Sick men with short tempers. Damp flannels on a fevered brow, cool water from a feeder. The kitchen was making the soup thinner, had cut the meals from four to three. Dora had twice the number of patients to look after, as well as having to clean the ward and make the beds, wash the bandages and boil up the instruments. She was inspected twice a day by whichever officer was on duty in the hotel. She had no special privileges now. Agnes was right.

The women’s meals were cut from three to two, then two to one. Their soup was made even thinner. Dora could see the bones of her feet with the veins pumping proud. By night, Cinderella, you dance. Dora looked with envy at the soldiers’ food, hoping they’d leave something in the bowl for her. She’d risk the dysentery for a full stomach. She wasn’t sure she would ever get used to the way hunger gnawed, the way it hurt and hurtled through her.

The bombing went on through the sticky, stormy nights of July when the airless cellar steamed like a bath and the women sweated what little moisture they had. Through August when the nights grew shorter and the cruel pinch of autumn stalked the room. Dora could see the smoke on the Normandy coast form low, bulbous clouds, the sparks and fires burnishing them orange and green, blotting out the stars at night. Her head thundered from the noise, the constant boom-boom-boom of the guns, from the hunger that tightened round her temples, from the fear and the fury she saw in the soldiers’ eyes. Fear made them impotent, angry. Your fault, not mine. Impotence made them cruel. There were twenty-one women left. Most had been sent back to France before the blockade, though Dora couldn’t understand why. The last woman to arrive before the British cut them off was number three hundred and ninety-five.

The officers were listening to the BBC, openly tuning in on the wireless in the mess. They didn’t notice Dora sitting in the corner. Jonah in the leviathan. Germany was in retreat, she learned. France was lost to the Allies. They couldn’t win this war, not now. It would only be a matter of time before it was over. Hold on, she told herself. That’s what Agnes had said. Hold on.

But it didn’t end. The fallen leaves were dry and brittle beneath Dora’s feet, the dawn a distant promise. Every morning dragging herself up and out into the courtyard to stand in rags while they counted them. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could bear this. Knowing the war must end soon made the now unbearable. Hope, she thought, is the cruellest virtue. The damp November mornings gave way to the frosts of December.