“It was my husband’s,” she said defiantly. “I kept it when he died. It wasn’t until I was already locked up in that miserable place that I started fiddling with it. Of course they knew who I was, but I’ve called myself Jane Warner since the early thirties.… And who doesn’t look forward to a better life ahead? I thought I should be ready if the chance arose. It was simple to fix—a razor and ink is all it took. Rubbing the raised stamp onto the photograph was the difficult bit.”

She was more of a rule-breaker than I’d realized.

“You really ought not to use it,” I scolded her. “You could get into terrible trouble.”

She laughed. “What do you think they would do? Put me in prison? At my age? Imagine!”

“It would be worse than the camp,” I argued.

“I was in prison for three weeks before I went to the camp, so I know what it would be like,” she told me.

I gazed at the glamorous smiling face of the elderly, but younger, woman in the fake passport.

“You don’t need to show identification papers to buy a rail ticket,” said Jane Warner. “That man was a bully. He was bullying you.”

“I know he was bullying me,” I said. “People often do.”

I’d been saved by an old German woman! Suddenly I laughed too. “Stupid bossy official! Aren’t there enough rules already? I wish we could report him for making up extra ones.”

“Never mind,” said Jane. “There’s no danger to national security, and we have our rail tickets. If he goes on making up extra rules, the stupid bossy official may get himself in trouble without our assistance.”

I gave her back her husband’s doctored passport.

“This is going to expire next year,” I pointed out.

“I’ll worry about that next year,” said Jane.

I rang Mrs. Campbell from the red telephone kiosk by the bus shelter on the Aberdeen road. That was as far as we could get to the village of Windyedge without having to walk, and Mrs. Campbell said she’d arranged for someone to come in a car to collect us.

It felt like the end of the earth. I remembered, in a flash, a time when I’d been very small, following a path in the bush behind Granny Adair’s tiny ramshackle house, and suddenly everything seemed strange. I was alone among the giant ferns and banana trees and huge Anansi spiderwebs, and I panicked. I wasn’t lost—I shouldn’t have been afraid. But I was terrified. I turned around and ran screeching back down the path to Granny Adair’s familiar shack and henhouses.