She said, “I know how old you are.”

I asked her why she was there. Just directly, because I’ve discovered that if you ask people things directly when they aren’t expecting it, they answer before they’ve worked out what they want to say.

She said her hours finished in November two and a half years ago.

I said, “So why are you still here?”

And Martha Vance leaned on a mop in a shelter foyer and said: “Because they let me in.”

She explained it in about four sentences and she did not cry and she did not apologise, and I have thought about those four sentences constantly since.