All the same, the four women now lived in the kitchen, sleeping there on mattresses they dragged in from the hall at night. It was hard enough to warm that one room, and they certainly did not have fuel to heat the rest of the house. The kitchen stove had burned coal in the old days, but that was now virtually unobtainable. However, they had found the stove would burn many other things: books, newspapers, broken furniture, even net curtains.

They slept in pairs, Carla with Rebecca and Maud with Ada. Rebecca often cried herself to sleep in Carla’s arms, as she had the night after her parents were killed.

The long walk had exhausted Carla, and she immediately lay down. Ada built up the fire in the stove with old news magazines Rebecca had brought down from the attic. Maud added water to the remains of the lunchtime bean soup and reheated it for their supper.

Sitting up to drink her soup, Carla suffered a sharp abdominal pain. This was not a result of pushing the handcart, she realized. It was something else. She checked the date and counted back to the date of the liberation of the Jewish Hospital.

‘Mother,’ she said fearfully, ‘I think the baby’s coming.’

‘It’s too soon!’ Maud said.

‘I’m thirty-six weeks pregnant, and I’m getting cramps.’

‘Then we’d better get ready.’

Maud went upstairs to fetch towels.

Ada brought a wooden chair from the dining room. She had a useful length of twisted steel from a bomb site that served her as a sledgehammer. She smashed the chair into manageable pieces, then built up the fire in the stove.

Carla put her hands on her distended belly. ‘You might have waited for warmer weather, Baby,’ she said.

Soon she was in too much pain to notice the cold. She had not known anything could hurt this much.

Nor that it could go on so long. She was in labour all night. Maud and Ada took turns holding her hand while she moaned and cried. Rebecca looked on, white-faced and scared.

The grey light of morning was filtering through the newspaper taped over the glassless kitchen window when at last the baby’s head emerged. Carla was overwhelmed by a feeling of relief like nothing she had ever experienced, even though the pain did not immediately cease.

After one more agonizing push, Maud took the baby from between her legs.

‘A boy,’ she said.

She blew on his face, and he opened his mouth and cried.

She gave the baby to Carla, and propped her upright on the mattress with some cushions from the drawing room.

He had lots of dark hair all over his head.

Maud tied off the cord with a piece of cotton, then cut it. Carla unbuttoned her blouse and put the baby to her breast.

She was worried she might have no milk. Her breasts should have swollen and leaked towards the end of her pregnancy, but they had not, perhaps because the baby was early, perhaps because the mother was undernourished. But, after a few moments of sucking, she felt a strange pain, and the milk began to flow.