'But it's disastrous! Every leader who's tried has been painfully disappointed. Ever since Jesus Christ.'

'Now you've gone too far.' Gerda Dieffenbach was a Catholic, unlike most inhabitants of Wuppertal, renowned in Germany as a nest of stinging Protestant sects. She was a year or so older than me, tall and grey-eyed, always in appalling long serge skirts and a plain white blouse freshly laundered every day. She never used cosmetics or scent or even bath salts. She smelt wholesomely of household soap. She argued with me because I was the first Englishman she had met in her life, and because argument is flirtation with intelligent young women who are not sure of themselves. I did not really argue at all. I teased, enjoying the delicious spectacle of her pink with indignation, her soft mouth open breathlessly.

It was early evening that same Saturday, and we were in the shabby room where everyone ate and sat at the front of Dr Dieffenbach's house near the Zoo. It was not a large house, and her father had to have his surgery, the waiting room and his small library, aromatic with cigars. The Gesellschaftszimmer across the narrow, tile-paved hall was filled with massive dark furniture and curtained with crimson plush, even the subjects of its solidly-framed family portraits looking uncomfortable. It was kept shuttered and unheated, mercifully reserved for important visitors, who by German custom always occupied in solitude the ugly horsehair sofa. Gerda had just come in from shopping. Her father was attending a patient, her mother gone visiting and her twelve-year-old brother Gunter somewhere out of the way. I could smell our evening meal cooking behind the double doors leading towards the kitchen, and faintly hear the wireless and the two maids calling to one another.

'Germany accepted the Fourteen Points on October 23, 1918 so that the bloodshed might be ended,' Gerda continued relentlessly. 'Then you dictated whatever terms you felt like at Versailles and tried to ruin us in the name of "Reparations". Well! How could you expect Herr Hitler to like that?'