A man in a hat was struggling with a wheelbarrow, an old woman scrunched in its tray. Her ankles hung over the end, her feet bandaged against the chill spring air. Her head rested on a cushion propped against the edge of the bowl. She was covered in a rug. He wanted to stop the truck, jump down. It could have been his grandmother. Perhaps this old woman baked a seed cake every Sunday, saw her grandson once a week. The man had paused, removed his hat, was wiping his forehead and the woman raised a corrugated finger, whispered a word. The man shook his head, heaved at the barrow. He’d lost his place in the line, but there was no rush, no end to find or deadline to meet.

John knew he wouldn’t have survived, wrenched from home, if the boot had been on the other foot. Where would he have gone in England? Tramping to nowhere?

‘This will take forever.’ John stood up in the truck and peered over the heads of the flow. It was already late afternoon. ‘What’s the hold-up?’

‘Rations, sir,’ Arthur said. ‘Our boys have set up a station along the way. Water, biscuits, you know. Feeding them.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Talk about a miracle. Where’s this lot heading?’

John shrugged. ‘Anywhere but east. They’re fleeing the Russians.’ He sat back onto the bench.

‘Where’s the Green Line bus when you need it, eh, sir?’ Arthur said. ‘Bremen to Braintree. Nordhausen to Northolt.’

John liked Arthur, with his dry, sly humour, found himself turning round, looking for the familiar transport, just in case.

‘After Dunkirk,’ John said, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised at anything.’ He fished in his pocket for his NAAFI cigarettes, offered one to Arthur.

‘Where are they going to put all these people when they get to where they’re going? That’s what I want to know.’

People.

John had braced himself for war back home but even so, every sense and sinew reeled from its horror. Death screamed from the ruins, polluted the air, soured the taste, blighted his sight. But the people. The life, in all this death. Clinging on. That took his breath away. Wherever he turned there was a frenzy to survive. A kaleidoscope. That’s what he saw now. Not a flowing river at all, but a human fractal changing at each twist of its body, a never-ending mosaic of Germans, Jews, Russians, Italians, Poles. Men, women, children.

He pulled out his matches, lit Arthur’s cigarette and his own.