The Welsh girl’s name is Esther Evans. She is 17 years old, and lives with her father – her mother is dead – on a sheep farm in North Wales. In the evenings she works behind the lounge bar of the Quarryman’s Arms in the village a couple of miles from their smallholding. It’s 1944. English sappers from the Pioneer Corps are in the area, converting an abandoned holiday camp for a clandestine military purpose. The local rumour mill is hard at work, grinding out speculation as to what or who the new base is for: commandos, Free French, Poles, Americans, ‘alpine troops training in the mountains for the invasion of Norway’. On the evening of D-Day, Esther and Colin, a sapper she’s been ‘stepping out with’, sneak down to the camp after last orders.

Esther hasn’t told her father about Colin. Arthur Evans is a ‘staunch nationalist’: he’s only been to England once, to a rally in Hyde Park in 1937 to protest against the conviction of the three Plaid Cymru leaders who set fire to the RAF bombing school – or training camp, depending on your point of view, though Peter Ho Davies tacitly takes the nationalist line – at Penrhos. Arthur drinks on the other side of the pub from the English soldiers, in the Welsh-speaking public bar. His daughter doesn’t share his politics: she’s ‘proud of her Welshness’ but ‘impatient with all the talk of the past’, and ‘yearns to be British, tonight of all nights’. She dreams of leaving, of escaping to London or Liverpool, and lets herself wonder if the ‘something special’ Colin has promised her mightn’t be a marriage proposal. If it were, it wouldn’t be her first: Rhys Roberts, the son of Esther’s old English teacher, who used to help out on her father’s farm, had asked her to marry him in the spring. He took the bus to Caernarvon and joined up when she turned him down.

Colin’s secret isn’t a marriage proposal, of course. At the deserted camp at midnight, they climb down under the tarpaulin covering an empty swimming-pool. ‘“Pee,” he whispers. “Oh.” He grins. “Doubleyas!” It takes her a moment to decipher him. “POWs!” he repeats, like it’s a punchline, and slowly, queasily, she begins to smile. “That’s who it’s for! And your lot thinking they was part of the war effort.”’ Despite this flash of hostility, she kisses him. But he wants more than kisses. ‘I wish I had something to remember you by,’ he says, and starts fumbling with her clothes. She tries to stop him; he rapes her; she headbutts him; he runs away.

The next day, ‘the morning after the invasion’ of Occupied Europe, but also of Esther Evans, she considers letting her father know what happened: