Laughter dances in Walter’s eyes as he looks back at me, hooking his basket into the crook of his elbow.

‘Wow,’ he says. ‘Little Hetty, all grown up!’

Under his gaze, something double flips inside and I feel my face flush.

‘So…’ I can’t meet his eyes. ‘You’re all grown up yourself.’

And you are a Jew.

Unformed thoughts swirl, refusing to fashion themselves into words. He catches my awkwardness and is silent too.

Kuschi explodes from the river, shakes himself at the water’s edge, and runs to me, rubbing his sodden body against my calf. I shriek, shaking the hem of my skirt.

‘What a marvellous dog,’ Walter remarks.

He crouches down and pats Kuschi’s wet side. The dog wags his tail so violently, it hits Walter in the face. He screws up his nose and teeters backwards. Kuschi turns and licks his ear avidly, as though he were a tasty piece of meat, making Walter laugh.

‘He’s a character, isn’t he?’

I shouldn’t be with a Jew.

But this is Walter.

My mouth is dry. I lick my lips. ‘He used to belong to the Goldschmidts,’ I mumble. ‘They lived across the road from us. Jews… But one day, they left their apartment and abandoned him. I found him in the snow, shivering and starved.’ I think back to that day. Vati didn’t want a Jew’s dog in the house. But eventually he relented, although he insisted I change his name from Flocke. ‘How could anyone be so cruel?’

Walter strokes the dog and doesn’t reply.

Something in me pings open, like a spring releasing. Long-buried feelings rise up and words flow out, full of shaky emotion.

‘What happened, Walter? I mean, where did you go, after that day?’

He flashes me a look and waves a hand towards the bank. ‘Shall we sit for a few minutes? There’s so much I want to say to you.’

You cannot sit with a Jew. Hitler’s voice, Herr Metzger’s, Vati’s…? I can no longer distinguish. They swirl and merge together. I look around at the empty lane, the grassy bank and river, the allotments stretching into the distance. Nobody is about – but what if someone comes?

He looks at me expectantly. His face has altered: a man’s jaw; a hint of stubble on his cheeks. Like Karl, he’s eighteen, almost nineteen. But the warm blue eyes are the same. A breath of wind lifts his hair from his forehead and I clutch Kuschi’s unattached leash tight in my hand. An invisible force takes hold and I’m sitting next to him on the bank… Not too close. I draw my knees into my chest, wrapping my arms around my shins.

‘What you did that day, what you said…’ His voice is low and buttery. ‘It was very courageous. And generous.’

‘I got into awful trouble for bolting out of school, but I meant it, at the time.’ I speak to my knees.

Then I did, but I’m older now. Wiser. In the three years since that day, I’ve come to understand the threat, the danger posed by the Jewish race. Now I understand the character, the essence of the Jew. But I don’t tell him that.