Sitting up on one elbow, she spoke to her friend. ‘What happened? Last I remember I was in the kitchen …’ She frowned as she tried to make sense of it all. She had been in the kitchen when someone had come to the door; no one seemed keen to answer it, so Roz had … She looked at Mabel. ‘I had a dream, that my mother …’ She fell silent as her mother appeared over Mabel’s shoulder.

‘Not a dream …’ said Inge.

Roz gaped at her mother, then at Mabel, who nodded, her lips trembling as she smiled. ‘And that’s not all …’

Roz craned her neck to see who else was there, keeping her fingers crossed that it would be her father.

‘Felix!’

Smiling, Felix too entered the room.

Still staring expectantly at the bedroom door she spoke softly. ‘Where’s Dad?’

Inge sank down beside the bed and cupped Roz’s hands in hers. ‘We got separated when we were leaving France, the Resistance thought it would be best …’

‘France?’

She nodded. ‘That’s where we’ve been all this time. You see, the man your father had swerved to avoid was a German soldier. As you can imagine, the accusation would have been that we had tried to hit him on purpose, so we had to think quickly. You had been thrown clear of the car, so everyone thought we were on our own and it was better that way. I couldn’t just leave you though so I asked a woman nearby to take you into the station. That’s when we made our escape. We knew it wasn’t safe to stay where we were so we made our way to France, where we worked on various farms for our keep.

‘We wanted to come to England, of course we did, but it was too dangerous. I wanted to write to let you know we were safe, but Papa said no in case the letters were intercepted. When France fell to Germany I really thought we were done for, but there’s a band of heroes who call themselves the Resistance, they’re like a secret army, and they’re fighting Hitler. The farm we were hiding in put us in touch with their leader, and that’s when things started to get better for us. They said if we helped them, they could arrange safe passage to England. It was the best news we’d had in a long time and of course we jumped at the chance.’

‘So where’s dad, and why isn’t he with you?’ Roz held her breath as she listened to her mother’s explanation.