Over the succeeding days, she revised her opinion. There was colour if you sought it out. It streaked through the baroque stones of Hradčany, the enormous castle complex hunching over the city, which she could see from her employers’ apartment in the Malá Strana (the Strangers’ quarter), directly beneath it. Later on, she became familiar with the sly summer sparkle of the Vltava river dividing the Malá Strana from the confusing matrix of streets in the Staré Mĕsto (the Old Town) and was treated to the swathe of summer green up on the Letná Plain.

It wasn’t a sexy city like Paris. Yet, there was something deep and mysterious about it that even the summer sun could not penetrate. Resting at its heart was a history of changing faiths, of persecution, of demons and music. It was a haunting place and a haunted place, its past littered with ironies.

Take the sentence in the book Prague on a Shoestring, with which she had armed herself. ‘Once the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, Prague is a Protestant capital with a magnificent Catholic cathedral.’

Petr Kobes, her employer, told her that the Czechs called their city matička Praha, ‘little mother Prague’, but, he added with the smile that charmed her, it was as well to be aware that one of its most famous writers, Kafka, had written: ‘this little mother has claws’.

In the Staré Mĕsto, a couple of drunks were propped up against a door with studded nails. Further down the street, another slumped on a bench, an empty bottle of Becherovka rolling mournfully on the ground beside him.

You could smell the booze as you passed. Nothing new there, she thought. Any day of the week there were drunks back home. ‘The English are hopeless with drink’, her wonderful, if a tiny bit superior, French mother had said more than once. They have drunks in Paris, too, Laure reminded her. Her mother had an answer for that one. ‘Parisians are better at it.’

This bunch looked especially depressed. Not one of the grey-looking men and women gave her so much as a glance as she passed by them with the children. In that minatory lecture on Prague, Petr warned her to take care. ‘The drunks will rip your fingernails out if they think they can sell them for Slivovice.’

Same old, same old, she thought and grasped Jan and Maria’s hands even more tightly.

Yet it wasn’t same old. Most things were strange and that was the point. Encountering the new, and absorbing it, was intended to help her negotiate the shock of her father’s dying. Having collapsed halfway through the first year at university, she knew she was a mess and her mother packed her off to Paris. ‘My city will heal you,’ she said. ‘You can return to university later.’