His mum leaned down to listen to him, then looked up and laughed.

“No, don’t be a silly-willy!” she told the boy. “Of course she isn’t a German!”

Jane gasped and flinched. I heard and felt it. I’d only known her for a fortnight, but in that time we’d seen Liverpool bombed and had faced down an enemy soldier with a gun, and delivered the code that sank three U-boats. I had never known her to be shaken by anything until this moment when she thought she’d been found out.

And she hadn’t even done anything to give herself away; she’d just been caught off guard somehow by a small boy. She stiffened, and sat up straight so that my head blocked the people opposite from seeing her face, and her hands went tight where they were propped on the sticks that lay across our laps. I could feel the sticks pressing hard against the tops of my thighs as she pushed on them.

But I knew that the boy had been looking at me, not her.

He wouldn’t raise his head. He muttered into his mum’s arm.

“I shall ask her myself.” She leaned over her little boy and spoke to me directly. “You’re not from round about, are you? Where do you come from?”

Jane got it, then.

But she didn’t relax; the sticks pressed down more fiercely into my legs.

“I grew up in Jamaica,” I said. I could feel the blood rising to burn in my cheeks, the familiar anger and the unfamiliar urge to fly into a fight, the way I’d felt when that horrid Chip Wingate called me a darkie. “I’m British. My dad is—” I swallowed. “My dad was a seaman in the merchant navy, but his ship was torpedoed. Hardly anyone was rescued.”

“Oh, darlin’, how terrible!” The young mum’s concern was warm and honest. “My husband too, last spring. Just after Angus came along, as well. He never saw the wee ’un.” She bent her head so she could speak into the cowering boy’s ear. “You see, Bertie? Her daddy’s been lost at sea just like yours. She wouldnae speak English if she was a German!”

Jane flinched again.

The woman looked back up at me and gave an apologetic little laugh. “You must be the most northerly Jamaican in the kingdom! He’s no’ seen one before. Nor a German, for that matter. But he worries about Germans a great deal. Silly wee lad! There’s no Germans here.”

I was the most foreign-looking person that boy had ever seen, so he thought I must be German.

And here all the while was this German woman sitting stiffly afraid beside me and hoping no one would notice. For once, Jane hadn’t spoken up for me.