‘It was very strange, the way all that detail returned but not the personal stuff,’ Freddy said, shaking his head slowly. ‘I told them what sort of things I’d learnt about and they began to ask me more and more. It became clear after a while that they wanted me to join them.’

‘Join them? Doing what? Being a farmer?’

‘No, silly,’ Freddy said with a familiar mix of affection and exasperation. ‘All right, I did do chores around the farm as so many of the young men who’d done the work before weren’t around any more.’

‘Just like home,’ said Laura.

‘But to be honest I wasn’t very good,’ he admitted. ‘I still had trouble walking properly – I’d taken this huge bash to the head, as you can see, and I’d been burned a fair bit. All that time of lying still had affected my muscles too. I could barely lift a spade to begin with.’ He sighed. ‘No, what they really wanted me for was my map reading and knowledge of navigation. They were with the Resistance, you see.’

Laura nodded. It made sense now. ‘So you stayed with them? Didn’t you want to try to get home?’

Freddy shrugged apologetically. ‘I might have, if I could have said where home was. But I honestly couldn’t. So I thought the best thing to do was stay with them and be of use that way. I didn’t know who to contact, and unless I stayed hidden I was a risk to them. So I kept below the radar, literally.’

Laura tried to understand what it must have been like, but it was a struggle. Part of her wondered if Freddy hadn’t really wanted to get back to his old life. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to let their parents or her know he was still alive and with the underground in France. Yet at the same time she told herself not to be so stupid. None of it had been his fault, and he’d ended up fighting the Nazis in a way that few others could have done.

‘It would have been almost impossible to have got me back to Blighty,’ he explained, sensing her concern. ‘I had no papers, nothing. Everything that could have identified me went up in flames in the crash, they told me. So bit by bit I became involved in their organisation, making new maps, advising them, that sort of thing, and doing some translation too when my French got much better. I’m pretty fluent now,’ he said with a grin. ‘One of the perks.’

Laura frowned. ‘What changed, then? Was it D-day?’