I’m writing this in a cafe on one of the main streets of Caen. That is to say, I’m sitting on a pile of bricks in front of a rough table made of a sign that once said Cafe de something or other, in the middle of a vast sea of rubble. Caen cathedral is a little way in front of me, not much more than a collection of stumps. The Canadians finally took the city yesterday and there is almost nothing left. The air stinks of death: there are uncountable bodies under the rubble. I’ve seen some terrible things recently. Fields full of dead cows. German soldiers, a lot of them not much more than boys, reduced to clods of meat by bombs. The bombing has just mown everything flat. A hundred yards or so behind me, down the street, there is the corpse of a woman lying on a pile of bricks and timbers. She is smartly dressed, as if she was on her way to church, handbag over her shoulder, stretched out, toes pointed, arms above her head. She doesn’t even look injured, apart from a trickle of blood coming from her nose. When I saw her I just automatically reached for paper and paints, but as I was licking my brush I looked up and she had become you, just for a moment. I was almost sick. It must have been the smart black suit she is wearing. It’s much better in the Cafe Something, apart from the dead SS man in spotty camouflage who is propped up just over there. I’m in the middle of painting a line of ambulances which are trying to get into the middle of the city: the red crosses and white circles are the cleanest things I’ve seen for days.

I shouldn’t be telling you these things. I shouldn’t be writing them at all. But you’ll never read this, will you? I’ve been sending these letters to an address in Cairo, which is the only address I have for the SOE chap who told me, two years ago now, that he could get letters into Greece. And they have all come back, sooner or later. They always find me. Me, not you. But I’ll send this one off as well, because there is nothing else I can do.