It started with Nan Campbell asking me to do her a favor on my way back from delivering a load of engine parts to Deeside near Aberdeen. She had two guests arriving to stay at the Limehouse and needed help getting them there. One was Jane Warner, Nan Campbell’s ancient auntie who had broken her hip and had to walk with two sticks. She’d just come out of hospital and had no other place in the world to go. The other was the girl Nan hired to help her auntie make the journey, and to look after her a time. Could I collect them in the Tilly from the nearest bus stop, Nan asked—the Tilly was the Hillman Minx van I had charge of, converted for carrying bags of stuff or a troop of men, with wooden benches in the back under a canvas top. Nan’s old auntie had brought piles of luggage and couldn’t possibly walk two miles to the Limehouse.

I said I didn’t mind, and when I got back from Deeside, there was the old woman waiting with her young assistant at the bus shelter on the Aberdeen road. They did make me laugh, all among their furs and their cases, when I pulled up! They looked like a pair of imperial Russian princesses running away from the Red Revolution.

The hired lassie gave me a surprise, for her smooth skin was the pale brown of milky tea or the inside of a fiddle. I wondered if crabbit Nan Campbell knew she’d hired a black girl. It had all been done over the telephone and in the post, and if this lass was anything like me, she might not have said. It’s easiest not to say, if you’re trying to get work. Unlike me, she wasn’t going to be able to hide her secret for much longer.

She was a pretty young thing, neat and small, with a heart-shaped face that looked a mite fed up at the minute. She wore a sleek black mink coat that shone more glossy than her dark hair, and she had a flute case on a long strap carried over her shoulder. The poor old lady, also bundled in a pile of fur, had fallen fast asleep waiting for me to turn up. She sat perched on one of her cases, bent with her hands clasped together over her sticks, her forehead resting on her knuckles.

I parked the Tilly at the bus stop and got out to help with the luggage. The old lady jerked awake as I slammed my door shut behind me.