This summer I am seventeen, I am bursting into being a woman, and I don't care about empty shops and sugar and flour rations. My blue eyes are blazing. My long limbs are taut and restless. I have wild wheat-coloured hair that flies in all directions and a great hunger in my flesh. All I care about is that this man who is grieving for his dead lover turn his eyes on me, notice my sun-bleached hair, my burning face and shoulders and play one of his melancholy songs for me alone.