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fussed over me and gave Agnes and me school lessons. Mostly though, she sat and wrote, or helped Mama shopping for food using ration cards stamped Jew .
    ‘We are given the worst food in the shops,’ she complained one day when they returned. ‘And havingonly set times to shop, the best food is gone then. Some shops see our yellow star and turn us away.’
    Miri sat with Aunty Gitta and listened to her talk about her grandparents and the war.
    ‘For a long time we Jews were respected,’ Aunty Gitta told her. ‘Your grandfather was awarded the Iron Cross in the First World War. We are German patriots. Hitler and this war will be the undoing of Germany. Now that London has been bombed and Pearl Harbor in Hawaii has been hit, the war has grown bigger. The Americans are in the war now. Hitler will lose. It is only a question of time.’
    ‘When?’ asked Miri.
    ‘I wish I knew.’
    Agnes was moody. Everything seemed to upset her. ‘I don’t want to be here,’ she said to Aunty Gitta and stamped her foot.
    I looked at her. She’d always been a moaner, and now she was worse. I sighed. I was so tired all the time. When had I last had a full stomach? Food rationing was increasing. I missed my old home, the birds on the window ledge, the front gate that creaked…
    Mama stood up and went to the kitchen with Aunty Gitta. From a pitiful supply of vegetables and a rare potato they would cook something for us all. I looked at Miri, who was busily writing in her journal. I closed my eyes and dreamed…
    When I grow up I will look like Miri. My hair will be elegant and curled at the bottom. It will not be messy like it is now. My eyelashes will be long and they might flutter, and perhaps I will have a prince fall in love with me. I’ll wear nylon stockings and be very shapely.
    My prince will come for me on a white horse and say he has never seen anyone as pretty as me. We will ride away to his castle. Of course, in the castle we’ll have lots of room for Mama and Papa and Miri. We will have a house for my aunt and uncle and cousins too, but there’ll be a moat between us.
    Then I remembered who I was and that Jewish girls do not marry princes.
    Miri bit the end of her pencil and stared at the wall opposite her. She reached into her pocket and took out her bottle of scent and dabbed a little behind her ears.
    ‘May I have some?’ I asked.
    Miri hesitated, but only for a second. I suppose that her hesitation was because her scent was all she had from her other life, all that reminded her of pretty things from the past.
    ‘Sure, you skinny thing. Come here.’
    She dabbed a little on each of my wrists. It was heaven in a bottle. I sniffed my skin, drunk with the smell of fresh flowers and open fields.
    Papa came into the room. He’d brought with him some of his medical equipment and was sorting it out on the table.
    ‘Do you have to use that scent?’ He waved the air around him.
    There was something about this sweet smell hanging like a cloud around Miri that truly bothered him. Why? The smell reminded Miri and me of fresh spring flowers. The spring flowers that would open wide in our old garden and fill it with colour and perfume.
    ‘Miri,’ I whispered, ‘can you put just a little scent in the wardrobe? It has a bad stink in it, and I really needto go there. I think the stink might be coming from Uncle Ernst’s socks.’
    Miri’s look told me that she thought this a total waste of good scent, but she also seemed to understand that I needed the wardrobe just as much as she needed her scent. So she went into the bedroom and, while Papa was busy sorting out medicines and various instruments, she dabbed some scent on the inside wall of the wardrobe, then closed it quietly and left the room.
    ‘T HERE , NOW YOU look like a fairy princess.’ Agnes, bored, was arranging a new bow in my hair. I’d swapped four of my own for two of hers. Agnes said it was a fair bargain as her ribbons were better. This new one was red