People said that if the invasion was coming at all, it would be very soon. I was a Daughter of Stone now – so, from up in the lantern room, from first light to twilight, I did what the Daughters of Stone do: I kept watch over our sky and sea. The weeks of summer went by and faded to autumn. There were flames in the sky nearly every day – flames and smoke and explosions and bullets like blazing rain and the furious battling of our planes against theirs. There were days when I watched from dawn, when the sea was still, misty and milky white, through the rolling blue of the morning, to the tufted waves and mackerel skies of midday. I watched the colours of the sea and the sky shifting together, like a beautiful dance of light. I saw all of this, and I thought about my poor lost Pa. I worried about my sister, drifting around the Castle and the clifftops as insubstantial as sea mist – as if the heart had been torn out of her. I thought about my Mutti far away from us, locked up in her internment camp. And I thought about the Rossis, and all the others who had been taken too.

A very sad thing happened to Mr Miller – the elderly German man who had been so kind and hopeful on the day of Mutti’s tribunal.

Despite being classed as Category C enemy aliens, he and his wife were eventually put in an internment camp anyway. Then Mr Miller was separated from his wife and was sent to Canada on a ship called the Arandora Star. The ship was sunk by a German U-boat and he drowned. Over eight hundred people drowned. I can’t say how many of those people were on the side of the Nazis – I expect some of them must have been, but everyone knew that Mr Miller was the sweetest, most harmless old man in the world, and there must have been others like him on the ship too: innocent people. The Millers had come to England for a new life because their home was not safe for them any more. ‘This is a good country,’ Mr Miller had said to my Mutti. ‘A free country. They will see the truth in you.’

Grandpa Joe just shook his head when we heard about the Arandora Star on the wireless. His blue eyes swam with tears.

Chapter 41

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