Nick’s study was a small, necessarily tidy room at the back of the house – it would have been larger had it not been foreshortened by the doodlebug that had blown the back off the building. Although I was doing it for Nick, searching the room for anything that could incriminate him, I still had a sense that I was somehow invading his privacy. Before I began, though, I waited to make sure Hazel was in her room and listening to the radio. The sound of voices and a laughing audience through the wall told me that she was doing as I had asked – I didn’t think for a second that she would take much of it in, but at least it would give her mind a rest from her fears and sadness.

Boxes of files were stacked untidily around the study walls. One wall also displayed a map showing how Britain had been divided. I traced the border along the complete southern shore of the Thames, and along the eastern part – our part – of the northern shore. Those stretches were all fence. The solid concrete wall, ranging from five to eight metres high and topped with barbed wire, ran up from the river near Trafalgar Square in the middle of the city, through Piccadilly Circus, where Checkpoint Charlie had been built, then north for fifteen kilometres to Barnet, at which point it curved west down to meet the Thames again at Twickenham.

For those in DUK London, the only way out of it was the heavily fenced-in road that the Westerns had named ‘the Needle’ because it pierced the cordon we had thrown around them. That ran from Checkpoint Bravo, on the western limit of DUK London, out through our land to Oxford, which was the beginning of the main part of the DUK. It was Nick who had explained to me that a convoy of supply lorries – and a few civilians with the right visas – passed along the Needle each day. The DUK’s London citizens actually ate better than the rest of their country because the Americans sent so much food – mutton and pork and fish – along the road just to make sure they couldn’t be starved into submission if we were to cut it off.

That border. Even if we did need it to reduce conflict with the DUK, it was awful how it also kept us divided from ourselves and from our vital, collective history. I couldn’t help thinking that even my own mind was taking on its character by locking away the memories I needed the most: those lost moments in Lorelei’s house. I suppose on some level our thoughts will change to reflect and resemble the world around us.