Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, the Royal Academy’s principal, said: “Khrystyna Mykhailichenko is an extraordinary talent of rare maturity for her age. But we never, ever thought our dreams of studying in those places would become a reality.” She said: “When I was in Ukraine, I used to imagine going to the Royal Academy, because of its worldwide reputation, and we knew all about the Yehudi Menuhin School. Within a few years, she was winning international competitions and giving concerts. Khrystyna began learning the piano aged four, and her parents soon realised she had an extraordinary gift. One friend’s son hasn’t left the house for six months because he’s terrified of being swept up.” Now there’s a probability of conscription. Matheson said: “Nataliia has a friend who was shot and injured trying to escape, and another friend’s husband died in the war. I thought, ‘ah, right, we’re in a different league here’. A few days before, I was sent a film of Khrystyna playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1. Joking that their honky-tonk piano is worthy of “a smoke-filled room with men drinking pints and singing Roll Out the Barrel”, Matheson said: “All we knew before they arrived was that they were a musical family. When the windows are open, you see people walking by and they just stand there.”

She told the Observer that they themselves are not musical, but that the Ukrainians’ music-making in their home has been “absolutely unbelievable”: “You run out of superlatives. Matheson, a semi-retired broadcast journalist, lives with her husband, a national director of the Skills Funding Agency, in an end-of-terrace five-bedroomed house. They lived in Poland for three months before arriving in Corbridge last June as part of the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

When Khrystyna played the Chopin Ballade No 1 to me recently, it was as if she was channelling the burdens of a hard life Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, Royal Academy of Musicīoth feel that classical music helped them to face the trauma of abandoning their home with their mother, Nataliia. Her 12-year-old sister, Sasha, a violinist, has a scholarship to become a weekly boarder at the Yehudi Menuhin School near Leatherhead in Surrey.

Khrystyna Mykhailichenko, 17, has been awarded a full bursary for four years to study piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Both girls have now received scholarships to two of the UK’s foremost music schools, less than a year after fleeing their home near Kyiv to start new lives in Corbridge, not far from Newcastle.

When we were sisters a novel