Our Castle by the Sea Page 4

  On the third foggy morning, I was up in the lantern room writing the weather report in the log-book for Pa: Temperature: 41°F, I wrote. Visibility: very poor … I stared out at the sea of cloud that swirled below us, trying to estimate how many feet ahead I could see, but the fog moved in slow white waves. It was as if the lighthouse were the bridge of a ship, and my Pa was the captain, sailing us all away from the real world, away from the war, out into the peace of the misty ocean … Then the telephone started ringing in the service room downstairs.

  I stopped writing and listened. The telephone is only to be used by the lighthouse keeper. I’m not really supposed to know, but Mags told me it is a direct line to the Admiralty. A lighthouse keeper is a very important person in wartime—it is a Reserved Occupation, so you cannot be conscripted into the army.

  I heard Pa’s brief responses to whatever orders he was receiving, then the click and jingle of the telephone as he hung up. His footsteps descended the stairs. A moment later, the lighthouse door opened and closed as he went outside to the foghorn shed, and a few seconds later, a deafening blast of sound. No matter how many times I heard the foghorn, it still made me jump. I squeezed my eyes shut—as if that would help somehow. There must be a ship stranded in the Channel, I thought. Lost in the fog—drifting near the sandbank … The monstrous sound stopped at last. Then I heard Pa coming up the spiral staircase, but he wasn’t whistling as he usually did when he went up and down the stairs. His footsteps gradually became louder until he appeared in front of me in the lantern room. He looked very smart, as always, in his lighthouse keeper’s uniform. With his squared shoulders, his neatly trimmed beard, and his polished brass buttons, I thought he looked like an admiral in the navy (albeit an admiral with sticking-out ears). He was carrying a very serious-looking envelope, which he tucked inside his jacket pocket. I saw that it had been opened and then closed again, the long edge folded tightly over.

  “Top Secret Lighthouse Keeper’s Business?” I asked.

  He hesitated for a moment; then he tapped his nose. “Top. Secret,” he said. I felt a little surge of pride at how important my Pa was.

  He consulted his watch. “One minute, please, First Mate,” he said. “Do you want to help?”

  I smiled and saluted him. “Aye, aye, Cap’n,” I said.

  He passed me the heavy iron handle for the optic. I fitted the handle carefully and wound it around, bending my knees with each rotation to crank up the clockwork mechanism.

  Pa counted under his breath; then he said, “That should do it …”

  Soundlessly, the optic started turning. It looked like a huge lampshade or drum with alternating panels of glass and wood—a giant zoetrope. As it rotated smoothly around the lamp, it gave the effect of the light flashing.

  Pa pulled down the switch to light up the lantern and the beam of light shot out into the fog. We both watched the slow-flashing light as it attempted to penetrate the misty air. Each beam looked almost solid, I thought—a blinding-white rod of metal, a spear for a Greek god … Then there was a heavy click. I blinked, and the light had gone. The lantern seemed to glow for a moment—electric-orange, then red—and then the world was colorless once more.

  Pa stood still for a while, his ocean-blue eyes fixed forward, as if in a trance. With the fading of the lamp, something seemed to have faded in him too. I stared out of the window with him, trying to catch a glimpse of the ship lost in the sea fret, but the world below was nothing but a smoky swamp.

  Then, from somewhere out in the Channel, we heard the sound of a distant foghorn, and I felt an unexpected spasm of panic: Are we helping the right ship? Pa knew his job of course, he knew his signals—but thoughts of the U-boat lurked just beneath the surface of my thoughts. What if the enemy had other vessels out there too, hiding in the fog?

  The sound of the foghorn brought Pa out of his trance at last. He gave me a distracted little smile; then he kissed me on my forehead and went back down the stairs. There’s something on his mind, I thought. He is very worried about something. Something important. I wondered if it was connected to that envelope he had just put in his pocket.

  Silently, I added this to the other puzzles that were drifting about in my head: the hidden photograph, the dark shape in Dragon Bay, Kipper’s accusation, my sister’s weird behavior … And now Pa too. A whole shoal of secrets, writhing in my mind like fish in a net.

  The fog did not lift all that day, and it was still there the next morning, cloaking the cliffs in stillness and secrecy. Our Castle was a castle lost in the clouds.

  The chill seeped into my bones as I tiptoed from the front door of the cottage and out into the pearl-gray gloom.

  I was following Mutti.

  Mags had gone out early—probably down to the harbor to work on her boat as she often did early in the mornings—and I had been lying there in bed, unable to get back to sleep. When I heard the kitchen door opening and closing again, I crept to the window, lifted the blackout blind, and peered out into the mist. I could just make out Mutti’s shadowy figure moving down the path towards the gate. What was she up to? It must have been around seven o’clock, and it was still quite dark. Mags sneaking out of the house to work on her boat was perfectly normal, but I’d never known Mutti to go for an early morning walk—particularly not in weather like this. And there was something about the way she had opened and closed the kitchen door. So softly …

  I pulled the collar of my coat up and huffed into my scarf to try to keep my face warm. My hands were tightened into fists in my coat pocket, and I wished I had taken a second to find my mittens. I trod carefully, trying not to make a sound. The figure of my mother was about twenty paces ahead of me. Every now and then the fog became so thick that I couldn’t see her at all. We were out on the cliff path now. In the darkness and fog, so near the cliff edge, it would have been dangerous for anyone else, but I had grown up here—I knew every twist and turn of these paths in the same way that I knew the ruts and potholes of the track to Stonegate or the wobbly steps of the spiral staircase in the lighthouse.

  We passed the turning that would have taken us down to the harbor and instead we kept going straight on, climbing the path that led up to the south cliff. The army had started to build something up on these cliffs. There was a tall barbed-wire fence and, beyond it, several half-built concrete structures. Amongst the bare wilderness of the clifftops, the wire and the concrete were so ugly, so out of place. The half-built shapes looked eerie in the mist—squat and sinister, like crouching toads. There was nothing else up here at all, just windswept gorse bushes and frostbitten grass. The fog was thinner up here and Mutti’s shape became clearer. As she walked, ribbons of mist swirled around her feet like snakes. Why is she going up here?

  I thought about that cryptic accusation from Kipper Briggs—She’s been seen. Had he been talking about Mutti? What was she doing out on the south cliff in the darkness and fog?

  The light was changing now—the black dissolving into a rusty gray. The sun must be rising. But there was a light ahead of us too—a pale, yellowy glow—then it was gone again—like a door or a curtain opening and closing. And then I remembered. There was something else up on the south cliff: Spooky Joe’s cottage.

  Spooky Joe had moved into the crumbling little house at the beginning of last summer. Everyone had assumed he was renting the cottage for some sort of holiday, but months later he was still there.

  I’d never actually seen him—he kept himself to himself and was rarely seen in the village. Pa had told us about him—said that his name was Joe and that we should “leave him well alone,” so naturally this made my sister and me all the more intrigued, and we started making up stories about him being a smuggler or a murderer or a spy. I can’t remember which of us came up with the nickname Spooky Joe, but it seemed to have stuck.

  Whenever we walked up this way, we always kept an eye out for him, but he was never more than a shadow at the window, a puff of smoke from the chimney, or a pair of black boots disa
ppearing through the doorway.

  When Mutti was about fifty yards away from the cottage, she stopped quite suddenly and ducked behind a gorse bush. It was then that I realized we were not alone on the clifftop. There was another figure too, just ahead of Mutti. It was a wraithlike shape, distant in the mist. Then the bizarrely comical truth of the situation became clear.

  I had been following Mutti, but she had been following someone else.

  I didn’t ask Mutti what she was doing that foggy morning, and I didn’t ask her who she had been following. I couldn’t find the right words without sounding like I was accusing her of something terrible. And I couldn’t admit that I had followed her. We had always been such a close family, we had always trusted one another, but secrets had started to seep into the gaps between us. And now, like water freezing in the cracked surface of a stone, those secrets were growing colder, harder, starting to force us apart.

  The very next morning, Pa and Mutti sat us both down at the kitchen table and told us that we needed to have “a serious conversation.”

  My stomach cramped with guilt—Am I in trouble? I always feel like that when a grown-up says they need to talk to me about something serious. It happened a lot at school: The headmistress, Mrs. Baron, could make me feel quite sick with one of her penetrating stares. It was usually Mags who was in trouble, not me, but I’ll bet Mags has never had a guilt cramp in her life.

  “We’ve been reading about the program for evacuation,” Pa said, putting his hands down flat on the table.

  “Evacuation?” I looked from him to Mutti.

  Mags wasn’t looking at either of them, her eyes were fixed on the window, and the cold, gray, drizzly world outside our cozy kitchen.

  “Yes,” Mutti said. “Children are being sent away from their homes to different parts of the country—to places that are safer.”

  “We know all about it,” I said. “Mrs. Baron told us in school. We’ve even got two new children from London in our class. They came a couple of months ago.”

  “That’s right, Pet,” Pa said. “Right now, the government says that the Kent coast is considered to be safe. But it’s possible that this area too may need to be evacuated in time, and we wanted to discuss it with you first. The government has already evacuated children from London and other big cities …”

  “But this isn’t exactly a big city, is it?” Mags interrupted, her eyes still fixed on the window.

  “Let me finish, please, Magda,” Pa said calmly. “And they will need to evacuate children from anywhere that becomes a target for attack. If things change, we need to know that the two of you can be moved quickly to a safe place inland.”

  Inland. Even the word made me feel panicky and claustrophobic. It’s a feeling that might be difficult for you to understand, unless like me you’ve grown up by the sea. I can’t bear the thought of being boxed in by buildings, shut away from our enormous skies and the clean salt-washed air and all the colors of the sea.

  “If the princesses are staying put, I’m sure it will be fine for us to stay too,” Mags said airily. We had heard something on the wireless about the royal family deciding to keep Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret at home rather than send them away to Scotland or Canada. Trust Mags to remember that.

  “Magda,” Pa said in one of his strictest voices. “Firstly—though this may be hard for you to believe—you are not actually a princess. Secondly, you haven’t even thought about it properly yet. Don’t fly off the handle so quickly. This could be a chance for you to visit a beautiful part of the country like Devon or Cornwall—lots of evacuees are going there—down in the southwest.” He took a pencil from his top pocket and sketched out a rough map of the country on the front cover of yesterday’s newspaper. I watched the shape growing on the page, corralling all those words about the war within its familiar borders.

  I love maps. It is, I think, quite natural to love maps when you grow up in a lighthouse. I got a gold star in the first geography lesson I ever had at school: I found the work so easy, so natural, because the maps and the smooth-rolling surface of the globe made perfect sense to me. It was the world seen from above—the blue of the sea, the green of the land, the jigsaw edges of the coastline: the whole world looking exactly as it does from the top of our lighthouse.

  As Pa’s map of Britain took shape, he told us about Dartmoor and Exmoor and wild ponies and golden beaches with rocky coves. I tucked my knees up on the kitchen chair and stretched my sweater down over them. I gazed out of the window into the drizzle, thinking about galloping across different clifftops, exploring new rock pools and caves. I imagined watching the sun setting over the sea instead of rising from it.

  “Will the other children in the village be going too?” Mags said. “I mean, will everyone be going?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Pa said. “But if our coast becomes dangerous, it would certainly be the most sensible thing.”

  “What would happen to our school?” I asked.

  “Well, in most cases so far, the schoolteachers have accompanied the evacuees. I think normal school would probably be closed for a while …”

  I couldn’t help grinning at this—no school!! Mags indulged me by making a silly, excited face.

  Pa shook his head at us.

  “Girls, this is very important,” Mutti said. “Please!”

  My stomach lurched as I realized that my mother was trying not to cry.

  “Sorry, Mutti,” I mumbled. She looked so fragile all of a sudden. Pa put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I just … I really do think we need to be prepared,” she said. “I couldn’t bear to be parted from you both but …” She trailed off and her eyes settled on Mags. “It’s not just about the risk of attack, my darling, is it?” We looked at her, waiting for the other reasons, but none came. Mutti twisted her hands together, took a long, trembling breath, and turned towards the window. Did she know something we didn’t know? I wondered if it could have had anything to do with her sneaking out of the cottage so early in the morning—following a mysterious figure across the misty clifftops. Something has happened that has made her think we will be safer if we leave Stonegate.

  “You think we should go, don’t you, Mutti?” I said.

  She nodded, and so did Pa. That made me feel very odd indeed—both our parents saying that they wanted us to go and live somewhere else. I felt like I was about to cry too, but I couldn’t tell if it was because I was feeling sorry for myself, or if it was because Mutti was so upset.

  “But we wouldn’t know the people we were staying with, would we?” Mags said then. “They could be anyone at all, couldn’t they?”

  “Well—someone with a spare bedroom who wanted to help others. You will find that most people are kind, Mags,” Mutti said, blotting the tears from her eyes with Pa’s handkerchief.

  “And what happens when they discover that we are half-German, Mutti? Do you think most people will still be kind to us then?”

  There was a leaden silence. My chest tightened. We looked at Mutti, and Mutti looked at Pa, fresh tears welling up in her eyes.

  They had not considered this.

  The logs in the kitchen stove crackled. The drizzle outside thickened, running down the kitchen window in thin gray worms of water.

  So we weren’t evacuated, and nor were any of the other children from our village. Not yet, at any rate. The early months of the war slid quietly by. Christmas and New Year came and went. The blossoms of spring had just started to fade when Hitler invaded France, and the war truly began. Terrible things started to happen one after the other then, with the dreadful, unstoppable momentum of storm waves at sea.

  We listened to the wireless every night, and every night it was clear that the German army was getting closer and closer to our little island: sweeping through the Netherlands and Belgium, and surging up through France. It is difficult to describe what we all felt, but I can tell you that my Wyrm nightmare tormented me every single night—a monster crawling from the
water and clawing its way up the cliffs to the Castle. A monster from which I knew there could be no escape.

  After the eeriness of the Twilight War, the darkness was now upon us at last. People continued to go about their everyday business, of course—weeding the garden and sweeping the step, and their words were defiant … But everyone was afraid. They were afraid that we would be next.

  At about six o’clock one morning, I sat up in bed, suddenly and completely awake. Something was wrong. Smoke.

  The smell of a burning building was unmistakable; even my dozing, dreaming brain knew that this was not a smell from the kitchen stove or the sitting room hearth or even a bonfire. I leapt out of bed, yelling to Mags, and ran through the cottage from end to end, expecting to see flames at any moment. I burst through the kitchen door and stared up at the lighthouse too. But there was no fire to be seen.

  Then I heard Mutti’s voice behind me—she was up and dressed already: “The village, Petra—it’s all right, my darling—it’s coming from the village.” She put her arm around me. “Over here—look …”

  We went towards the cliff path and I saw it straightaway: a cloud of dirty gray smoke. It sat over the village below, bulging and billowing. The breeze pulled at the smoke, tearing off woolly skeins of it here and there and carrying them up towards us.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What’s on fire?”

  “The village hall,” Mutti said, “according to the postman.”

  I tried to make out the shapes of the familiar buildings, but everything was obscured by the smoke. The bell of a fire engine echoed over the fields.

  Mags and I dressed quickly and ran down to the village, but by the time we got there, the fire was almost completely extinguished. A crowd had gathered in the street. Some people were still wearing slippers and dressing gowns. They frowned and folded their arms and shook their heads and muttered to one another.