‘Mmmm.’ I started to feel very sleepy. I listened to the gulls calling to each other as they wheeled over the waves. The sea air up on the cliffs was soft, sun-warmed and seaweedy – completely different from the cold-salt smell of the sea in winter. I thought dreamily that the people in Germany were breathing the same gentle air as us, and I wondered if there was a little German girl, lying in the grass somewhere, thinking about me. I stuck my hands up in the air and squinted at them, spreading my fingers out and examining the splashes of green paint on my skin.

Then I heard the engines.

A weird thing happens to me when I am frightened. I freeze. Like a startled rabbit. My whole body stiffens and I can’t move at all. People use the word ‘petrified’ to describe feeling afraid, but it really means much more than that – it means being so terrified that you cannot move a muscle; it means being turned to stone.

I lay there, rigid, breathing very quickly, while the noise of the aeroplane came closer and closer.

‘Pa!’ Mags shouted.

Everything darkened around me.

Chapter 3

3

There were footsteps then, pounding footsteps. Pa was pelting across the garden, and he had picked me up and flung me over his shoulder before I knew what was happening. He ran back to the cottage with Mags at his side, and I went bump, bump, bump, dangling upside down and watching the jolting colours of the sky behind us. ‘All right, Pet?’ Pa called. My family often called me Pet – a silly, shortened version of my name, Petra. ‘Pet’ was affectionate, I knew, but it always made me feel small – like a toy dog on a lead, or a mouse in a cage. I felt pathetic as I hung there, bouncing around like a sack of potatoes on my father’s back.

The engines buzzed louder and louder in the sky above, until it felt as if the whole world were burning with noise. Mutti was waiting for us at the door of the cottage. From upside down, she looked quite normal, but when I was turned the right way up, I could see how scared she was. Pa was calmer; his face was like a slab of stone. ‘It’s the first,’ he said. ‘It’s just the first, and it probably won’t be the last. Reconnaissance, I expect,’ he said. That meant they were enemy planes coming over to gather information.

Pa said we had to go down to the coal cellar. We were to come here whenever we heard low-flying aeroplanes or caught the sound of the air-raid siren drifting up from Stonegate harbour below. Mags said that she thought most of the planes would probably be ours. By ‘ours’ she meant British planes.