“Yes, she had a flat in London,” said Mrs. Campbell. “Uncle John had a long lease on it that expired ten years ago, and afterward the landowner rented it to them year to year. But Uncle John’s dead now, and Aunt Jane’s let the flat go and has no place to live. At eighty-two! What am I to do with an eighty-two-year-old invalid who’s made her living in music halls—put her behind the bar? Oh—and you must be quiet about her being German. The pub is next to a Royal Air Force base, and the bomber lads often come here when they’re not in the air.”

“Does your aunt speak English?” I asked.

Nancy Campbell huffed at the other end of the telephone line. “Aye, did I not say? She married a Scotsman—they kept a London flat for fifty years! Of course she speaks English.”

I took the job over the telephone without the desperate Nancy Campbell seeing me. She was easily persuaded when I told her that Mummy had been a music teacher, and that I could play the flute and the piano. Mrs. Campbell thought her operatic auntie would like to have a musical companion.

So I filled a pasteboard suitcase with books and sheet music, and a larger one with all the winter clothes I could cram into it. I said good-bye to the landladies at Number 88 Gibraltar Road in Tooting. Then I started on my first journey all alone across the British Isles.

That journey passed in a swirl of November leaves and rain outside moving windows: train to Liverpool, overnight ferry to the Isle of Man, and another train to Rushen Camp, gray and wet, in a seaside town surrounded by barbed wire. I kept my nose in a book or pressed against the window the whole way, being polite to everyone, ignoring the stares, avoiding looking at anybody—just the way Mummy had always done when we went out together.

The prison guards were social workers, Society of Friends volunteers, they said. A young woman wearing a patched cardigan, with her hair tied back in a school ribbon, led me up the stairs in a Victorian guesthouse converted into barracks. “Are you from East Africa, perhaps? You do speak English very well. Was it difficult to pick up?”

She was as nice as possible, but annoyed me by asking the same old stupid questions, which I answered politely as usual.

“I’m from Jamaica. My mother was English.”

“Oh, Jamaica, even farther! Don’t you mind the cold? Here we are.”

She didn’t even give me a moment to answer about whether I minded the cold or not. She knocked and opened a door.

“On you go.” She waved me ahead of her.

I stepped into the room and came face-to-face with Johanna von Arnim.