Mags and Pa stood near the fence at the bottom of the garden, talking quietly – or rather, Pa was talking quietly and Mags was just staring at the ground with her arms folded across her chest. She kicked at the grass with the toe of one shoe. After a while I heard her say, ‘You didn’t hear them, Pa. You didn’t hear what they said about Mutti.’

There’s something I should mention about my family and, specifically, about Mutti – why we call her Mutti and not Mum or Mother. Mutti was born in Germany and grew up there. German is her first language, and she’s taught it to us too. Mutter is German for ‘mother’. The fact that our Mutti had been born in Germany was never important to us – it was just normal, as normal to us as living in a lighthouse – but now that the war had started, other people seemed to think it was very important indeed.

Mutti called us all in to dinner, and we sat around the kitchen table in silence. Mags touched the corner of her lip and inspected her finger to see if it was still bleeding. It wasn’t like a normal dinner time. There was something else at the table with us – something tense and waiting, like a gun that had been cocked but not yet fired – the fizzing gunpowder trail of the conversation Pa and Mags had started but not finished.

My sister had a library book in her lap – Essential Motor Boat Maintenance – but her eyes didn’t seem to be focusing on the pages as she turned them over.

Pa moved his chair closer to Mags and leant towards her a little. She pretended to be interested in a diagram of a propeller. Mutti and I pretended to be interested in our dinner. Mags frowned down at her book, refusing to look at Pa.

‘You’re too old for playground scraps, Magda,’ he said. ‘You’re nearly sixteen now.’ Then he sighed, and when he spoke again his voice was softer. ‘Try to let it go, Mags,’ he said. ‘Next time they start saying things like that, just try to let it go.’

Mags said nothing.

‘You have a choice,’ he went on. ‘You don’t have to react.’

‘You’re right, Pa,’ Mags said at last, closing her book and turning to look him dead in the eye. ‘I have a choice.’

And the conversation was over.

After dinner, Mags shut herself in our bedroom. She wanted to be by herself, so I took my sketchbook up to the lantern room. Perhaps I’ll draw the sunset, I thought. There were some wonderfully dramatic clouds that evening – dark and jagged against the red sky.