Marc suffered an emotional explosion as he rode around the corner and got his first glimpse of the place where his mother had abandoned him. The feeling was neither good nor bad, but it was powerful for the few moments until it turned into disappointment.

In Marc’s imagination Beauvais station had always been a fantastic place, with engines venting steam under a wrought-iron roof, boys selling newspapers and the bustle of expensively-dressed people with places to go. But Beauvais was on a rural branch line and its station was merely two open platforms, with a ticket office, a waiting room and a café that looked as if it had been boarded up for some years.

The people were the same desperate souls that Marc had seen on the road. The more he saw of them, the more he realised that they were dregs. The lucky few who owned cars, those with decent carts and even those who were simply healthy enough to maintain a good walking pace had passed through days earlier.

Only the truly desperate washed up at Beauvais station hoping for a train. Many were elderly and those that weren’t tended to be women with young children – sometimes as many as four or five spread around exhausted mothers like litters of pigs. Their men were either dead, fighting at the front, or imprisoned by the Germans.

Some people waited hopefully on the station platform, staring down the tracks as though the very act of looking might make the train come sooner. The ticket office was tiny so most sat in the street outside. Everyone was dirty and everywhere Marc looked he saw feet covered in vile scabs and blisters.

There was no queue at the ticket office, but the teenaged ticket officer had the weariness of someone who knew exactly what he was going to be asked.

‘There are three trains up the line to the north,’ the youth explained, as he whirled his cap around on his index finger. ‘I can sell you a ticket, but I can’t say if a train will come tonight, tomorrow or any other time. And when it does come I can’t say if it will stop, or if there will be space to board. The last train was three hours back. It was packed with injured troops and the driver didn’t stop.’

Marc nodded solemnly. ‘When will you know if a train is coming?’

‘All our telephones to the north are down. The stationmaster gets an automatic warning when a train reaches the water tower just up the line, but you’ll most likely have heard it coming by then anyway.’

Marc had led a sheltered life. He’d always imagined trains as huge invulnerable beasts. It hadn’t occurred to him that one bomb-damaged rail was all it took to bring a hundred kilometres of track to a standstill. He was visibly upset and the teenager took pity.

‘Are you alone?’ the lad asked.