Kids of between fifteen and twenty-five were already gathering in the streets around the hall. Swing boys wore check jackets and carried umbrellas, to look English. They let their hair grow long to show their contempt for the military. Swing girls had heavy make-up and American sports clothes. They all thought the Hitler Youth were stupid and boring, with their folk music and community dances.

Carla thought it was ironic. When she was little she had been teased by the other kids and called a foreigner because her mother was English: now the same children, a little older, thought English was the fashionable thing to be.

Carla and Frieda went into the hall. There was a conventional, innocent youth club there, with girls in pleated skirts and boys in short trousers playing table tennis and drinking sticky orange cordial. But the action was in the side rooms.

Frieda quickly led Carla to a large storeroom with stacked chairs around the walls. There her brother, Werner, had plugged in a record player. Fifty or sixty boys and girls were dancing the jitterbug jive. Carla recognized the tune that was playing: ‘Ma, He’s Making Eyes at Me.’ She and Frieda started to dance.

Jazz records were banned because most of the best musicians were Negroes. The Nazis had to denigrate anything that was done well by non-Aryans: it threatened their theories of superiority. Unfortunately for them, Germans loved jazz just as much as everyone else. People who visited other countries brought records home, and you could buy them from American sailors in Hamburg. There was a lively black market.

Werner had lots of discs, of course. He had everything: a car, modern clothes, cigarettes, money. He was still Carla’s dream boy, though he always went for girls older than she – women, really. Everyone assumed he went to bed with them. Carla was a virgin.

Werner’s earnest friend Heinrich von Kessel immediately came up to them and started to dance with Frieda. He wore a black jacket and waistcoat, which looked dramatic with his longish dark hair. He was devoted to Frieda. She liked him – she enjoyed talking to clever men – but she would not go out with him because he was too old, twenty-five or twenty-six.

Soon a boy Carla did not know came and danced with her, and the evening was off to a good start.

She abandoned herself to the music: the irresistible sexual drumbeat, the suggestively crooned lyrics, the exhilarating trumpet solos, the joyous flight of the clarinet. She whirled and kicked, let her skirt flare outrageously high, fell into the arms of her partner and sprang out again.

When they had danced for an hour or so Werner put on a slow tune. Frieda and Heinrich began dancing cheek to cheek. There was no one available whom Carla liked enough for slow dancing, so she left the room and went to get a Coke. Germany was not at war with America so Coca-Cola syrup was imported and bottled in Germany.