What happened next – almost next – I can only describe as miraculous. Esther Wirth had an idea that didn’t involve her big mouth or her fists. Instead, it called for sewing. I confess I was so taken aback I had to ask her to repeat it when she told me.
‘What you said about telling my story,’ she said. ‘It’s got me thinking.’
We were at the lighthouse, having tea. When I’d invited her, Esther had shrugged and said, ‘Why not?’ quite casually. Yet once she saw the lighthouse ladder we had to climb and the lovely rooms inside, her whole face lit up into the hugest of smiles. She was a dab hand at making toast too. We ate a big pile of it topped with Ephraim’s crab-apple jam, and made Pixie beg for the crusts. It was the nicest tea I’d had in ages.
‘We’ll ask if we can borrow the refugees’ coats tomorrow,’ Esther explained, wiping crumbs from her mouth.
‘What for?’
‘You’ve seen the badges?’ She meant the yellow stars with Jude on them, which meant ‘Jew’ in German. ‘They left in such a hurry, some people didn’t get the chance to remove them. It’s time they came off. And I’ve an idea who’s going to do it.’
*
The next morning being a school day meant we’d find the local kids in class. Bright and early, we visited all the refugees, rounding up more coats than we could sensibly carry. By the time we reached school, my arms were ready to drop off, but we kept going until we arrived at the classroom door.
‘What now?’ I asked Esther, since neither of us had a free hand to knock.
Esther did that one thing Mum said girls should never do: she winked. Then pushing down with her elbow on the handle, she managed to open the door.
Mrs Simmons, the teacher, shrieked in surprise. ‘Good gracious!’
It must’ve been a bit of a shock, to be fair. We were little more than two enormous piles of coats, with legs sticking out the bottom. Unable to hold on to mine any more, I placed them as gently as I could on the floor. Straightening up again, I got my first full view of the class: twenty Budmouth Point kids staring right back at us. My mouth turned dry. Without really meaning to, I edged nearer to the door. Esther had no such qualms. Only this time, instead of squaring up to the local children, she laid out her father’s coat on the front desk.
‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing,’ Mrs Simmons said shrilly. ‘But you’re not doing it in my classroom.’
Taking Esther’s arm, she tried steering her towards the exit. Esther dug her heels in, and I blocked the way. Thinking it all good entertainment, the Budmouth kids started slow clapping and cheering. Already, we were more interesting than their geometry lesson, and we hadn’t yet said a word.
At the second attempt, Esther managed to display the coat properly, holding it by the shoulders so everyone got a good view of the yellow star.
‘I’m going to fetch the headmaster,’ Mrs Simmons spluttered, but didn’t leave the room.
Bit by bit, the noise died away. The pupils began to look quite intrigued. Some sat forward, chins in hands. You could see the mockery still lingering in their faces like they were waiting for something to make fun of. But as Esther explained the yellow stars and what they meant, their expressions changed.
It was like watching newspaper catch light when you made a fire. Once it took hold, the flames began to spread and glow. At last, the class were starting to understand. This was someone their age, who they sort of knew, explaining what prejudice felt like from the other side. That horrible sense that if people were your enemy it meant they didn’t feel, didn’t breathe, didn’t think like you did. Really, they were hardly proper people at all. So it was all right to drop bombs and destroy people’s lives, or treat them no better than animals.
Except it wasn’t.
The mood grew ever more sombre. By the time Esther finished talking, a few pupils were wiping their eyes. The rest of the class looked stunned.
‘Thank you for listening,’ Esther said, her chin held high. I was close enough to see the tiniest tremble in her bottom lip. And it made me think her even more magnificent.
It was Mrs Simmons who moved first, opening a cupboard at the side of the room and bringing out half a dozen sewing tins.
‘Right, class,’ she said, all shrill again. ‘Take a coat each from the piles. Unpick the stars carefully – no snagging of fabric, please – these are people’s best coats, remember.’
Within moments, the room was noisy again, only this time with the buzz of activity. Each pupil had a coat spread in front of them on their desk. Some people got straight on with the task. Others took a moment to look at the garment, as if it was a person they were meeting for the first time. One boy, I noticed, lifted a sleeve to his nose and sniffed it. Another fastened the buttons and tidied the lapels.
Of the two coats left, I took one over to a spare desk and sat down. This coat was knee-length with a belt at the waist. It smelled of face powder and the sea. Made of grey wool with tiny red flecks in it, its buttons were shaped like budding roses, and I’d a feeling I’d seen Frau Berliner wearing it. With a few snips the star came off. After I’d smoothed away any trace of stitch marks on the fabric, it was, once again, just a coat. A lovely, elegant coat. All it told the world about Frau Berliner was that she had excellent taste.
It didn’t take long to remove all the stars.
‘What do we do with them now?’ a boy at the front asked.
Mrs Simmons gestured to the coal stove that burned in a corner of the classroom. But Esther shook her head: ‘Can everyone put their star into the pocket of the coat they removed it from, please?’
Mrs Simmons looked confused. ‘Can’t we throw them away?’
‘They’re not yours to get rid of,’ Esther replied firmly. ‘What happens to each of those stars now is entirely up to the person who had to wear it.’
She was right: those stars were other people’s stories, not ours.
Then we had the task of delivering a huge heap of coats back to their owners. Returning them was much easier, mind you, because the whole class came with us to help.
*
It didn’t change everything, not straight away. Twenty pupils unpicking yellow stars was just the beginning. Yet on my way home from school that afternoon Mrs Moore came out of her bakery to speak to me.
‘I’ve been hearing all about you,’ she said rather mysteriously. ‘You and your friend were very brave, taking on the class like that. Bravo to you both.’
At school the next day, I told Esther. It was breaktime and we were sharing the jam sandwiches Ephraim insisted on putting in my satchel.
‘Has anyone started speaking to you in the street?’ I asked.
‘The street?’ She laughed, almost choking on her sandwich so I had to thump her on the back. ‘They’ve been queuing up to meet Papa. Everyone’s heard how he saved Cliff’s life and now people are coming from the next village. Someone this morning even brought him their cat!’
I looked at her in amazement, especially when she told me the cat’s owner was Mrs Wilcox the farmer.
‘We need another idea now,’ I said eagerly. ‘Removing the stars made people think, but—’
‘– we have to build on it. Bring people together,’ Esther finished for me.
‘Well, we bonded over jam sandwiches,’ I said, holding up the empty paper wrapper.
Esther grinned. And just like that she had another brilliant plan, though I like to think Ephraim’s sandwiches helped.
*
Esther’s idea was to hold a tea party. So, working together at Queenie’s kitchen table, we designed invitations on whatever scraps of card we could find. These we then delivered to all the villagers and the refugees, also asking them to bring cake or sandwiches to share. The party was to take place that Sunday afternoon. By chance it fell on the same day Cliff was due to leave hospital, which was brilliant because I knew he’d not want to miss it for the world.
All morning we set up tables in the village hall, with some of the Budmouth kids coming to help – boys called John, Clive and Arthur, and two girls, Gillian and Pamela. They’d brought snowdrops and early primroses, which we put in jugs, and white cloths that made the tables look smart. Meanwhile, Mrs Henderson and Miss Carter hung up a huge banner on the wall, which said, ‘Welcome to Budmouth Point’.
I kept listening out for the Plymouth bus until Mrs Henderson said it didn’t come until three thirty. Though I couldn’t wait to see Mum and Cliff, I also knew that being together would make us notice who was missing. There was still no news on Sukie – not even a sighting. Maybe I was being over-sensitive, but Miss Carter’s cheerful reassurances were starting to sound rather strained.
At three o’clock the guests began arriving. I shook hands with Jim the cabbage man and Mr Barrowman as they came in. I said ‘hullo’ to people whose names I still didn’t know; had a quick cuddle with baby Reuben, whose mum had brought him along; thanked everyone who’d come with plates of food, which I took and put on the white-clothed tables. In fact, I smiled so much it made my face ache.
As more of the refugees arrived, the Budmouth kids started whispering with interest. Pamela said to Gillian, ‘That’s the coat I unpicked,’ and nodded at Mr Schoenman.
‘That’s mine,’ Gillian replied. She was pointing at Fräulein Weber. Giggling shyly, she went over to say hullo.
Esther was busy showing people where to hang their things.
‘You all right?’ I asked as we passed each other.
She puffed out her cheeks. ‘It’s hard work being nice, isn’t it?’ Yet you could see she was loving every minute.
Even in our wildest dreams we hadn’t expected so many to come. There had to be over a hundred people from Budmouth Point alone, and though the Austrians hovered a little tentatively around the edges still, Dr Wirth couldn’t move for adoration.
I wouldn’t have put it past Ephraim not to come at all. So I was awfully glad when he arrived. He’d made quite an effort too, wearing a smart grey suit and carrying a tin of homemade carrot fudge. He’d even tied a red ribbon round Pixie’s neck. It crossed my mind he was hoping, on this big occasion, that Sukie might miraculously appear, like people did in stories and at the end of films. Or maybe that was wishful thinking on my part.
I was about to tell him how nice he looked when Pixie’s barked. In a scrabble of paws, she shot off across the room to greet someone she knew who was coming in the door. The person was wearing short trousers that didn’t cover his scabby knees, and my heart leaped because it was Cliff.
I rushed over at once to give him a hug, though it was hard to with Pixie squirming at his feet.
‘Careful!’ Cliff winced. ‘Mind my stitches!’
‘Hullo, darling.’ Mum kissed me. ‘He’s tired, so we won’t stay long.’
‘I am here, you know,’ Cliff remarked, grinning cheekily. He looked a million times better than when I’d last seen him but was still very thin in the face. Once we’d got him comfortable in a chair, with Pixie at his feet, Mum went in search of tea.
‘Want to see my scar?’ Cliff asked, the minute she was gone.
I nodded eagerly.
Without a flicker of embarrassment, he untucked his shirt to show me the four-inch purple scar between his right hip and belly button, criss-crossed with thread where the stitches were still in.
‘Cor!’ I gasped. ‘That’s the wasp’s ankles!’
‘Isn’t it?’ Cliff looked extremely chuffed. Unfortunately, the hospital hadn’t let him bring home his appendix in a pot, so he said, but it was all right because he could make his scar pull faces. ‘Watch this, look!’
We were still laughing when Mum returned with two cups of tea. ‘Olive, love, Mrs Henderson’s asking if you’ll pop down the road and fetch Queenie. She seems to have forgotten what the time is.’
‘Her clocks are stopped, that’s why,’ Cliff explained. ‘And all at the same time.’
‘Still?’ I asked. ‘Last I heard Dr Wirth was trying to fix them. Maybe she doesn’t want them working again.’
Mum looked surprised. ‘Why ever not?’ Then, as if the answer had come to her, her face paled. ‘Oh. Oh dear. The poor thing.’
‘It’s all right,’ Cliff replied. ‘They’re not very nice clocks.’
Somehow, I didn’t think that was what Mum meant.