‘Can we get a kitten?’ Zoë asks. There are a few cats in the warehouse and last week, one of them had produced a litter of tiny ginger and white kittens. All the children had been beside themselves, but then the overseer, a sour, balding Athenian, had taken them away in a potato sack.

‘Let’s see how much room we have,’ Mama Katina says gently. ‘Now, anybody hungry? I can smell food!’ She puts her arms around her children and they begin to walk up the hill.

‘Mmm! I can too,’ says Zoë. ‘I’m going to eat until I explode!’

‘Come along, darlings.’ They walk through the raw streets into open country. A church is being built a little way off. They pass by the whitewashed wall and freshly planted wisps of cypress trees that mark the new cemetery. Ahead, Zoë hears music: a violin, and the ripple of a kanonaki zither. A clarinet joins in, and Zoë’s heart lifts. She grabs Pavlo’s hand.

‘Come on, old tortoise!’ she laughs. Mama is going to sing today, and the thought of that is even more lovely than the thought of food.

‘Will Batis be there, Mama?’ Pavlo asks. Funny Mr Batis, who sells patent medicines and plays the baglamas, knows every musician in Piraeus. Mama says that he is a wicked man, but she always says it with a smile. Zoë knows he is wicked but she likes him anyway. She has never forgotten the time when she had been singing along to a gramophone record in the warehouse, and Mr Batis had squatted down in front of her and listened, nodding his head. To be heard, as a child in the refugee camps, is as precious as diamonds. When Mr Batis listened to her that day, it made her feel the way she thinks Mama must feel when she sings at a wedding or at one of the clubs down in Piraeus.

A little while later, they are standing in the middle of another dry, stony field, watching a wedding feast being laid out on long trestle tables knocked together out of planks and scraps from the building work which is going on a few yards further on. The daughter of Mrs Vlessas, their neighbour in the warehouse, is marrying a policeman’s son. Mrs Vlessas is from Seydiköy, outside Smyrna. The policeman is from Athens – a Vlach, a shepherd, as the refugees call the inhabitants of this primitive country. Mountain people. Peasants. Salt fish eaters. The wedding is being held in this field because the Refugee Settlement Commission is going to build another few streets here and the newly-weds are on the list for one of them.