Mum got straight to the point. ‘I need to clear a few things up, Olive.’

After asking Miss Carter to give us a moment alone, she told me her side of the story. I felt as if I was listening to Mrs Henderson again, hearing about the lives of people I didn’t know. Only this was my own mother.

Every Monday and Friday night, leaving us with awful suppers to reheat, our mum didn’t work late shifts at the printworks. She went to an office in Shoreditch. And from there, by radio, by note, by telephone and letters, she exchanged messages with Miss Carter and Mrs Henderson and Queenie and others like them on what she called ‘humanitarian war work’. She’d never met any of them in person.

‘I can’t tell you any more details. It’s secret work. How you know even this much is really quite beyond me,’ she admitted.

‘I worked most of it out myself,’ I told her. She might’ve hidden it from me all this time, but I wasn’t stupid. ‘Sounds like Sukie did too.’

‘Your sister spied on me,’ Mum replied bitterly. ‘She stole paperwork, listened in to private conversations. She was very foolish to get caught up in something she knew nothing about.’

‘She did know about it, though. What Hitler’s doing really got to her. She was desperate to do something about it. All that post from Devon? It wasn’t from Queenie. Those were letters from the lighthouse, written by Ephraim, who feels the same about the Jewish people as Sukie does.’

‘It was stupid, impulsive behaviour,’ Mum argued, ‘of the sort your sister’s very good at.’

Yet to me she had missed a vital point.

‘You know Sukie wanted to help you, don’t you? She saw how ill you’d got over Dad. By standing in for you on this job, she was making sure you’d get some rest, like the doctor said you should.’

‘I might’ve known you’d stick up for your sister,’ Mum remarked. ‘But it didn’t help me – it worried me sick!’

‘It did help thirty-two refugees, though,’ I reminded her.

‘She was lucky she didn’t get arrested straight away,’ Mum went on as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘When I found out that night what she’d done, I was all for going after her, hauling her back and locking her in her bedroom, till this frightful war was over if I had to. But it was too late by then. She was already halfway to France.’

‘You knew the night she disappeared?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘And admit that I do undercover work and Sukie was doing it too?’ Mum cried. ‘Good grief, Olive, it’s secret business. It was too dangerous to tell you. There’s a war on, remember!’

‘People always use that excuse,’ I muttered.

It stunned me that Mum had known all this time. But then, hadn’t there been signs? The looks in our kitchen between her and Gloria, the refusal to talk about Sukie, the bundling us off out of the way – to here, the very place Sukie might, with any luck, show up. It was a clever way of making sure we knew the moment she set foot on British soil again.

Mum leaned forwards, elbows on the table. She looked strong, determined, and so very much like Sukie it made my chest hurt.

‘Some things have to be secret, don’t you see? Yes, it upsets people. But it’s done for good reason – to keep even more people safe.’

‘But—’

‘No buts, Olive,’ Mum said firmly. ‘That’s the harsh reality.’

‘You lied to us.’

‘I did it to protect you!’ she cried, sitting back in her seat. Reaching into her jacket pocket, she pulled out the postcard I’d sent her, white and tatty and covered in my big handwriting. ‘I suppose this was the truth, was it?’

‘It’s not the same,’ I said crossly.

Putting it back in her pocket, Mum reached across the table for my hand. ‘I knew you’d be homesick down here, darling. I knew you were heartbroken over Dad and upset about Sukie. But you wrote this stupidly happy message to protect me, didn’t you?’

I thought of the postcard, written yesterday, that I hadn’t sent, and sniffed. ‘Maybe. It’s still not the same, though.’

‘I know that.’ She rubbed my knuckles gently with her thumb. ‘But it might help you understand why I did it.’

I looked at her properly then, drinking in this person I thought I knew so well. Even the familiar bits – the chocolate brown eyes, the dark wavy hair – looked different somehow.

What surprised me most was the pride I had for my mum. These past months I’d seen her become a sad person who cried too much. Yet, even then, there were parts to her that were stronger than I’d ever imagined. Thinking over all she’d done, how Queenie and Ephraim and the others held her in such high regard, and how she’d inspired Sukie, I began to feel different too. The uneasiness that she wasn’t well was still there. Mixed in with it, though, was the belief that she’d recover. I supposed what I was feeling was hope.

*

What this meant was that Sukie was the person left behind in France. When Queenie heard about Mum she apologised for not believing me.

‘You were right about your sister. I should’ve listened,’ she said.

Mrs Henderson, though, went bananas, storming round to Miss Carter’s and blaming her to her face. Ephraim, typically, said nothing. He went to work as normal, spending long hours up in the control room, the only obvious differences being the radio was less busy and there were no sounds of knitting.

No one, including me, knew what we were going to do about Sukie.

*

The next morning Mum went to Plymouth to be with Cliff. She was planning on staying there till he was well enough to come home. Alone again, I had plenty of time to think, though the best medicine for it was to keep busy. At night, I’d read far later than usual, hoping that when I switched off my torch I’d fall asleep more easily: it didn’t often work. In the day, I delivered food from Ephraim’s cupboards to the refugees.

On such a morning, a few days after Mum had left, I ran into Esther in the street. She said she was going to school.

‘What, now?’ Our afternoon session went on long enough; I couldn’t imagine anyone choosing to spend a whole day in lessons.

‘Yes, now,’ Esther said, like I was being really slow. ‘Mr Barrowman’s giving a talk to the local kids about the refugees.’

‘I thought the plan was to keep things low-profile.’

‘Too late for that,’ Esther replied.

Actually, I was glad someone was addressing the issue. What had started out as a low-key mission had quickly become the talk of the village. There weren’t thirty-two refugees any more – Miss Zingari had already gone to catch a ship to New York, and a few of the others had taken trains to London. Yet the word soon got round that twenty or so people remained, which in a place as small as Budmouth Point was bound to stir things up.

And it had. Some of the locals had been nice. We’d had offers of clothes and food and spare beds. But plenty had been pretty hostile.

‘We don’t want their sort round here,’ I overheard a woman in the queue at the baker’s saying.

Her friend agreed. ‘They won’t eat our meat, so Mrs Drummond says. And they’ve got other funny ways you wouldn’t imagine!’

It even got to the point where some people were calling Miss Carter and Mrs Henderson names in the street and boycotting Queenie’s shop.

‘We’d better hurry, then,’ I said to Esther. ‘We don’t want to miss what Mr Barrowman’s got to say.’ Linking arms, we walked on up the street. I didn’t make a big thing of it, but it was the first time I’d properly felt like her friend.

*

The school sounded hushed, like it did when lessons were in full swing.

‘This way.’ I beckoned Esther to the side of the building.

She looked unimpressed. ‘Aren’t we just going in?’

‘We haven’t been invited,’ I reminded her.

The big window that had broken when the stray bomb fell still hadn’t been fixed. If we stood right underneath it we’d hear what was going on inside. Almost straight away I recognised Mr Barrowman’s voice with its London accent.

‘Refugees are people who’ve had to flee for their lives. They’re leaving their jobs, homes, families because of war. We should be welcoming them, not treating them like enemies.’

The class grumbled disagreeably.

Esther looked worried. ‘Oh dear. He’s laying it on a bit thick, isn’t he?’

‘He’s trying to help,’ I pointed out, thinking perhaps he was quite decent for a teacher after all.

‘But he’s stirring things up, not calming them down. My father and the others just need a few days to recover and they’ll be on their way again.’

‘Are you leaving as well?’ I wasn’t sure I liked the idea. ‘Can’t you all stay here in England?’

Esther shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The laws on asylum are so strict now, my father and the others are pretty sure they won’t get accepted that way.’

‘They’ve got identity papers.’

‘Fake ones, with English names and occupations, just to get them to the nearest port and on to another boat. It’s all very risky.’

The risk lay with Queenie too, then: she’d probably go to prison if she got caught forging papers. This bothered me as well.

Inside, Mr Barrowman was still talking.

‘… What the Nazis are doing is terrifying. All because being Jewish doesn’t fit with their ideals …’

‘My mum says them new people are Germans,’ a boy interrupted, ‘and you expect us to look after them.’

‘They’re from Austria,’ Mr Barrowman corrected him calmly. ‘A country invaded by Hitler.’

‘Why should we help the Jews?’ said someone else. ‘What’ve they ever done for us?’

As the class went quiet, Mr Barrowman tried again: ‘Put it another way, how would you feel if your life was at risk just because you were from Devon?’

‘He can’t help that, sir. He was born here,’ someone quipped. The group erupted into laughter.

‘That’s exactly my point. Would you stay here and die, or would you leave?’

The boy didn’t respond.

‘How would you feel about being spat at in the street? Or seeing your parents arrested though they’d done nothing wrong?’

I glanced nervously at Esther. Her face was tight with emotion. Perhaps listening in hadn’t been such a great idea.

‘This is why we’re at war with Hitler. We don’t hate the German people, we hate fascism. Wouldn’t it be a way of letting Hitler win if we all started behaving as he does?’

It made perfect sense to me. I was expecting the class to think so too but what followed was an uncomfortable silence. A few coughs. Someone muttered about his ruler being taken. Another boy said he didn’t have it.

‘Yes you have, Clutterbuck. I saw you nick it.’

‘Go chase yourself,’ the boy snarled.

The class’s usual teacher, Mrs Simmons, clapped for quiet. It was too late. By then Mr Barrowman’s moment was lost.

Esther didn’t stay to hear any more. I went after her and found her sitting on the school wall, angry tears in her eyes.

‘I came to England to try to forget what happened.’ Esther wiped her face clumsily with her coat sleeve. ‘But I can’t escape it. Seeing Papa again, it’s brought it all back to me.’

‘Here.’ Giving her my rather grubby hankie, I hopped up to sit beside her.

She took it and blew her nose. ‘I know Mr Barrowman means well and I’m grateful. But …’ She paused. ‘It’s my story, you know? I should be the one telling it.’

We sat staring out over the village to the grey-green sea, and the lighthouse, painted dull as a chimney pot.

‘You can tell me if you like,’ I said quietly.

I honestly didn’t expect her to. And she didn’t say anything for such a long time, when she did speak it surprised me.

‘I can’t remember a specific time when the comments and the name-calling started, but one evening in November it all got much worse,’ she said. ‘My brother Tobias and me were doing our homework at the dining-room table like we always did.’

‘You’ve got a brother?’

She hesitated before nodding. ‘Papa was working late at the clinic in a friend’s back room – it was against the law for Jews to work as doctors. Mama was making supper in the kitchen, and I remember her cursing because she’d just burned her hand on the griddle. Tobias and me couldn’t stop laughing because Mama never swore.’ The memory of it made her mouth twitch in an almost-smile.

‘Then someone banged on our front door. It was late – too late for social calling. Mama told us not to answer it. Everyone knew someone who’d had a knock at the door like that.’

‘Who was it?’

‘The police, usually. Sometimes Hitler’s soldiers. It was never for a good reason, and it never ended happily. We all dreaded it happening to us. So, Mama turned the lights out and put her hand over the dog’s nose.’ Esther, glancing sideways at me, explained: ‘We had a sausage dog called Gerta who barked at everything.

‘The knocking went on and they started shouting through the letter box, saying they’d burn the house down if we didn’t answer the door. Mama told us to hide under the table and went to speak to them. They wanted Papa. They said he’d been treating non-Jewish patients at the clinic and it had to stop. Mama told them he wasn’t here but they didn’t believe her and came in anyway. There were four of them in Nazi uniform, stomping through our house in their filthy great boots. Finding us hiding under the table, they decided to take Tobias as a substitute for Papa. “When your husband hands himself in, we’ll release the boy,” was what they said.

‘It was cold outside – a freezing Austrian winter’s night – but they wouldn’t let Tobias fetch his coat. As soon as they laid hands on him, Mama started screaming. She let go of Gerta and grabbed Tobias – we both did – pulling on his arms, yelling that they couldn’t take him, that he’d done nothing wrong. Gerta was barking. I saw one of the men swing his boot at her. She went flying across the room, hitting the mantelpiece. It was awful. She didn’t bark after that.’

It took a moment for the horror of what she was saying to sink in.

‘Don’t tell me any more if you don’t want to,’ I said gently.

She stared straight ahead like she hadn’t heard me. ‘They took my brother anyway. He was ten years old.

‘We ran into the street after them, and it was chaos – like the end of the world or something. The whole town was full of Nazi uniforms. There were broken windows, burning houses, people sobbing in the gutter. The synagogue at the end of our street was on fire. I was terrified. So terrified I couldn’t move. But Mum kept running. Shouting and yelling and running after my brother. I didn’t see what happened but I heard the gunshot.’

She stopped. Rubbed her face in her hands. ‘Afterwards they gave it a very pretty name: Kristallnacht – meaning “the night of broken glass”. But it was the night I lost my mother and my brother. I was sent away soon after as part of the Kindertransport, though Papa never got used to losing us all at once. Nor did I. That’s why he came to find me. He always promised he’d try.’

Anything I might’ve said stayed stuck in my throat. There weren’t words for it, not really. So I put my arm through Esther’s and we sat, gazing out to sea, two old enemies who were, at last, friends. She was right – it was her story to tell. And I could think of plenty who might benefit from hearing it.