Marc looked back and saw that his oversized boot had been saved from a mound of human shit. With a hundred thousand refugees in town it was a common enough sight, but Marc’s stomach still recoiled. A second later he kicked the outstretched leg of a young woman with dead eyes and bandaged toes.

‘Pardon me,’ Marc said, but she didn’t even notice. The woman had drunk herself into a stupor and no one would bat an eye if she turned up dead at sunrise.

Since running away from his orphanage two weeks earlier, Marc had trained himself to block out the horrible things he saw all around: from mumbling old dears suffering heat stroke to escaped pigs lapping the blood around corpses at the roadside.

The port was under blackout, so Henderson didn’t see Marc’s sad eyes, but he sensed a shudder in the boy’s breathing and pressed a hand against his back.

‘What can we do, mate?’ Henderson asked soothingly. ‘There’s millions of them … You have to look after number one.’

Marc found comfort in Henderson’s hand, which made him think of the parents he’d never known.

‘If I get to England, what happens?’ Marc asked nervously. He wanted to add, Can I live with you? but choked on the words.

They turned away from the dockside, on to a street lined with warehouses. Clumps of refugees from the north sat under corrugated canopies designed to keep goods dry as they were loaded on to trucks. Despite the late hour a half-dozen boys played a rowdy game of football, using cabbages stolen from the wharves.

Henderson ignored Marc’s tricky question, instead answering the one he’d asked two minutes earlier.

‘The consulate will be closed, but we have nowhere to stay and the office is sure to be inundated by morning. We might be able to find our own way in …’

Henderson tailed off as a pair of German planes swept overhead. The lads playing cabbage football made machine-gun noises and hurled curses over the sea, until their parents yelled at them to cut the racket before it woke younger siblings.

‘I’m French,’ Marc noted seriously. ‘I don’t speak a word of English, so how can you get me a British passport?’

‘We’ll manage,’ Henderson said confidently, as he stopped walking for a moment and switched his heavy case from one arm to the other. ‘After all we’ve been through, you should trust me by now.’

The consulate was only a kilometre from the dockside, but Henderson insisted he knew better than the directions jotted down by an official at the passenger terminal. They traipsed muggy streets where the smell of sewage mixed with sea air, until a friendly-but-sozzled dockworker set them back on the right path.

‘I wonder where Paul and Rosie are,’ Marc said, as they broke into a cobbled square with a crumbling fountain at its centre.