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flatly. ‘He is a dirty old man and I shall be leaving home.’ She’d put on her best cream coat and, without saying goodbye, had left at once for Esuires near Lille to stay with her friend, Isobelle Lemaître, until the storm had blown over. Her resistance had slowly weakened as the days had passed, however, and she had been almost prepared to go home when the first bomb had dropped.
    On the night of 9 May they’d heard anti-aircraft guns and seen searchlights, and it had been reported that there was an air raid to the north-east. The following day they’d heard that the very thing they’d all been dreading had happened – the Germans had attacked.
    From that moment, they’d seen aeroplanes all the time – none of them ever French, British or Belgian – and then the refugees had started. Finally there’d been French soldiers, and when they’d asked how things were going, the men had replied quite simply: ‘The Germans are coming!’ It had shocked Marie-Josephine to life at last. Esuires was no place for her.
    She’d packed her belongings and gone to the bus-stop to go home. But suddenly there were no buses heading east and, deciding to head for relatives who kept a café at Vitry, she’d borrowed a few francs from Isobelle and taken the bus north instead. Vitry was full of refugees and when she arrived she learned that her parents were dead. The farm had been on the direct route of the panzers and the place had been razed to the ground. The news had shocked her but, because she was of hard-headed northern French stock, she’d dried her tears and accepted the fact that she was on her own.
    The news that came in now was that the Belgians were collapsing and that Queen Wilhelmina of Holland was in England, and from then on the air was filled with noise and she’d soon found she could distinguish between bombs and anti-aircraft fire. The refugees had continued to pour past, ancient carriages driven by ancient coachmen and ancient cars with solid tyres and acetylene lamps, dusty from years of lying unused in country garages; priests, frantic women with children, farmers trying vainly to drive their stock. They were followed by soldiers in lorries with buckled mudguards, their faces stubbled and grimy. The rumours they spread that half the refugees were really spies or enemy agents were so widely believed that many refused to help them.
    It had seemed to be time to move further west and she’d just set off towards the bus-stop when the German aeroplanes arrived. She had stood, shocked and uncertain what to do, until a French soldier, diving at her, had knocked her flying into the ditch and she’d lain there with all the breath knocked out of her body, the man’s heavy frame across her in a way that might have terrified her if she hadn’t been already frightened out of her wits.
    She lay with her arms over her head, her ears assailed by the shriek and clang of explosions, her eyes full of flashing light. Her body seemed to be lifted from the ground in a serious of jerks as the explosions occurred, and she was deafened, half-blinded and stupefied by the clamour, trying instinctively to claw herself under the ground away from the showers of stones, rubble, splintered wood and flying fragments of glass and pulverised soil.
    As the ringing in her head died and she became aware that the din had stopped, she rose to her knees, her hair matted with dirt, her face caked with it, spitting it from her tongue as she tried to draw breath in what seemed an airless vacuum. The man who’d flung her down had already disappeared, running down the village street, and then she realised she could hear the crackling of flames and the high thin sound of someone crying.
    She decided she’d better go back to the café to clean up, but it was only when she was on top of it that she realised it wasn’t there any more and that the screaming she could hear came from her aunt who was sitting by the roadside, her clothes blasted from her