These apartments and rooms, all five floors, are packed with people, and most of them I’ve known all my life. Another flight of wooden stairs, a turn to the right, step through a big hole in the wall, a corridor on the left, filled with light from another hole high in the wall, then the open doorway into my family’s part of the building.

Nanna glances up from the pot on the black wood stove with an expression of relief. It’s a look I’m well familiar with: I’ve made it home again, she’s probably thinking. Then she bends back over her pot. Soup – again. Bits of vegetables bubbling up in the liquid. The smell of it makes my stomach rumble.

“Have you got anything?” she rasps.

From my jacket pocket I pull out the piece of hard smoked sausage I’ve pilfered. It was on the table in the Black Marks’ barracks, just sitting on a plate; somebody’s breakfast left lying there as if it had no value at all. Unbelievable. I can never get used to the way the Black Marks treat their food, like there’s so much of it they can leave scraps lying around. Though if I asked for their leftovers – a thin boy in a too-big jacket at the door – they would laugh and kick the door shut in my face.

Nanna takes it without a word or any praise, even though it was a big risk getting it, but I can tell she’s pleased. We haven’t had meat for days. She slices it paper-thin with a knife, and puts a handful of slices into the soup; the rest she wraps with a piece of waxed paper and tucks away in her skirt pocket. My mouth is watering by now. I didn’t even take a bite myself, yet I’d had plenty of opportunity; I could have eaten the whole thing and not told.

Glancing at me with her raisin eyes, casting her gaze over my rat-thin body and sensing my hunger, she passes me a slice. I hurry it into my mouth, sucking, closing my eyes in bliss. The joy of its smoky saltiness!

“Now get the others,” she says, adding, “Marina’s upstairs talking to Siri.”

My younger sister Babet is easy enough to find. She’s made a camp with a friend out of blankets in the side room off the kitchen that she shares with Marina. I push back the curtain covering the hole in the wall and step through. Whispered voices come from the camp and I poke my head inside. Two little faces look up, deep in some fantasy world of their own making.

“The Messenger has arrived,” sings Babet. “What do you wish to tell the Queen, oh Messenger?”

My kid sister really cracks me up. “Oh, Queen,” I say with a serious face, playing the game, “the royal feast is about to be served.”