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just about to begin.’
    ‘
This is the seven o’clock news from the BBC, on Sunday, the third of September
…’
    The bulletin was starting as Eileen led the old man into the living room, where they sat and listened in grave silence. According to the newsreader, there’d still been no response from Hitler to the British demand that he withdraw his troops from Poland. The broadcast finished with the announcement that there would be another bulletin in an hour’s time.
    Eileen switched the set off and turned to Mr Singerman. His rheumy eyes behind his half-moon glasses were moist and full of fear.
    ‘I’ve been awake all night,’ he whispered. ‘I prayed there’d be some good news this morning, but he won’t turn back now. We’re on the brink of catastrophe, Eileen. Any minute …’
    She patted his shrivelled, parchment-coloured hand, feeling glad there was someone to comfort and take her mind off her own despair. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea, luv.’
    The kettle was boiling away in the back kitchen and the window had misted up with steam. As Eileen stirred the pot vigorously – Mr Singerman liked his tea strong – she decided Hitler must be stark raving mad. Two days ago, despite all the warnings, his troops had brazenly marched into Poland, an invading army, and seemed intent on staying there.
    ‘I don’t understand it,’ she said, as she returned with the tea. ‘Why do countries want to invade other countries? People should be left to get on with their own lives in their own way.’
    Mr Singerman shrugged his stooped, narrow shoulders. ‘It’s something in a lot of men. It goes right back to the Romans, Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, the lust for power and territory. Now they have such terrible, dangerous weapons and each war seems more unspeakable and bloody than the one before. They called the last, ‘the war to end all wars’. I should never have believed them.’ His face crumpled. ‘Oh, why did I let my Ruth go to Austria?’ he wailed.
    He seemed on the verge of tears, a sad, lonely old widower whose wife had died in childbirth at the age of forty while giving birth to their only daughter, Ruth. Eileen had never known Ruth, but the neighbours had told her the whole story. ‘Oh, she was such a lovely girl, Eileen. Spoilt rotten, mind you, because Mr Singerman, he doted on her. He went without to pay for her piano lessons. Going to be a proper pianist, she was.’
    For Ruth’s twenty-first birthday, her doting father’s gift was to spend his entire savings on a three-month holiday in Austria, where Ruth would stay with his brother. ‘He only wanted to show her off, like, Eileen. Let everyone see what a lovely girl he had. You never saw anything like the clothes she had to go with.’
    That was nineteen years ago, and Ruth had never returned. She’d fallen in love with a dentist and got married. Mr Singerman, retired by then from his tailor’s shop due to failing eyesight, and eking out a living from the small rent he received from the former assistant who’d taken the business over, could never afford to visit her, though Ruth wrote, often, sending snapshots of the grandchildren he’d never seen, which were proudly displayed on the sideboard in his home. But for more than a year now, since Austria had been forcibly taken over by Germany, there’d been nothing. No letters, no more snapshots, just an awful silence.
    ‘That was a long time ago, luv,’ Eileen said softly. ‘You couldn’t possibly have known what was going to happen.’
    There were rumours, terrible rumours, nothing that you read about in the papers, but Mr Singerman seemed to have heard them, about what Hitler was doing to the Jews. It wasn’t only Ruth and her family who’d disappeared. He’d spoken of camps – what were they called, Eileen racked her brains – concentration camps, where Jews were put to die, along with Communists and mentally defective people like Phoebe Crean’s two boys. Though Eileen