Rosie sulked, crossing her arms and staring directly ahead. After a few minutes of defiance she opened the door and got into the back beside Paul. When it started getting dark they pulled the curtains in the spacious rear compartment and arranged the luggage so that they could put their feet up. It wasn’t as comfortable as a proper bed, but they both got to sleep well enough.

Mr Clarke looked back at them and welled up with parental pride. Rosie usually gave her brother a hard time but they’d pulled together now, just like they’d done when their mother died a year earlier. Paul even slept with his cheek resting on his big sister’s shoulder.

Clarke himself was exhausted, but the roads were opening up as the refugees on foot made camp for the night and he didn’t want to miss the chance to make progress. After driving further between ten and eleven o’clock than he’d managed in the previous four hours, he reached into the leather pocket inside his door, pulled out a small tin filled with Benzedrine pills and popped two into his mouth. The drug was a staple of salesmen, truck drivers and anyone else who couldn’t afford to go to sleep.

*

At sunrise the Citroën formed part of a vast queue of vehicles waiting to cross a bridge into the town of Tours. Clarke was satisfied with his night’s work, having driven more than a hundred kilometres beyond his original target of Orléans and making almost half of the distance between Paris and Bordeaux, where he hoped to find a ship to England.

But the car didn’t budge for the next two hours. The kids woke up and while Paul dashed into the grass verge at the side of the road to urinate, Rosie played mother, dividing up stale bread, jam and left-over slices of a bacon joint for their breakfast.

‘What’s the hold-up?’ Mr Clarke said, leaning out of the car and addressing a lanky man who was walking along the verge from the front of the queue.

‘Looks like the army,’ he explained. ‘The Germans have bombed two of the bridges into town and the other one took a blast. There’s a military convoy waiting to cross over, so the engineers are trying to shore it up.’

‘Doesn’t sound too good,’ Mr Clarke said gravely. ‘Is it possible to get over on foot?’

The man nodded, and rustled a paper bag containing two loaves of bread. ‘People are walking across the railway bridge,’ he explained. ‘The centre of town isn’t far. There are a few cafés open. I was dead lucky. I got to the bakery just as it opened; less than a dozen people in the queue.’