I came in with my old crowd, 2nd Parachute Brigade. Perfect glider landing, and I found myself more or less immediately being offered red wine and salami by a dazed but happy farmer. There’s been some light fighting – the Americans and French are doing most of the heavy stuff – and the Germans are retreating north. We liberated Cannes yesterday. As I said, it seems untouched, though it isn’t, of course: the Gestapo shot eight people in the cellar of their headquarters before running away. I had a look this morning (documenting this sort of thing is part of my commission): belle époque, palm trees, stunning view. And in the cellar … I went down to make a drawing. How many places like this are we going to find, I wonder? Smell the same. When I went back outside, I might have been stepping back ten years, when my father and Mrs Leeds came here to gamble with my mother’s money.

Yesterday I realised that I’d spent an hour painting a bowl of tomatoes, simply for the pleasure of using the brightest red in my paintbox. That should be a good thing, surely: if anything could be called a blessing these days it ought to be a terracotta bowl filled with fat, ripe (cadmium red), ridged tomatoes, warmed by the sun, the green starbursts of the stems smelling of cat piss on new-mown grass. I picked each one up and held it against my face: in fact I felt – and probably looked – like an old peasant man venerating a holy relic. Paint: that cadmium red, undiluted. I let it stain the paper, deeper and deeper. My eyes have been famished.

But the sheer normality itself is disturbing. When was the last time you ate a tomato, Zoë? How many years has it been? I read in The Times a few days ago about the EAM partisans allying themselves with the Greek government in exile. People are saying that the Germans are finished in Greece and that it’s only a matter of time before we push them out for good. The newspapers are starting to write quite a lot about Greece, though mostly about the government in exile, who don’t seem to be able to make up their minds about anything. One wonders what that means for Greece after liberation. But it is coming. Freedom for Greece. I can’t believe I’ve even written that. Should I start to hope again? Are you daring to think such things, where you are?