No school! A few months ago, I would have skipped all the way down the cliff path to the village, but I wasn’t that girl any more. I walked quickly and stiffly, my hand clamped around the handle of Mrs Rossi’s umbrella, and I recited Pa’s shopping list in my head. He had entrusted me with the ration book and had asked me to collect some fish, a newspaper and a few other groceries. It was an overcast day and the air was very cool and damp. Rain started to fall – gently at first and then more steadily. I couldn’t decide whether or not it would be wrong to actually use Mrs Rossi’s umbrella when I was in the process of returning it; handing it back to her all damp and dripping would be bad manners, wouldn’t it? But then, with a darkening of the sky above, the rain doubled into a downpour, and I concluded that Mrs Rossi wouldn’t mind at all.

The sea looked vast that day – as flat and grey as wet slate. It was calm in the way it often is in that sort of rain – patted down by the raindrops, flattened by the weight of clouds above. I heard the sound of an engine droning high in the sky above. One of ours, I said to myself, though I couldn’t see the shape of the plane. It’s probably one of ours.

I had become so used to the sounds of aircraft roaring back and forth above the Castle that it was difficult to remember a time when the cliffs were truly peaceful. I tried to keep the old cliffs in my heart, and I had Mutti’s drawings and paintings to remind me of what it all used to look like before the bunkers and barbed wire. But that peaceful, safe, serene feeling was really hard to summon up now that the war was everywhere. Everything was different.

It was like being freezing cold – so cold your whole body is shivering and your teeth are chattering. When you’re that cold, it is hard to imagine ever being too warm. Or like being so achingly hungry that you can’t remember what it feels like to eat too much; such a sensation is impossible, surely? Well, that’s what war does – it makes everything so different, so extreme, that you forget what life was like before. That first pang of hunger – the first hammering of the guns – comes as a shock. But then it all becomes normal.

Chapter 20

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