‘Oh aye, I bet you’d not be that enthusiastic if it were some feller what had come callin’,’ said Bill with a mischievous chuckle.

Felix shrugged nonchalantly. ‘She’s been through some hard times, and I’m trying to help her find her parents back in Berlin. They went missing the day she boarded the train.’

Bill and Alan exchanged a dark glance. ‘If that’s the case,’ said Alan, ‘you might well be all she’s got.’

Nodding, Felix stared gloomily at the pieces of lamb in his bowl of scouse. Ever since arriving in Liverpool he had kept the truth about his mother’s arrest to himself, but seeing the expressions on Alan and Bill’s faces, and hearing their opinion on the Nazis when it came to the Jewish people, he turned his thoughts to his own mother, where she might be and what might have happened to her. Up until now he had convinced himself that he was in a better position than Roz because he knew his mother was in one of the camps, but whilst no one knew for a fact what happened once you were there, anyone with an ounce of common sense could see the outlook wasn’t good. He spooned up a particularly large piece of meat and stared at it. His rabbi had said his mother had been arrested, but surely you took people who’d been arrested to jail, not a camp? Weren’t camps for holidays? He felt his heart sink because deep down he knew the truth. The soldiers were calling it a camp because they knew there would be mass hysteria otherwise, the same as the parents whose children had boarded the train told them that they were going to join them later on. Felix knew they were lying, he was pretty certain other children did too, but no one had questioned it.

‘No point lookin’ at it …’ Bill’s words cut across his thoughts.

Smiling briefly, Felix popped the spoon into his mouth.

‘You alright, boy?’ said Alan, his face full of concern.

‘I will be,’ replied Felix.

Alan clapped a hand on the table. ‘You’re here now, and that’s all that matters. You can put your old life far behind you – you needn’t worry about no Nazis whilst you’re living in Britain.’

Standing up, Felix gathered the empty bowls and took them over to the sink. ‘You don’t think he’ll try and invade Britain?’

Alan shook his head decidedly, but Bill didn’t seem so sure. ‘I was in the first lot, and I seen what them Germans are like first-hand. If it wasn’t for the Americans we would have been well and truly scuppered. But if I thought that lot were bad, they ain’t nothin’ compared to Hitler and his Nazis. They’re a different kettle of fish altogether, and I can’t see him lettin’ the Americans get in his way, not this time around. They’ll have learned their lessons from the last lot, which makes them ten times more prepared and a hundred times more dangerous.’