It was just a few days after Magda’s fight that Pa received a very strange order from the government. We had to paint the Castle green.
We all painted it together. Pots of green paint shot up and down on pulleys and I was allowed to use the stepladder to paint the downstairs windowsills. It was much better than whitewashing, because if we splashed paint on the grass, it didn’t matter so much – you could hardly see it. Mags painted the very top of the lighthouse – the round roof. She scaled the highest part of the tower with a rope, just like a mountain climber, her paintbrush tucked in a back pocket. It took the four of us three whole days to paint it, and the closer it was to being finished, the more peculiar it looked. I couldn’t get used to the greeny-brown paint at all – it just looked completely the wrong colour for a lighthouse.
‘It’s camouflage,’ Pa said. ‘To make us harder to spot from the air. We don’t want the lighthouse to be bombed, do we?’
No.We didn’t.
There has been a lighthouse above Stonegate for centuries – to warn ships of the dangerous sandbank in the sea beyond the cliffs, and to guide them safely past the Wyrm to the harbour below. Its light has come from all sorts of different things, from oil lamps to braziers and coal fires. It hasn’t always looked the same, of course, but I was pretty sure that it had never been painted green before. The lighthouse has been destroyed many times. It has been hit by hurricanes, struck by lightning and burnt down by fire, but it has always risen again – a phoenix from the storm-blown flames.
I love our lighthouse, and I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, but I know that other people often find it odd. They might imagine, perhaps, that all the furniture has to be round in order to fit inside, or that we sleep in hammocks hung from the spiral staircase, and spend our days climbing ladders and polishing glass. Actually, there is a fair bit of glass-polishing that has to be done, but we have never slept in hammocks: we sleep in normal beds in the cottage at the foot of the lighthouse. The cottage is just like any other cottage really, like any other home. And we are just like any other family. At least, we were just like any other family, before the war began. Now, if I think back to that sunny autumn day when we finished painting the lighthouse, I can see that the tide had already begun to turn.
It was beautifully warm for September, and Mags and I lay next to each other in the long grass between the standing stones.
‘Looks odd, doesn’t it?’ Mags said. ‘Now that it’s green.’
‘It looks weird,’ I agreed.
I loved our strong, white tower – brilliant and proud against a clear blue sky. It looked so different now that it was the same sort of earthy colour as the fields that surrounded us. It looked as if it had sprouted up from the ground itself.
‘It looks like a goblin castle,’ I said.
Mags laughed. ‘Or an ogre’s folly.’
‘Or a troll’s tower.’
My sister plucked a daisy and threw it at my face. I laughed too and closed my eyes. My muscles were achy from painting, and the grass was warm and dry and pleasantly scratchy beneath me.
‘It makes sense, though, doesn’t it?’ Mags said in a more serious voice. ‘Hitler’s bombers won’t be able to spot us as easily now. Pa said there is a risk that landmarks like lighthouses could be used by German planes for navigation.’
‘Mmmm.’ I started to feel very sleepy. I listened to the gulls calling to each other as they wheeled over the waves. The sea air up on the cliffs was soft, sun-warmed and seaweedy – completely different from the cold-salt smell of the sea in winter. I thought dreamily that the people in Germany were breathing the same gentle air as us, and I wondered if there was a little German girl, lying in the grass somewhere, thinking about me. I stuck my hands up in the air and squinted at them, spreading my fingers out and examining the splashes of green paint on my skin.
Then I heard the engines.
A weird thing happens to me when I am frightened. I freeze. Like a startled rabbit. My whole body stiffens and I can’t move at all. People use the word ‘petrified’ to describe feeling afraid, but it really means much more than that – it means being so terrified that you cannot move a muscle; it means being turned to stone.
I lay there, rigid, breathing very quickly, while the noise of the aeroplane came closer and closer.
‘Pa!’ Mags shouted.
Everything darkened around me.