Sometimes, I felt I barely knew my sister any more. Despite food rationing, she was shooting up and suddenly seemed about a foot taller than me. She had started to pin her hair up on her head, using the curls to conceal her sticking-out ears. Then, one day, she announced that she was dropping out of school.

‘It just feels ridiculous,’ she said to Pa, ‘copying out of dusty old history books when history is happening all around me right now and I could be doing something practical to help.’

‘You’re still too young for the Wrens, Magda,’ Pa replied.

‘But I could volunteer. I could volunteer on the lifeboat until I’m old enough for the Navy.’

Mutti looked at Pa as if she were trying to tell him something with her eyes. Her expression was grim, but she didn’t say anything.

Pa sighed. ‘I’ll talk to the boys at the lifeboat station tomorrow.’

Mags looked delighted. ‘We’ll go together?’

‘We’ll go together.’

I remember that next day very well. Mags was up earlier than usual, and washed and dressed before any of the rest of us. By eight o’clock she was waiting for Pa in the kitchen.

And at nine o’clock she was still waiting.

At half past nine she gave up. ‘Where is he?’ she said to no one in particular.

‘I don’t know, darling,’ Mutti tried to soothe her. ‘He went out for a walk early this morning – perhaps he got held up somewhere, or stopped off at the farm or the village . . .’

‘Or perhaps he just forgot,’ Mags interrupted. And she went straight to our bedroom and slammed the door.

At almost exactly the same moment, the kitchen door flew open and Pa appeared, holding what looked like a box of goodies from the grocers.

‘Who wants a breakfast picnic?’ he said, a broad smile plastered across his face.

He might as well have said we were off to have tea with a mermaid. ‘A breakfast picnic? There’s no such thing, is there?’

‘There is now,’ smiled Pa. ‘We’ve got fresh bread and butter, scotch eggs, sausage rolls straight from the oven, oranges, and I’m going to make us a big flask of hot cocoa too.’

I gasped. Pa must have decimated the ration book.

‘My darling, what’s the special occasion?’ Mutti asked, standing up and giving him a big kiss on the cheek.

‘Do we need a special occasion?’

Mutti smiled and kissed him again. It was like the sun coming out after weeks of rain – I had forgotten what their faces looked like when they were lit up like that. For months now they had both been so pale and pinched with worry.