Then the rumours of a French advance became more detailed. A woman coming into my shop warned Marie that we should hide our books and bury our treasure.

‘Why?’ I demanded of Marie.

She was white-faced. ‘I am English,’ she said to me. ‘My grandmother was pure English.’

‘I don’t doubt your loyalty,’ I said, incredulous that someone should be trying to prove their provenance to me, a mongrel by birth, education, religion and choice.

‘The French are coming,’ she said. ‘That woman is from my village and she was warned by her friend. She has come to hide in Calais.’

She was the first of many. A steady flow of people from the countryside outside the gates in the English Pale decided that their best safety lay inside the untouchable town.

The Company of Merchants who all but ran the town organised a great dormitory in Staple Hall, bought in food ahead of the French advance, warned all the fit young men and women of Calais that they must prepare for a siege. The French were coming, but the English and Spanish army would be hard behind them. We need fear nothing, but we should prepare.

Then in the night, without warning, Fort Nieulay fell. It was one of the eight forts that guarded Calais, and as such was only a small loss. But Nieulay was the fort on the River Hames which controlled the sea gates, which were supposed to flood the canals around the town so that no army could cross. With Nieulay in French hands we had nothing to defend us but the other forts and the great walls. We had lost the first line of defence.

The very next day we heard the roar of cannon and then a rumour swept through the town. Fort Risban, the fort which guarded the inner harbour of Calais, had fallen too, even though it was newly built and newly fortified. Now the harbour itself lay open to French shipping, and the brave English boats which bobbed at anchor in the port could be taken at any moment.

‘What shall we do?’ Marie asked me.

‘It’s only two forts,’ I said stoutly, trying to hide my fear. ‘The English army will know we are under siege and come to rescue us. You’ll see, within three days they will be here.’

But it was the French army which drew up in lines before the walls of Calais and it was the French arquebusiers who flung a storm of arrows which arched over the top of the walls and killed at random people running in the streets, desperate to get inside their houses.

‘The English will come,’ I said. ‘Lord Robert will come and attack the French from the rear.’

We bolted the shutters on the shop and shrank inside to the back room, in a terror that the great gates, so close to our little shop, would be a focus for attack. The French brought up siege engines. Even hidden as we were in the back room of the shop I could hear the pounding of the great ram against the barred gates. Our men on the ramparts above were firing down, desperately trying to pick off the men who were pounding the defences, and I heard a roar and a hiss as a great vat of boiling tar was tipped over the walls and showered on the attackers below, I heard their screams as they were scalded and burned, their upturned faces getting the brunt of the pain. Marie and I, desperate with fear, crouched behind the shop door as if the thin planks of wood would shield us. I did not know what to do, or where to go for safety. For a moment I thought of running through the streets to Daniel’s house but I was too afraid to unbolt the front door, and besides the streets were in turmoil with cannon shot overarching the city walls and falling within the streets, burning arrows raining down on the straw roofs and our reinforcements running up through the narrow streets to the walls.