The War that Saved My Life (30 page)

I swallowed hard.

The man—an ordinary-looking man, at least from the distance—took something from his rucksack. He unfolded it and used whatever it was to dig a hole in the beach. He put the suitcase into the hole. Covered the hole with sand. Walked cautiously up the sand dunes toward the barbed wire. I couldn’t see what happened next, but suddenly the man was on the other side of the fence, walking down the road toward me.

I turned Butter and galloped away.

I could have gone to the airfield, but the police station was closer and I knew where it was: near the school, near the shop where I’d had tea. I kept Butter to a canter even over the cobblestoned main street. I pulled him to a halt at the station, wrapped his reins around the handrail, and hurried up the steps as best as I could. I didn’t have my crutches. “I think I found a spy!” I said to the first person I saw, a portly man seated behind a large wooden desk. “A spy on the beach!”

The portly man turned toward me. “Get ahold of yourself, miss!” he said. “I can’t understand you the way you’re gabbling.”

I grabbed the edge of his desk for balance. I repeated my words.

The man looked me up and down. Particularly down, at my bad foot in its odd homemade shoe. I fought the urge to hide it.

“How was it you saw this spy?” he asked. He had a little smile on his face. I realized he did not believe me.

“I was out on my pony—” I began. I told the whole story, the hill where I always kept a lookout, the little boat, the suitcase buried in the sand.

“On your pony,” the man said, nodding, his smile widening into a smirk. “Watch a lot of newsreels, do you? Listen to the scary stories on the radio?”

He thought I was lying, or, at best, exaggerating. And now he was staring at my bad foot again. I felt a wave of heat climb up my neck.

I thought of what Susan would do. I drew myself up, taller, and glared at the man, and I said, “My bad foot’s a long way from my brain.”

The man blinked.

I said, “I would like to speak to your commanding officer. The government asks us to report anything suspicious, and that’s what I am going to do. If you won’t listen, I want to talk to someone who will.”

The second police officer took me more seriously. “We’ll go in the squad car,” he said. “See if we can find him.” He asked if I needed help getting to the car.

“No, thank you,” I said. I walked as straight as I could manage, even though it hurt like crazy. The officer put me in the front seat beside him and together we started down the road. We’d hardly gotten out of town when we came across the man I’d seen, walking down the road with perfect ease. I pointed him out to the officer.

“You’re sure?” the officer asked.

For a moment I wasn’t. I hadn’t really gotten a close look at the man’s face. But he felt like the right person. I nodded. The officer stopped his car and got out. “Papers, please,” he said.

“Really?” said the man, in perfect English with the accent Lady Thorton used. “Why ever for?”

“Routine,” the officer said.

The man raised his eyebrow as if it were all a joke, but reached into his pocket readily enough. He pulled his identity card out of a battered leather wallet. “I’m just on a bit of a walking holiday,” he said, indicating the rucksack on his back. “My ration card’s in there if you want me to fish it out.”

He could not sound more English. He could not look more English. And yet—

“Sir,” I said to the officer. He came over to the window on the passenger side, and leaned in.

“I’m sorry, miss,” he said, shaking his head, “but I think you’ve—”

I said, “His trouser cuffs are wet. And they’re full of sand.”

No one went on the beaches anymore. No one ever. It wasn’t allowed.

The officer’s smile disappeared. For a moment I thought he was angry with me, but I was wrong. The next thing I knew the man from the beach was handcuffed and bundled into the back of the car. He protested vehemently in his perfect English voice.

Back at the station, patient Butter still stood tied to the porch rail. The officer told me to go on home. “We’ll handle it from here, miss.”

I wanted to tell Susan, but I wasn’t sure how. I put it off so that I could think about it more. We were halfway through dinner that evening when the police knocked on the door.

It was my second officer, and another. “We need to speak with your daughter, ma’am.”

I got up quickly. Susan looked stunned. Jamie looked delighted.

“We need you to help us locate the buried parcel,” my officer said. So I went again in a squad car, this time all the way to the beach. I showed them where I’d stood with Butter, watching, and I tried to show them where I thought the man had landed with his boat. The tide was high now and everything looked different.

“We’ll have to get the army to dig it up anyhow,” the other officer said. “For all we know, the beach is mined.” He drove along the edge of the barbed-wire fence. We got out near where I thought the man had gone through, and walked up and down the road until we found a footprint. The officer marked it with a piece of cloth tied to the fence, and then took me home.

I paused before I got out of the car. “Will you let me know what happens to the man?”

The officers shook their heads. “It’ll be a secret, miss.”

“Will you let me know if he really is a spy?”

They looked at each other, and nodded. “But you’re to stay quiet about it,” one said.

I nodded. “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” I said. I went in to make my explanations to Susan.

She was waiting for me on the purple sofa. She listened to the whole story. Then she put her hands on either side of my face. She smiled at me, and she said, “Oh, Ada. I am so proud.”

The very next afternoon, someone knocked on our door again. It was a police officer—not the one who had helped me, but the fat one who’d sat at his desk and thought I was making things up. “I need to apologize to your daughter, ma’am,” he said. When he saw me, he swept off his hat and bowed. “I should have believed you,” he said. “I’m sorry. A grateful nation thanks you for your service.”

With great ceremony, he handed me an onion.

The army had found the suitcase buried in the sand. It contained a radio transmitter, the sort spies used to send coded messages across the channel. The perfect Englishman really
had
been a spy.

I became a hero. The RAF men at the airfield brought me chocolate; the WVS women pooled together a tablespoon of sugar each, and gave me a whole bag. Daisy’s mother from the pub hugged me whenever she saw me, and every time I went into the village I was greeted with smiles and shouts of, “There’s our little spy-catcher!” or “There’s our good lass!”

It was as if I’d been born in the village. As if I’d been born with two strong feet. As if I really was someone important, someone loved.

Jamie made me repeat the story over and over again. “Tell me,” he’d beg. “Tell me your hero story.”

Maggie wrote from her school.
Ooh, I wish I’d been with you! I might have been, you know, if I’d been home.

I wish you had been,
I wrote back.

You wouldn’t mind sharing the honors?
she replied.

I wouldn’t have minded at all. It would have been easier.
Hero
wasn’t a word I was used to hearing. The admiration was interesting, but the attention made me feel unsettled.

“Say it again,” Jamie said, giggling. “Tell me what you told the first officer.”

“He looked at my bad foot,” I said, “and I said, ‘my foot’s a long way from my brain.’”

“And you were right,” Jamie said.

“Yes,” said Susan. “She was.”

Of course, the part that was frightening was that there had been an actual spy. A real spy. Sent to make the invasion easier. When the air raid sirens started up again it was hard not to be very afraid.

“But you caught him,” Jamie said.

“I caught one spy,” I said.
“One
.
”
The sirens had started earlier than usual that evening, while we were still eating; we’d carried our plates to the shelter with us.

“An’ now he’s dead,” Jamie said, chewing with his mouth open. “We took him out to a field, lined him up, and pow!” He mimed firing a gun. I flinched.