‘That big?’ Michael looked at her with a strangely serious expression on his face. ‘You know what it could have been, don’t you, Mags?’

‘What?’

His green eyes shone with boyish excitement. ‘A German U-boat.’

Chapter 7

7

Mags suggested that we tell the police, just in case that dark, sinister shape really had been a German U-boat, but Michael Baron said there was no point as they wouldn’t believe us. He tried to persuade her to take him out in the boat straight away so that he could see it, but I fixed my sister with such an ‘I’ll tell Pa’ look that she took me home instead.

I couldn’t decide what was more horrifying – the idea that I’d stepped on to the scaled skin of the Wyrm in my struggle to get out of the water, or that what I’d felt beneath my feet had been the top of an enemy submarine.

There were certainly rumours of U-boats in the Channel. Some of the fishermen came home with stories of having spotted them lurking beneath the water, but most people dismissed the sightings, just as fishermen’s tales of mermaids and sea serpents had been dismissed for thousands of years.

Could the enemy really be that close to our coast? Could they be watching us? Since those first reconnaissance planes on the day we finished painting the lighthouse, everything had been eerily quiet – no bombs or gas, none of the things we had been warned about – just air-raid drills and false alarms. Someone on the wireless had called it the ‘Twilight War’. Perhaps the promised darkness is never going to come, I had thought. Perhaps all the trouble is just going to fade quietly away . . . But now it seemed possible that the darkness was much, much closer than we’d thought. I didn’t know it at the time, but its shadowy fingers were already reaching into the very heart of my family.

A couple of months after the disastrous crabbing competition, a stubborn fog settled over Stonegate. Pa was under strict instructions not to light the lamp. He only lit it now when he received a telephone call, telling him that the light was needed for the safe passage of a particular British convoy. The foghorn was not sounded very often either – again, only when the telephone rang or Pa received a radio message. This was to make sure that we were not accidentally helping any enemy aeroplanes or vessels that might be near our coast.