They walked from the luggage hall in thoughtful silence, overtaking a well-dressed woman with two bulging Harrods bags atop the suitcases on the trolley she was pushing. Ahead was a mother who had seated a small boy on her trolley, walking beside her an older boy carrying her duty-free goods.

While absently observing those around him, A.P. was trying to make sense of Marianne’s personal reaction to arriving where he now was. His gran was a highly intelligent woman, not a hysteric like her cousin Shirley, who let off steam about everything and had said that nothing would persuade her to go to Berlin for Howard’s wedding.

A.P. and Jeremy were present when Shirley had a row with Laura about her and Jake going. Laura had said she had overcome her feelings a few years ago when offered an assignment to take pictures in Berlin, and would do so again for Howard’s sake.

While they waited in the queue to show their passports, Jeremy said with a grin, ‘Didn’t you even get half of a skin-prickle?’

‘You were entitled to a whole one!’

‘And I’m asking myself now, what’s the big deal?’

‘I have to conclude,’ said A.P., who at times displayed a ponderousness of speech Marianne attributed to his Kyverdale connection, ‘that it’s pointless to apply logic to how the older people in the family tick in this respect.’

‘Well,’ said Jeremy, ‘feelings don’t spring from the mind, do they? But in this case they do have some factual basis. Could be that the difference between us and them is we weren’t around when the Nazis did what they did—’

‘Nor was Laura. She wasn’t born till after the war – well, not unless she’s older than she looks—’

‘She’s forty-two.’

‘As old as that? She looks about thirty,’ A.P. opined.

‘I’ll tell her you said so! But I’ve met Jews no older than thirty who feel like Laura and my dad do about Germany.’

‘So did I, until today. You said that feelings don’t spring from the mind, Jeremy, but that isn’t necessarily so. There are some that can be all in the mind and we’re here to prove it.’

‘An important factor in what we’re discussing,’ Jeremy replied with the assurance of his generation, ‘is that people of our age group are more open-minded than our elders ever were.’

‘Indubitably,’ said A.P. ‘Another factor, if I may say so, is that our lot is farther removed from the events that made our elders’ blood run cold. In my view they’ll never get it out of their systems. In that I include Laura, though she’d have been a babe in arms then, and the thirty-year-olds you mentioned are similarly afflicted. They’d still have been imbibing hatred of Germany and Germans with their mother’s milk, wouldn’t they?