. If the Red Army had pressed on right up to the North and Scotland when they arrived, of course, the whole island would be celebrating their arrival. Instead, the Soviets had been as surprised as the rest of us when American paratroopers dropped into the Midlands a month later, closely followed by their ships docking in Liverpool. And a year later, as Churchill said, ‘The iron curtain fell across our land.’ So tomorrow we would all cheer the streams of tanks, troops, Pioneers, bands, boilermen and fishermen as they paraded past us after marching defiantly along that curtain.