Someone in the village had written a terrible word on the door of the Rossis’ bakery and had thrown stones through their window. I was there, trying to help Edie tidy up a bit, when the police came. It wasn’t Pinstripe, it was a grey-haired officer from Dover. He was very polite to Mr and Mrs Rossi, but he wasn’t interested in investigating the vandalism of their shop. It wasn’t the vandals he had come to arrest. He told the Rossis that they would be safer in an internment camp than in their own home. I saw the tears shining in Mrs Rossi’s brown eyes as she and her husband were led away, and I thought of her kindness to Mutti on the day Spooky Joe had called her ‘Jerry’: Difficult for all of us, my dear . . .

As soon as I got home, I told Mags what had happened, and I told her what I wanted to do. To my surprise, she agreed to help.

We went straight back down to the village with a bucket of soapy water, a scrubbing brush, some wood, a hammer and a bag of nails. Edie and I scrubbed the graffiti off the front door of the bakery, and Mags boarded up the broken windows. A few people watched us from the other side of the street, others pretended not to notice. One man spat on the pavement as he passed. We ignored them all.

It was a hot day – one of those un-British summer days when the pavement is like the bottom of an oven and the heavy air throbs with heat. The back of my neck got redder and redder in the sunshine, and the soapy water ran down my arms. It must have been low tide, because the whole village smelt of warm, rotting seaweed. I scrubbed and scrubbed, and scratched at the door with my fingernails. I was determined not to leave a trace of the vulgar painted letters behind. I was thinking about kind Mrs Rossi, and I was thinking about my Mutti too. I remembered the look that passed between Mrs Peacock and Mrs Baron when Mags insisted that we weren’t orphans – They might as well be orphans that look had said. If Pinstripe knew that Mutti had not committed any act of treachery, she was safe from being prosecuted, but how long would it be until she was released from the internment camp? With this new policy to lock up every enemy alien in the country, Mutti might not be allowed home until the end of the war. And when would that be? It could be years and years . . . I hardly noticed the tears that ran down my cheeks as I scrubbed at the ugly paint. The sun burnt away at my back.