Our Castle by the Sea

by Lucy Strange

  She didn’t reply. I heard the kitchen door slam shut.

  I sat there on my own for a while, staring out over the dark sea, trying to think of something that might convince Mrs. Baron to let us stay, but my brain felt blunt and tired, and all I could think about was Pa and Mutti.

  Everything was very, very still and quiet, so when the wail of the Stonegate air raid siren came drifting up over the cliffs, I was confused. I scanned the bruised horizon with Pa’s telescope.

  Nothing.

  It must be a false alarm.

  I moved all around the lighthouse, checking each section of the coast with the telescope. The last rays of sunlight were disappearing in the west now, and the sky was a murky purple color. There were no lights to be seen at all inland—it was after the blackout after all, and as far as most people were concerned, we were having an air raid …

  But then there was a light—or at least I thought there was. Something seemed to flash on the farmland to the northwest of the lighthouse. Then it had gone again, and the gloom surged back like squid ink. Had I imagined the light? I searched with the telescope again but could see nothing at all.

  Then there was a sound. A low, familiar drone. I turned back towards the sea.

  It was just a thin, dark shape at that point—barely visible in the heathery twilight—it could have been a gull or a goose, but it wasn’t. I knew exactly what it was.

  A bomber.

  My breathing quickened. My fingertips started to tingle.

  Just a second later, the heavens split apart, and a fighter plane ripped through the sky above me, heading straight for the German bomber. I gasped at the noise—it was as if it were only inches above my head.

  “Spitfire,” I murmured, transfixed.

  I knew I should have gone straight down to the cellar, but I couldn’t move.

  The last of the light drained from the sky as the planes met over the bay. The Spitfire wheeled around the bomber like a mobbing magpie, and the sky rattled with guns. Three dark shapes dropped, one after another from the bomber, thumping heavily into Dragon Bay—two into the sea and one into the beach itself—and then the plane started streaming smoke.

  There was another plane now—from nowhere, a German fighter bearing down on the Spitfire, its guns blazing. Even in the gloom of nightfall, I could see that the front part of the enemy plane was painted a startlingly bright yellow, like the beak of a bird of prey. The Spitfire dived sharply and headed out over the sea, drawing the German fighter away from our coast.

  Smoke was still pouring from the injured bomber. It banked around and around and then, like a huge white rose opening, I saw a parachute bloom in the air. The bomber plunged steeply into the sea with a tremendous white crash of water.

  A tiny figure hung beneath the parachute, helpless. I held my breath.

  There was a very odd moment of calm. The moon was visible—large and low—and its pale light made the parachute into a ghost. The seconds were slower, the skies were silent, and the parachute floated down through the smoke, towards the silver sea.

  What’s that? I put the telescope to my eye again quickly.

  In the shallows, just off the south beach, I saw the shape of a rowing boat, and two oars dipping and rising, dimpling the dark water.

  Someone else must have seen the dogfight too. Someone else must have watched the bomber go down and the slow drift of the ghostly parachute. Whoever it was must have been going out to rescue the Luftwaffe pilot.

  I squinted hard through the telescope, I adjusted the focus.

  Then I stopped breathing.

  It was too dark to see the name King Edward on the prow of the little boat, but I didn’t need to. I knew the shape of its hull, the pattern of its painted stripes.

  But it wasn’t the boat itself that had made my lungs tighten so painfully, it was the tall, square-shouldered silhouette that was rowing it out to sea.

  Pa?

  I don’t know how I did it, but I did. My limbs prickled with pins and needles and my breathing was dangerously fast and gasping, but I managed to stagger down the lighthouse stairs and out of the cottage.

  I knew that it couldn’t possibly be Pa in the rowing boat—how could it be?—but I needed to see. If it wasn’t Pa, then who was it? I could believe that the light flickering up on the north cliff had been some sort of illusion, but could I really have hallucinated a whole boat, and a person rowing it too?

  I half ran, half fell all the way down the cliff path to the harbor. There were points at which I was aware of the ground thudding beneath my numb feet and points at which I felt like I was almost flying through the darkness. If Mrs. Baron had seen me, racing along with a torch after the blackout, I would have been in serious trouble, but she wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

  I arrived at the beach, panting for breath, blood pounding, muscles burning. I stopped, hands on my knees and breathing hard, beside a huge crater in the sand. The bomb had missed the harbor, and it had missed the army buildings on the clifftop too, but it had blown a hole in the barbed wire over fifty yards wide. It looked like a gigantic sea monster had taken a bite out of the beach.

  Then I saw a long, thin groove in the sand. This is where he launched from. The groove ran all the way down to the water. There were footprints too—man-sized boots.

  I looked out to sea, but there was no sign of the parachute, the pilot, or Pa. There was hardly any breeze now. It was eerily still and the sea was calm. The moonlight sketched pencil-silver waves on the black silk of the surface. Then I heard the splash and creak of oars, quiet and regular. There was a light—faint and quivering—a lantern perhaps—and the outline of a boat gradually became clear. It moved towards us, gliding smoothly with each pull through the water.

  The figure rowing the boat was square-shouldered, just like Pa—and he rowed the boat exactly as Pa would have done too, but something wasn’t quite right. The man’s hair was white as smoke in the moonlight. Was it a ghost? I shivered as the little boat drew nearer. I thought of the Wyrm lurking below the surface. I imagined the rotting masts of all those ships reaching up towards the boat like the bony fingers of the dead.

  My heart was beating so fast that it just felt like a dull, dizzy buzzing in my rib cage. The wet sand sucked at my feet.

  I could hear voices coming from the sea wall in the direction of the harbor, but I couldn’t drag my eyes from the boat that was drawing closer and closer with each smooth pull of the oars.

  Then it reached me, sliding up onto the sand with a gritty hiss.

  The figure in the boat turned around and looked straight at me.

  It wasn’t Pa—of course it wasn’t—but the floundering disappointment was shocked out of me almost immediately.

  It was a face I recognized.

  “Spooky Joe,” I breathed. Everything was so strange and so dreamlike, the words had escaped from my lips before I could stop them.

  The old man raised his bushy white eyebrows at me. “Spooky Joe? That’s what you call me, is it, Petra?”

  I stared at him. How did he know my name?

  My hands still gripped the wet, gritty side of the King Edward. “What are you doing in our boat?” I managed to say.

  “Your boat, is it?” For a moment I thought he was going to snarl at me, but then he stopped and shook his head. That’s not important now. He turned towards the dark shape that was slumped in the bottom of the boat.

  I peered in.

  “He’s breathing, but he’s unconscious,” Spooky Joe said.

  A lantern had been placed in the bow of the boat. Its feeble light illuminated the face of a young man, lying there limply. His hair and uniform were soaked through with sea water, and there was something dark running down the side of his head and neck. Blood. He can’t be much more than twenty years old, I thought. Just a few years older than Kipper Briggs or Michael Baron.

  The voices were closer now. Two men in military uniform were half running towards us from the direction of the harbor, the light from
their torches whirling around on the sand like pinwheels.

  “He’ll be all right, I think,” said the first man after he had examined him. “Taken a bash to the head but he seems to have a strong enough pulse. Good job you got him out of the water so quickly—he’d have drowned otherwise.”

  Spooky Joe grunted. He helped maneuver the Luftwaffe pilot out onto the sand, but I noticed that he wasn’t gentle with him. The pilot’s left leg fell heavily onto the sand and twisted behind him. One of the men in uniform poured a few drops of something onto the young man’s lips. It smelled like brandy.

  “He’ll be useful, won’t he,” Spooky Joe said in a low, emotionless voice. “You might be able to get some information out of him.”

  The first officer shrugged. “We can try.”

  Then the pilot stirred. His eyelids flickered and he muttered something in German.

  “We need a translator down here,” the first officer said to the second as he rolled the boy onto his side and handcuffed his wrists together. “As quickly as you can.”

  The second man was already on his feet when I said, “You don’t need one. I can speak German.”

  Spooky Joe and the two military men looked straight at me. It was as if I had suddenly become visible. It was hard to read the expressions on their faces, though. I was useful. But could I be trusted?

  “Can you? What did he say, then?”

  “He said something about a sign—a signal.”

  The pilot’s eyelids flickered as he rolled onto his back, and he muttered the same words again.

  “A signal?”

  “Yes,” I said. “A signal.”

  I looked up towards the dark cliffs that lay beyond the lighthouse.

  Perhaps I hadn’t imagined it. Perhaps I had seen a light flashing up there after all.

  I was back home and in bed by the time Mags finally crept back into the cottage. It must have been very late.

  “Did you see the bomber come down?” I whispered. I don’t know why I whispered—there was no one else in the cottage for us to disturb.

  I had been lying there, sleepless in the dark, thoughts of the German pilot, Spooky Joe, and the mysterious signal from the clifftops all swimming around my head. Pa had been the spy that Pinstripe had been searching for—I knew that—but there must be someone else too: Someone else had cut the telephone lines and burned down the church hall and someone was now flashing a light during the blackout to signal to the enemy …

  “Yes,” Mags said. “We saw it come down.”

  “Where were you, Mags? Who were you with?”

  But she didn’t say anything.

  “Mags?”

  She changed into her pajamas and climbed into bed. I heard the rustle of her sheet and blanket as she pulled them up over her shoulder and turned away from me.

  What was wrong with her? After a few minutes of silence, I rolled in the opposite direction—towards the window—so that our backs were facing each other. Eventually I gave in to sleep, allowing the dark dreams to flood back into my exhausted brain.

  The day after that, Mags was out of the house at dawn and didn’t come home until after suppertime, and the same thing happened the next day too. I spent both days up in the lantern room, polishing the lamp, and recording the weather conditions and shipping movements in Pa’s logbook. I stared out to sea, hypnotized by the slow-twisting shape of the Wyrm beneath the waves, trying to work out what had happened to my sister. Something had shifted again—she was just as she’d been before Dunkirk, back in the early spring when I’d felt as if I hardly knew her at all. I needed to talk to her about being evacuated—had she managed to speak to someone about it? Had she sorted it out somehow? We hadn’t heard anything from Mrs. Baron for a couple of days now.

  Perhaps that cold, lonely silence between me and Mags would have gone on forever, if it hadn’t been for what happened to Mrs. Rossi and her husband:

  The police came for them and took them away.

  They weren’t spies—they hadn’t done anything wrong at all—but their home country, Italy, had now joined the war—on Hitler’s side, not ours. With everyone in the country so angry and frightened and expecting an invasion at any minute, Mr. Churchill had ordered the police to “Collar the lot!” Anyone who could potentially be a supporter of the enemy. Anyone born in the wrong country. It didn’t matter now if you were a Category B or C enemy alien—you were likely to be rounded up for the internment camps, and some were being deported too.

  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 gray-haired officer from Dover. He was very polite to Mr. and Mrs. Rossi, but he wasn’t interested in pursuing the vandalism of their shop. It wasn’t the vandals he had come to arrest. The policeman told the Rossis that the two of them would be safer in an internment camp than in their own home, but they didn’t really have a choice. 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 particularly un-British summer days when the pavement is like the bottom of an oven and the heavy air pulses 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 smelled 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 imprisoned or prosecuted, but how long would it be now 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 burned away at my back.

  Mal Bright, one of the fishermen, stopped and offered to help us. His son, Sam, had been killed in the evacuation of Dunkirk. He had been hit by machine-gun fire trying to help a soldier out of the water.

  “Thank you, Mr. Bright,” Mags said as he held the plank of wood steady across the window frame. My sister hammered it into place, knocking nails into the corners.

  “I was wonderin’,” Mal said. “It’s my boy’s funeral on Friday. Sam’s funeral.”

  Mags stopped hammering. I stopped scrubbing at the paint.

  “I was wonderin’, because you won’t be able to have a funeral as such, if you two would like it to be a memorial for your dad too?”

  Mags looked at me properly for the first time in days. I was suddenly aware of my sunburned neck, my hot, tearstained face. I nodded.

  “Yes,” Mags said. “That’s kind of you, Mr. Bright. I think we would like that very much.”

  Friday was cooler than the rest of the week had been—the white clouds looked like they had been combed upwards by the stiff breeze. I put on my smartest dress and brushed down my old black coat.

  Mrs. Baron and Michael were waiting in the church porch when we arrived. I noticed t
hat Michael’s gaze followed my sister from the church gate, all the way through the churchyard. I looked at Mags, trying to see whatever it was that he evidently saw. She was wearing a coat of Mutti’s. With its belted waist and buttoned collar, and her hair all up with pins, I supposed she did look a bit more grown-up than usual.

  They greeted us, and Mrs. Baron gave us both a little hug and a pat on the back. She’s not such a bad old stick, I thought, remembering how angry Mags had been with her in the wake of the “Peacock and the Pied Piper” incident. She isn’t an old dragon at all. She just wants us to be safe.

  “I need to talk to you afterward, please, girls,” she said, readjusting herself after our hugs and tucking a strand of hair back beneath her smart black hat. “I’ve got a bit of good news for you.”

  Good news? To do with being evacuated. Did we really have to talk about that today? I felt my chest tighten.

  Mags looked away almost immediately, her face instantly stony and closed-up. I tried to smile politely at Mrs. Baron as we turned to enter the church, but I suspect my face may have been grimacing.

  It was cold and dim inside, as gloomy as a tomb. Daylight struggled through the stained glass window behind the altar—wine red and bottle green. We shuffled into our pew near the front. I hadn’t been to church for ages—not since before Mutti was taken away—and the familiar smells swirled around me like the rising tide: old hymn books, cold stone, dust, and candle wax. The air was heavy with stillness and quiet prayer.

  The church filled up quickly—the whole village was there, I think. Someone started playing the church organ, and I was relieved; the quiet, respectful muttering was starting to make me nervous. My best dress was not warm enough for the chill of the church, and I found that I was somehow shivering and sweating at the same time. My fingertips had gone all pale and waxy, as if I didn’t have enough warm blood in my veins to reach them. I didn’t want to look at poor Sam Bright’s coffin. It was so close to me that I could almost have reached out and touched the newly hewn wood. I kept thinking that it could so easily have been my sister in there.