They came to a hallway where four corridors met and a man in a glassed-in box directed them to a closed door.

‘What are we doing here?’ said Lena.

‘We’ve come to see the lady almoner.’

‘Why?’

‘You have to go to school and I want to ask her how it works.’

‘Why her?’

‘She was kind to me once. And I don’t know anyone else to ask.’

Fräulein Winkler seemed surprised to be consulted on a matter of education. ‘Since the child is baptised, I presume you can send her to St Theresa’s school,’ she said, sitting at her desk with a picture of the hospital’s patron behind her. ‘They’ll feed her at midday, too.’

‘I have no money,’ said Carina.

‘The church provides.’

Lena squirmed in her chair. Other children didn’t go to hospital to find the way to school. Her mother was like a child herself.

‘Will she meet other children?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’m not sure I want that.’

‘She can’t be a hermit. She must make friends.’

Lena looked at Fräulein Winkler’s pointed face and the grey hair drawn back from it. What did this woman know about children anyway?

They left the hospital and walked past St Thomas’s church till they came to a building behind iron railings, a place Lena had often seen before, in a street that ran down to a bridge across the river. The man there asked Carina to sign a piece of paper. To Lena’s relief, he didn’t laugh when her mother told him she couldn’t write, but signed her name himself. And a week later, Lena began her education.

It was the first time she had been in a room with more than two other people. She found a place on a bench at the back and looked straight ahead, wondering what on earth awaited her.

There were rows of these benches, with iron legs that came up and supported sloping tabletops. A wooden ridge at the base prevented books and pencils from sliding off. Most of the children seemed to know each other already; in a way that was extraordinary to Lena, they also seemed to know what to expect.

The teacher, Herr Kaufmann, held up pictures on large cards with a letter by each one. Lena was too fascinated by Kaufmann to concentrate on what he was saying. She looked at him as she might have looked at an entertainer in a circus. Did he live in a house? With a wife? Or in a teacher place? She pictured rows of Kaufmanns in a dormitory with iron beds. Herr Kaufmann’s words and pictures – a zebra, a banana – flew past her eyes.

Lena looked at his suit with its silver watch chain. Everything about him was hard. She wondered if he had skin beneath his clothes or if he was coated in metal. He never smiled, though the chalk, when he ground it into the board, made a sound like a small creature laughing.

‘Once you’ve learned all the letters and how they sound, you’ll be able to read,’ Kaufmann said.