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Back The Enigma Game Save as PDF
Chapters (82)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Part 1
  4. Flight Lieutenant James G. Beaufort-Stuart:
  5. Louisa Adair:
  6. Volunteer Ellen McEwen:
  7. Jamie:
  8. Louisa:
  9. Ellen:
  10. Jamie:
  11. Louisa:
  12. Ellen:
  13. Louisa:
  14. Ellen:
  15. Ellen:
  16. Jamie:
  17. Part 2
  18. Ellen:
  19. Louisa:
  20. Jamie:
  21. Ellen:
  22. Jamie:
  23. Louisa:
  24. Jamie:
  25. Ellen:
  26. Louisa:
  27. Ellen:
  28. Louisa:
  29. Jamie:
  30. Louisa:
  31. Ellen:
  32. Jamie:
  33. Louisa:
  34. Jamie:
  35. Louisa:
  36. Part 3
  37. Jamie:
  38. Louisa:
  39. Jamie:
  40. Ellen:
  41. Jamie:
  42. Louisa:
  43. Jamie:
  44. Ellen:
  45. Jamie:
  46. Louisa:
  47. Jamie:
  48. Louisa:
  49. Ellen:
  50. Jamie:
  51. Ellen:
  52. Louisa:
  53. Ellen:
  54. Jamie:
  55. Part 4
  56. Louisa:
  57. Jamie:
  58. Louisa:
  59. Jamie:
  60. Ellen:
  61. Louisa:
  62. Ellen:
  63. Louisa:
  64. Jamie:
  65. Ellen:
  66. Louisa:
  67. Ellen:
  68. Louisa:
  69. Ellen:
  70. Louisa:
  71. Ellen:
  72. Louisa:
  73. Jamie:
  74. Louisa:
  75. Jamie:
  76. Discover More
  77. Author’s Declaration of Accountability
  78. Further reading:
  79. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
  80. About the Author
  81. ALSO BY ELIZABETH WEIN
  82. PRAISE FOR

Daddy said I lost my Jamaican accent in one year. One year at the rather posh London school where my mother taught music, and I had a polite accent I’d picked up from my schoolteachers. I didn’t even know it was happening. There wasn’t any other obvious way to blend in, with my light brown skin and springing dark brown hair, tamed into plaits by Mummy and then into tight rolls by me when I got older. “Me boonoonoonoos country gal is turning into a little English lady,” Daddy teased. But it stopped the other girls from teasing.

In November 1940, my polite English accent came in useful.

I was fifteen years old and both my parents were killed in a single month by German explosives, Mummy in an air raid and Daddy in a sea battle, thousands of miles apart. My school closed because of the Blitz even before Mummy was killed, but I was old enough I didn’t need to stay in school anyway. Now I was stuck by myself in Mummy’s rented attic room surrounded by falling bombs. Our elderly landladies looked in on me and made sure I didn’t starve, but all I did in the first shocked, horrible weeks after Mummy’s death was bury my nose in books whose orphaned heroines got happy endings.

I reread A Little Princess, Jane Eyre, and Anne of Green Gables, but my literary friends began to feel disappointing. They didn’t have to cope with air raids. Nobody was rude to them for being foreign. Sara Crewe was born in India and spoke Hindustani, but she still looked English. When people shooed her away it wasn’t because she was brown.

I had a bit more money than Sara Crewe or Jane Eyre or Anne Shirley, that was true. There was twenty-five pounds in Mummy’s post office account. But it wouldn’t last forever. I had to have something to do when it ran out, or I would end up living in an air-raid shelter on an Underground platform. The only person I could go to was Granny Adair, Daddy’s mother in Jamaica, and how was I going to get back to Jamaica, past the U-boats and destroyers? The City of Benares, full of evacuated children, was torpedoed by a German submarine in September!