That had come later, when slowly he had begun to stay awake for long enough to understand he was a problem for the people looking after him. Several women had brought food and water, and he had woken one day and noticed he was in clean but threadbare clothes, not anything he recognised as his own. He still didn’t understand much of what they were saying, but he was gradually catching more and more of it, piecing together fragments of their conversation with snippets that came back to him from lessons at school. But when he tried to think about his school, he couldn’t remember where it was or when he’d been there. He could remember almost nothing, in fact. Try as he might, he couldn’t even manage his own name. He became aware of the seasons changing, working out that he must have been hidden in that remote barn for months on end – if not longer.

Laura’s hand went to her mouth to stop herself from crying out. She knew she would have been terrified if such a thing had happened to her. It was unthinkable, her poor brother lying wounded and far from home, unable to do anything to help himself. ‘What happened then?’ she prompted gently.

‘Slowly, really slowly, I began to improve,’ he said. ‘I started to talk back to them in French. I tried to help them out in small ways. I could see they were taking a big risk in hiding me. If I had been discovered by the enemy, or if someone had betrayed my whereabouts, they could have been killed. I owe them my life. Once I was up and about, able to move on my own, I started to do things for them around the farm, but I still didn’t know who I was. One or two of them spoke a little English, and of course they knew I was British from my pilot’s uniform. They’d had to burn that – well, they said that it was pretty burnt anyway after the plane crash. They’d try to get me to talk about my past, but it was like there was a big curtain drawn across everything before that day.

‘I tried to ask where I was and they brought me a map. It was a very rough one, and of course all in French, but it made sense to me. Then I began to remember – not my name or where I was from, but that I’d been taught about maps.’

‘That makes sense, you must have done heaps of navigation training,’ Laura said, taking a drink from her glass. It wasn’t quite a cocktail from the admiral’s cabinet, but it would do. ‘Go on.’