While verena was lunching with Hitler on a trip to Berlin in January 1938, her sister was still in England. Far away from events in Germany, Friedelind was brimming with initiative and living on a generous 200 marks a month. Life was good.

Winifred was glad to have enough hard currency to keep her uncomfortable daughter at arm's length. ‘Every month in England is a relief to us. Geissmar says she is always there during office hours and helps her out a lot with correspondence. That's a strange child! She won't help Bayreuth and her mother, but she'll do it voluntarily for the Jewess!!!!’

Friedelind's intellectual exchange with her aunts continued unabated. Daniela and Eva read Shakespeare's Coriolanus, a work that according to Eva ‘was a particular favourite of your grandfather's’. They also started on Balzac's novel Illusions perdues, which depicted a Paris – according to Daniela – ‘where the beast and the devil reign in the shape of man, along with poverty, vice and despair (it's nothing for the young like you!).’ Friedelind replied cheekily that the youth of the day was enlightened, ‘while you were probably as innocent as lambs at the age of nineteen … and a little nine-year-old squirt probably knows more than both of you at 77.’