She had not made up her mind. Yes, managing the two children was far from the easy ride she had blithely assumed but it was a quid pro quo situation. She tilted her face up to the sun. There were unexpected compensations for it had never occurred to her that children were fun. Nor that she would feel so protective of them.

‘Oh, Mees Laure, our mother likes you to take us to bars …’ Jan had turned out to be an excellent tease and she had to keep her wits sharpened. Marie was a soberer child who needed to think about things and was easily hurt. Close in age and, thus, competitors, she and her brother were at the stage where they did not get on.

Unsurprisingly, Laure’s French was approaching faultless (and the Kobes children spoke mostly French) but handling the Czech language and currency was going to be tricky. She bent over and adjusted Maria’s sunhat and said, ‘Let’s find an ice cream. But you will have to ask for it, Jan.’

The trio had tramped across the Charles Bridge which spanned the river between the Malá Strana and the Staré Mĕsto, stopping now and again to look at the statues, many of which were still damaged from the Second World War. Below, a grey-green Vltava flowed seawards. Apparently, said the reliable Prague on a Shoestring, in the fourteenth century, a saint had been thrown into the river from this bridge. For his beliefs, no doubt, even as he promised loyalty to King Wenceslas who had ordered the execution. Personally, Laure echoed her father’s robust political views: it never did to put one’s trust in princes.

From the bridge a street led directly towards the Staré Mĕsto square where, she was relieved to see, there were a few shops. Venturing into a couple, she found dark interiors and sparse stock. In the third, a notice hanging on the wall read in large black type: ‘Workers of the World Unite’. A smell of disinfectant in the fourth wafted over them from a back room.

There was no ice cream to be had.

The children were turning less cooperative by the second and Laure speculated what sort of country was it that had no ice cream during a blazing summer. Was it that ice cream was capitalist? Or did Czechoslovakians not care for it?

An odd set of rules apparently applied. The chief being: if there was demand, let’s not supply it.

Maria tugged at Laure’s hand and wailed with heat and weariness. Jan spoke up for both. ‘Laure, we want to go home.’

She was pretty sure Jan meant the comfortable apartment near Neuilly, Paris, in which the Kobes were housed by Petr’s firm. Not the apartment close to St Nicholas Church in the Malá Strana where the family were established for the summer.