Our Castle by the Sea Read online

  It was just a few days after Magda’s fight that Pa received a very strange order from the government. We had to paint the Castle green.

  We all painted it together. Pots of green paint shot up and down on pulleys, and I was allowed to use the stepladder to paint the downstairs windowsills. It was much better than whitewashing, because if we splashed paint on the grass, it didn’t matter so much—you could hardly see it. Mags painted the very top of the lighthouse—the round roof. She scaled the highest part of the tower with a rope, just like a mountain climber, her paintbrush tucked in a back pocket. It took the four of us three whole days to finish painting it, and the closer it was to being finished, the more peculiar it looked. I couldn’t get used to the greeny-brown paint at all—it just looked completely the wrong color for a lighthouse.

  “It’s camouflage,” Pa said. “To make us harder to spot from the air. We don’t want the lighthouse to be bombed, do we?”

  No. We didn’t.

  There has been a lighthouse above Stonegate for centuries—to warn ships of the dangerous sandbanks in the sea beyond the cliffs and to guide them safely past the Wyrm to the harbor below. Its light has come from all sorts of different things, from oil lamps to braziers and coal fires. It hasn’t always looked the same, of course, but I was pretty sure that it had never been painted green before. The lighthouse has been destroyed many times over the years. It has been hit by hurricanes, struck by lightning, and burned down by fire, but it has always risen again—a phoenix from the storm-blown flames.

  I love our lighthouse, and I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, but I know that other people often find it odd. You might imagine, perhaps, that all the furniture has to be round in order to fit inside, or that we sleep on hammocks hung from the spiral staircase and spend our days climbing ladders and polishing glass. Actually, there is a fair bit of glass polishing that has to be done, but we have never slept in hammocks: We sleep in normal beds in the cottage at the foot of the lighthouse. The cottage is just like any other cottage really, like any other home. And we are just like any other family. At least, we were just like any other family, before the war began.

  Now, if I think back to that sunny autumn day when we finished painting the lighthouse, I can see that the tide had already begun to turn.

  It was beautifully warm for September, and Mags and I lay next to each other in the long grass between the standing stones.

  “Looks odd, doesn’t it?” Mags said. “Now that it’s green.”

  “It looks weird,” I agreed.

  I loved our strong white tower—brilliant and proud against a clear blue sky. It looked so different now that it was the same sort of earthy color as the fields that surrounded us. It looked as if it had sprouted up from the ground itself.

  “It looks like a goblin castle,” I said.

  Mags laughed. “Or an ogre’s folly.”

  “Or a troll’s tower.”

  My sister plucked a daisy and threw it at my face. I laughed too and closed my eyes. My muscles were achy from painting, and the grass was warm and dry and pleasantly scratchy beneath me.

  “It makes sense, though, doesn’t it?” Mags said in a more serious voice. “Hitler’s bombers won’t be able to spot us as easily now. Pa said there is a risk that landmarks like lighthouses could be used by German planes for navigation.”

  “Mmmm.” I started to feel very sleepy. I listened to the gulls calling to one another 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, and breathing very quickly, while the noise of the airplane came closer and closer.

  “Pa!” Mags shouted.

  Everything darkened around me.

  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 colors of the sky behind us. “All right, Pet?” Pa called back. 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 little and insignificant—like a toy dog on a leash, 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 like the whole world was 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 down here whenever we heard low-flying airplanes or caught the sound of the air-raid siren drifting up from Stonegate harbor below. Mags said that she thought most of the planes would probably be ours. By “ours” she meant British planes.

  “Yes, they probably will,” Pa said. “And we’ll learn to tell the difference. But for now, we won’t know which is which until it’s too late.”

  That was the first time I really understood that the war had started and that we and our lighthouse were in danger. But I still felt safe. As we descended into the dusty dark of the coal cellar together, I felt so very, very safe.

  Mutti tried to encourage me to curl up on an old armchair and go to sleep, but I wanted to poke about amongst the piles of bric-a-brac stacked up in the cobwebby corners. The smell of coal-dust and mold was mysterious and exciting. I started clambering through a stack of broken furniture—I was an insect in a dusty jungle.

  “Be careful please, little Pet,” Mutti said. “That furniture is very old—you will hurt yourself.” I was twelve years old. I wondered just how old I would have to be before I stopped being Mutti’s little Pet.

  I stopped climbing and stood quietly for a minute or so, writing my name in the dust that covered an old writing desk. Pet Smith, I wrote. Then I wrote my full name (including my middle name, which comes from Mutti’s family): Petra Zimmermann Smith.

  That is the name of someone extraordinary, I thought. An explorer. An adventurer or a mountain climber, someone who does wonderful and fearless things. I wasn’t brave enough to be an adventurer, though, I knew that. I wasn’t bold and fearless like Magda. What I really wanted was to be an artist. I sighed, and stared at my name. I had always felt it was several sizes too big for me. Was it a name I could grow into? I scribbled it out and wrote plain Pet Smith again. I was anonymous once more—small, mousy, and unimportant.

  I started looking through the desk drawers one at a time, to see if I could find any little bits of forgotten treasure. Apart from a few dead earwigs they all seemed to be empty. Everyone was quiet. Mags lay down on an old mattress with her book clasped to her chest. I watched her close her eyes tightly, but I knew she wasn’t asleep—her breathing was all wrong. Pa sat next to Mutti and took her hand. I saw my mother stealing glances at Mags every now and then—she’d been watching her like that since the fight earlier that week. After a while Mags huffed impatiently, as if Mutti’s anxious looks were kee
ping her awake. She moved beneath the fanlight and opened Essential Motorboat Maintenance, squinting at the pages as the last dregs of evening light faded into darkness. I caught the faintest trace of the air raid siren in the wind, still wailing mournfully from the village below.

  Pa was restless. He got up and lit a couple of oil lamps, and the yellow light illuminated something at the back of a desk drawer I had thought to be empty. I took it out and dusted it with my sleeve. It was a photograph in a frame—a formal photograph of a bride and groom on their wedding day. A vicar was standing beside them. I looked closely at the faces of the couple. She was a young woman with long yellow-brown hair just like mine. She was wearing a simple dress with a pattern of leaves on it and holding a bouquet of wild flowers. He was a gentle-looking man with sticking-out ears, wearing his only good suit.

  It is Mutti and Pa. I’d know Pa’s ears anywhere …

  I recognized one of the other figures—the old lady who stood beside the bride was Mrs. Fisher from the village. She was dead now, but she used to do the flowers at the village church and was a cousin or aunt of Mutti’s (Mutti worked in her hotel when she first came over to England from Germany). Mrs. Fisher was easy to recognize because she always wore a hat covered in large artificial sunflowers. A thin man stood beside her. He had fair hair, an angular face, and a neat, pointed beard. He was holding a plate piled high with wedding cake.

  I wanted to show the photograph to Mutti and Pa, but something told me not to. There were three things about the photograph that struck me as being very important and very strange:

  1. It was Mutti and Pa’s wedding day, but there only seemed to be two guests.

  2. No one in the photograph was smiling.

  3. The photograph had been hidden away in the coal cellar.

  I put it back and gently closed the desk drawer, leaving it where I had found it—amongst the rubbish and the dust and all the other forgotten things.

  It seemed wrong not to tell Mags about the wedding photograph straightaway—I had always told my sister everything—but for some reason I wanted to keep this as my secret, at least for the time being. I sensed that there was a mystery attached to the picture—a secret reason for it being hidden away like that—and I wanted to solve the puzzle myself, without Mags taking over.

  She knew that there was something on my mind. That night, she whispered to me from her bed, “Are you all right, Pet? Are you scared about an air raid or something?”

  “I’m fine,” I replied.

  “No you’re not,” she insisted. “I can always tell when you’re lying, Pet. Sisters always know. What’s wrong?”

  “I’m fine,” I said again.

  She hmphed quietly, and I heard her bed creak as she rolled over towards the blacked-out window. I was aware of an odd, new distance opening up between us.

  Now that I think about it, it was around this time that Mags started to behave strangely. She muttered in her sleep, and one morning I caught her in a sort of trance, sitting on the edge of her bed with one sock on and one sock off, staring dreamily at the wall. When I asked her if she was all right, she snapped at me to leave her alone. So I did. I plodded up the lighthouse stairs with my sketchbook and pencil and sat in the lantern room. I felt the need to draw something, but I ended up just thinking about the hidden photograph and doodling a pattern of waves.

  It was one of those gray, heavy autumn days when endless banks of cloud roll in from the horizon, and the sun never quite manages to take hold. I watched a boy come up the cliff path towards our cottage, carrying a brown paper parcel. As he got closer, I realized it was Kipper Briggs—a boy from the village. Kipper is as big as a man, broad-backed and large-handed. He was the same age as Mags, though he had left school a couple of years ago to work for his father (Arthur Briggs was the fishmonger in the village, and he owned half a dozen fishing boats that used to head out of the harbor every morning come rain or shine).

  I watched Kipper climb the last, steep stretch of the path and come through our garden gate. It banged shut behind him, and a seagull flapped haphazardly across the garden, startled by the noise. I put down my sketchbook and pencil and ran down the stairs to meet him; he was probably bringing Mutti’s order of fish for the week.

  Kipper is not a pleasant boy to be around I’m afraid—and I’m not just talking about his aroma (children can be very inventive when it comes to cruel nicknames, but whoever christened Colin Briggs “Kipper” didn’t need much of an imagination—only a basic sense of smell). Kipper used to be famous for stealing the lunches of the smallest children at school. I remember him taking an iced bun from Mags and gobbling it up right in front of her furious face. Mags had only been about ten years old at the time, and Kipper must have been much bigger than her, but she’d kicked him in the shins for that.

  By the time I had run down the lighthouse stairs, I was a bit dizzy. Rather than going through the cottage, I came out of the main lighthouse door and stopped for a second, holding on to the door frame to steady myself. There were two figures standing by the garden gate—Mags must have seen Kipper coming too, and she’d got there before me. I don’t know who had said what to who in the short time it had taken me to get down the stairs, but it didn’t take me long to realize that they were on the brink of a fight.

  “Don’t know why Dad’s still doing business with you lot of crummy krauts,” Kipper was sniping. Mags held out her hand for the parcel, but Kipper kept it just out of reach. He danced around her. “Oh, you want this, do you, Jerry? Come and get it …”

  Mags’s face didn’t even flicker, and she didn’t try to grab the parcel; she wasn’t playing Kipper’s game. She folded her arms, keeping eye contact with Kipper. She looked almost bored, but I know Mags, and I knew her heart would have been thundering.

  “Come on,” Kipper taunted, backing out through the gate again. “Come and get it, Magda … Or are you SCARED?”

  “I’m not scared of you, Kipper,” Mags said evenly. “But I am afraid of getting too close—I just can’t stand the smell, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, you think you’re funny, don’t you, Frau Smeeth! You think you’re it. Up here in your bloody so-called castle. Think you’re better than us, don’t you? Well, you’re not. If you don’t take that back, I’m going to lob your parcel right off the bloody cliff!”

  It was at this point that Kipper, now reversing quickly towards the cliff edge, his eyes fixed on Mags, collided with our enormous ginger cat, Barnaby, who was out hunting rabbits. Barnaby yowled and tore back towards the cottage, and Kipper started falling backwards, his arms windmilling wildly. He was heading for the edge of the cliff, and I shrieked before starting towards him, along with Mags, who was already through the gate and halfway there. At the very last moment, Kipper’s foot went down a rabbit hole and he fell, not backwards towards the edge, but to his left, cracking the side of his head on one of the standing stones.

  “Are you all right, Kipper?” I called.

  Mags laughed. It wasn’t a cruel laugh as such—more relief than anything I think, but it made Kipper even angrier. Now he was humiliated too. “You’ll be sorry!” he snarled at us both, as if we had done this to him deliberately. He pushed himself up, blinking back tears and clutching at the side of his head. “You’ll be sorry! Everyone knows what you all are—and everyone knows what you’re up to!” He stumbled back towards the cliff path and flung the dirty parcel at us. It landed soggily at my feet. “She’s been seen!” he spat. He pointed a trembling finger towards the lighthouse. “My dad told me—he’s seen her. And I’m going to make sure everyone knows.” Then he finally turned and limped away.

  We were both silent for a moment. The clouds over the sea were as heavy as boulders. I could see a thin, dark line of liquid trickling down the standing stone where Kipper’s head had cracked against it.

  “Seen who, Mags?” I breathed, not daring to look up at my sister. “What was he talking about?”

  “He’s talking rubbish, Petra,” she muttered
. “Kipper’s an idiot. Just ignore him.”

  But, as she turned back towards the cottage, I saw that my sister’s face was white as chalk.

  We didn’t see Kipper again until the day the gas masks arrived. What a horrible day that was—and what a horrible thing a gas mask is too. I know it could save my life of course—I’m not stupid. I just can’t help finding it terrifying. Sometimes I could feel my gas mask looking at me from its home on the kitchen sideboard—with its round, glassy, goggle eyes, and its round mouth too—fixed in an O of horror. It was always there, ready to be strapped on in an ugly, rubbery panic, should the moment ever come.

  We were summoned to collect our gas masks just a few weeks after the blackout started. Everyone lined up in the village hall, and we were issued the masks one at a time while the vicar’s wife ticked our names off her list with a blunt pencil. Then we all had to sit down in rows.

  There must have been about fifty of us there in the village hall that day. Kipper Briggs sat at the back with his father, and when I turned around to look at him, he raised his chin and just glared past me towards the front of the hall, where Mrs. Baron, our headmistress, was demonstrating how the gas masks worked.

  I remember watching Mrs. Baron as she was speaking to us all and deciding that if she were a bird, she would probably be a kestrel. She was wearing her usual tweed suit with a pearl-colored scarf around her neck. Her hair was done up in a neat bronze twist, and her narrow gray eyes darted about as she spoke. Mrs. Baron was probably the busiest lady in Stonegate. She and her son, Michael, had moved to our village from London about three years ago and she had swiftly become what Pa called a “pillar of the community.” Not only was she the headmistress of our school, but she was also a magistrate at the court in Dover.

  “… So,” she was saying, “I shall, for the time being at least, be the village’s Air Raid Precaution, or ARP, warden.”