My mother grabs my arm and drags me under the kitchen table, where we crouch, staring at my father’s filthy feet circling us in worn-out sandals. An old service revolver dangling from his right hand, as he belts out the chorus from a favourite John Lennon song in heartfelt English. War is over. Merry Christmas.

‘A shell hits the flats opposite, and still he finds a tongue to sing,’ my mother says. Then she orders me to stay put and crawls out. ‘Idiot,’ she says to my father.

My father’s grubby feet stop pacing. Perhaps considering her point, but then he continues marching up and down the kitchen, muttering that he made the table to eat on, not to cower under. He never does what my mother wants, which is why we’re here, not sheltering in the underground garages with our neighbours. Depending how much alcohol he’s guzzled, what he calls her ‘relentless nagging’ too often loosens his fists, leaving purple bruises on her chalk white skin. I hate my father.

I call for my mother to come back under the table, but she shh’s me and returns to insulting and pleading with him. I lift the white tablecloth—draped over the table earlier in preparation to serve up a hastily put-together lunch of cold sausage and bread—to find my father pointing his gun through the window at the street below, rehearsing the moment enemy soldiers screech to a halt outside our block. ‘When the bastards finish dropping their stinking shells,’ he ...