Iwas back home and in bed by the time Mags finally crept back into the cottage. It must have been very late.
‘Did you see the bomber come down?’ I whispered. I don’t know why I whispered – there was no one else in the cottage for us to disturb.
I had been lying there, sleepless in the dark, thoughts of the German pilot, Spooky Joe and the mysterious signal from the clifftops all swimming around in my head. Pa had been the spy that Pinstripe had been searching for – I knew that – but there must be someone else too: someone else had cut the telephone lines and burnt down the village hall, and someone was now flashing a light during the blackout signalling to the enemy . . .
‘Yes,’ Mags said. ‘We saw it come down.’
‘We? Where were you, Mags? Who were you with?’
But she didn’t say anything.
‘Mags?’
She changed into her pyjamas and climbed into bed. I heard the rustle of her sheet and blanket as she pulled them up over her shoulder and turned away from me.
What was wrong with her? After a few minutes of silence, I rolled in the opposite direction – towards the window – so that our backs were facing each other. Eventually I gave in to sleep, allowing the dark dreams to flood back into my exhausted brain.
The day after that, Mags was out of the house at dawn and didn’t come home until after supper time, and the same thing happened the next day too. I spent both days up in the lantern room, polishing the lamp, and recording the weather conditions and shipping movements in Pa’s logbook. I stared out to sea, hypnotized by the slow-twisting shape of the Wyrm beneath the waves, trying to work out what had happened to my sister. Something had shifted again – she was just as she’d been before Dunkirk, back in the early spring, when I’d felt I hardly knew her at all. I needed to talk to her about being evacuated – had she managed to speak to someone about it? Had she sorted it out somehow? We hadn’t heard anything from Mrs Baron for a couple of days now.
Perhaps that cold, lonely silence between us would have gone on for ever, if it hadn’t been for what happened to Mrs Rossi and her husband.
The police came for them and took them away.
They weren’t spies – they hadn’t done anything wrong at all – but their home country, Italy, had now joined the war – on Hitler’s side, not ours. With everyone in the country so angry and frightened and expecting an invasion at any minute, Mr Churchill had ordered the police to ‘Collar the lot!’ – anyone who could potentially be a supporter of the enemy; anyone born in the wrong country. It didn’t matter now if you were a Category B or C enemy alien – you were likely to be rounded up for the internment camps, and some people were being deported too.
Someone in the village had written a terrible word on the door of the Rossis’ bakery and had thrown stones through their window. I was there, trying to help Edie tidy up a bit, when the police came. It wasn’t Pinstripe, it was a grey-haired officer from Dover. He was very polite to Mr and Mrs Rossi, but he wasn’t interested in investigating the vandalism of their shop. It wasn’t the vandals he had come to arrest. He told the Rossis that they would be safer in an internment camp than in their own home. I saw the tears shining in Mrs Rossi’s brown eyes as she and her husband were led away, and I thought of her kindness to Mutti on the day Spooky Joe had called her ‘Jerry’: Difficult for all of us, my dear . . .
As soon as I got home, I told Mags what had happened, and I told her what I wanted to do. To my surprise, she agreed to help.
We went straight back down to the village with a bucket of soapy water, a scrubbing brush, some wood, a hammer and a bag of nails. Edie and I scrubbed the graffiti off the front door of the bakery, and Mags boarded up the broken windows. A few people watched us from the other side of the street, others pretended not to notice. One man spat on the pavement as he passed. We ignored them all.
It was a hot day – one of those un-British summer days when the pavement is like the bottom of an oven and the heavy air throbs with heat. The back of my neck got redder and redder in the sunshine, and the soapy water ran down my arms. It must have been low tide, because the whole village smelt of warm, rotting seaweed. I scrubbed and scrubbed, and scratched at the door with my fingernails. I was determined not to leave a trace of the vulgar painted letters behind. I was thinking about kind Mrs Rossi, and I was thinking about my Mutti too. I remembered the look that passed between Mrs Peacock and Mrs Baron when Mags insisted that we weren’t orphans – They might as well be orphans that look had said. If Pinstripe knew that Mutti had not committed any act of treachery, she was safe from being prosecuted, but how long would it be until she was released from the internment camp? With this new policy to lock up every enemy alien in the country, Mutti might not be allowed home until the end of the war. And when would that be? It could be years and years . . . I hardly noticed the tears that ran down my cheeks as I scrubbed at the ugly paint. The sun burnt away at my back.
Mal Bright, one of the fishermen, stopped and offered to help us. His son, Sam, had been killed in the evacuation of Dunkirk. He had been hit by machine-gun fire trying to help a soldier out of the water.
‘Thank you, Mr Bright,’ Mags said, as Mal held the plank of wood steady across the window frame. My sister hammered it into place, knocking nails into the corners.
‘I was wonderin’,’ Mal said. ‘It’s my boy’s funeral on Friday. Sam’s funeral.’
Mags stopped hammering. I stopped scrubbing at the paint.
‘I was wonderin’, because you won’t be able to have a funeral as such, if you two would like it to be a memorial for your dad too?’
Mags looked at me properly for the first time in days. I was suddenly aware of my sunburnt neck, my hot, tear-stained face. I nodded.
‘Yes,’ Mags said. ‘That’s kind of you, Mr Bright. I think we would like that very much.’