There were footsteps then, pounding footsteps. Pa was pelting across the garden, and he had picked me up and flung me over his shoulder before I knew what was happening. He ran back to the cottage with Mags at his side, and I went bump, bump, bump, dangling upside down and watching the jolting colours of the sky behind us. ‘All right, Pet?’ Pa called. My family often called me Pet – a silly, shortened version of my name, Petra. ‘Pet’ was affectionate, I knew, but it always made me feel small – like a toy dog on a lead, or a mouse in a cage. I felt pathetic as I hung there, bouncing around like a sack of potatoes on my father’s back.
The engines buzzed louder and louder in the sky above, until it felt as if the whole world were burning with noise. Mutti was waiting for us at the door of the cottage. From upside down, she looked quite normal, but when I was turned the right way up, I could see how scared she was. Pa was calmer; his face was like a slab of stone. ‘It’s the first,’ he said. ‘It’s just the first, and it probably won’t be the last. Reconnaissance, I expect,’ he said. That meant they were enemy planes coming over to gather information.
Pa said we had to go down to the coal cellar. We were to come here whenever we heard low-flying aeroplanes or caught the sound of the air-raid siren drifting up from Stonegate harbour below. Mags said that she thought most of the planes would probably be ours. By ‘ours’ she meant British planes.
‘Yes, they probably will,’ Pa said. ‘And we’ll learn to tell the difference. But for now, we won’t know which is which until it’s too late.’
That was the first time I really understood that the war had started and that we and our lighthouse were in danger. But I still felt safe. As we descended into the dusty dark of the coal cellar together, I felt so very, very safe.
Mutti tried to encourage me to curl up in an old armchair and go to sleep, but I wanted to poke about amongst the piles of bric-a-brac stacked up in the cobwebby corners. The smell of coal dust and mould was mysterious and exciting. I started clambering through a stack of broken furniture – I was an insect in a dusty jungle.
‘Be careful please, little Pet,’ Mutti said. ‘That furniture is very old – you will hurt yourself.’ I was twelve years old. I wondered just how old I would have to be before I stopped being Mutti’s ‘little Pet’.
I stopped climbing and stood quietly for a minute or so, writing my name in the dust that covered an old writing desk. Pet Smith, I wrote. Then I wrote my full name (including my middle name that comes from Mutti’s family): Petra Zimmermann Smith.
That is the name of someone extraordinary, I thought. An explorer. An adventurer, or a mountain climber. Someone who does wonderful and fearless things. I wasn’t brave enough to be an adventurer, though, I knew that. I wasn’t bold and fearless like Magda. What I really wanted was to be an artist. I sighed, and stared at my name. I had always felt it was several sizes too big for me. Was it a name I could grow into? I scribbled it out and wrote plain Pet Smith again. I was anonymous once more – small, mousey and unimportant.
I started looking through the desk drawers one at a time, to see if I could find any little bits of forgotten treasure. Apart from a few dead earwigs they all seemed to be empty. Everyone was quiet. Mags lay down on an old mattress with her book clasped to her chest. I watched her close her eyes tightly, but I knew she wasn’t asleep – her breathing was all wrong. Pa sat next to Mutti and took her hand. I saw my mother stealing glances at Mags every now and then – she’d been watching her like that since the fight earlier that week. After a while Mags opened her eyes and huffed impatiently, as if Mutti’s anxious looks were keeping her awake. She moved beneath the fanlight and opened Essential Motor Boat Maintenance, squinting at the pages as the last dregs of evening light faded into darkness. I caught the faintest trace of the air-raid siren in the wind, still wailing mournfully from the village below.
Pa was restless. He got up and lit a couple of oil lamps, and the yellow light illuminated something at the back of a desk drawer I had thought to be empty. I took it out and dusted it with my sleeve. It was a photograph in a frame – a formal photograph of a bride and groom on their wedding day. A vicar was standing beside them. I looked closely at the faces of the couple. She was a young woman with long, yellow-brown hair just like mine. She was wearing a simple dress with a pattern of leaves on it, and holding a bouquet of wild flowers. He was a gentle-looking man with sticking-out ears, wearing his only good suit.
It is Mutti and Pa. I’d know Pa’s ears anywhere . . .
I recognized one of the other figures – the old lady who stood beside the bride was Mrs Fisher from the village. She was dead now, but she used to do the flowers at the village church and was a cousin or aunt of Mutti’s (Mutti worked in her hotel when she first came over to England from Germany). Mrs Fisher was easy to recognize because she always wore a hat covered in large artificial sunflowers. A thin man stood beside her. He had fair hair, an angular face and a neat, pointed beard. He was holding a plate piled high with wedding cake.
I wanted to show the photograph to Mutti and Pa, but something told me not to. There were three things about the photograph that struck me as being very important and very strange:
1. It was Mutti and Pa’s wedding day, but there only seemed to be two guests.
2. No one in the photograph was smiling.
3. The photograph had been hidden away in the coal cellar.
I put it back and gently closed the desk drawer, leaving it where I had found it – amongst the rubbish and the dust and all the other forgotten things.