At first the letter the women showed me seemed no different from others I’d seen coming from the island. As I read, the room became silent. The eyes of the three women were on me, and I felt as though I were undergoing some sort of test. I was not so good when it came to reading, writing or speaking English – but nor was Harry Krauss. No sentence was more than I could manage, no words were out of my range. I examined them – the vines and bees and butterflies, the trellises, hearts and flowers.

Then I saw it – a precise and elegant drawing of one of Chappy’s baskets. I looked up. Eyes were making holes in me. I reread the letter. The little basket illustrated the sentence: ‘A new Chap came Today.’ Peeping over the edge of the basket was a little pencilled star. That was how we learned that Chappy Star had been apprehended and detained on Somes Island.

We didn’t know the reason for Harry’s secrecy, but found out later that when Chappy was taken, he had identified himself under a Japanese name, not the one given when he was born, but the one his grandmother gave him when she took him to the basket-maker. He was determined that nothing he did or said would lead the authorities to his wife and children. Fearing recognition, he’d managed, by turning his face to stone when he saw Harry, to convey to him that he didn’t want to be exposed.

Oriwia had an idea what was in Chappy’s mind at the time. She said that when Harry and his sons had been taken away, Chappy had told her that they should hide Daphne and Binnie. He wanted to send them to stay with Dorothea. ‘I didn’t understand his fears, and I still don’t understand,’ Oriwia said. ‘Why would anyone want to take our daughters away, or hurt them?’

It was a relief to all of us to know that Chappy was safe and would be having the regular ‘good meals’ and ‘good bed’ which Harry told about in his letters, but Oriwia was worried that he would be deported.

‘They can’t do that while the war’s on,’ I told her. ‘Not while they think he could go home and take up arms against Britain and America.’

Oriwia was comforted by this. She told me to take the horse and said she was going home to write a letter to her husband, hoping there would be someone at the prison able to interpret it for him. I wasn’t sure that this was such a good idea, since Chappy was trying to keep his Star secret, and I didn’t think the letter would reach him in the first place. But, then again, he and Oriwia were husband and wife, which had to stand for something.

Chapter 14

Oriwia