‘Just you wait and see. And my big sister hasn’t remembered it’s my birthday—’

Janis emerged from her daydream and came to set that right.

‘Falling in love makes people forgetful, doesn’t it, Mummy?’

‘And if Jeremy says “yuk” again I shall bop him on the head. Let’s get on with our breakfast.’

Jeremy dished up the eggs he was scrambling while Laura replenished the toaster and Janis fetched the marmalade to the table.

Laura wished she had her camera handy to snap Bessie’s comical expression as she watched everyone else tuck in and restricted herself to an apple. But the time would come when she would remember her daughter’s tenth birthday as when the nightmare began.

Chapter Eleven

The overt anti-Semitism in Austria, revealed to the world during the run-up to that country’s presidential election, was made the more personal for the clan by Kurt’s presence among them.

By then he had met not just the Londoners but the Mancunians too. His being Sigmund Moritz’s relative was sufficient to ensure him a welcome from those to whom Sigmund was a pillar of their own past.

‘I can’t believe the Austrian people will choose a man with Waldheim’s background to be their president,’ Jake said to Kurt one evening after the family had watched the Nine o’clock News.

‘Have a banana, Bessie,’ said Laura.

‘No, thanks.’

‘A plum then—’

‘Will you stop it, Laura!’ Jake exclaimed. ‘If she wants to diet, let her.’ He turned to Kurt. ‘What those people we just saw interviewed in the street said – well, didn’t it come as a shock to you?’

‘Not exactly. But then, I live in Austria. You do not. Did your father not tell you,’ he asked Laura, ‘how when Hitler marched into Vienna he received a rapturous reception?’

Laura shook her head. ‘But I always had the feeling that there was a good deal my dad had blotted out. It couldn’t have been a pleasant memory for him, could it? That the people he had grown up among – he’d have been about fifteen at the time – cheered their heads off at what for him and his family was like the knell of doom.’

Laura paused pensively. ‘He never told me, either, about the night his parents were taken by the Nazis – which was probably the equivalent of Germany’s Kristallnacht, when the sound of breaking glass while all the Jews were rounded up was part of the horrific scenario,’ she said with a shudder.

‘From such details my parents also have spared me,’ said Kurt, ‘but each time there was an anti-Semitic incident in Vienna – and I find it significant that there are many more now that Waldheim is standing to be our president – my father would recall the Anschluss, how he watched from a window of his family’s apartment the rejoicing that greeted Hitler’s arrival.’