shoeboxes piled on top of each other. ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed as she began lifting the lids to peek inside.
‘What?’ Clara asked, the outfit folded in her arms.
‘These aren’t all shoeboxes, or rather, they are shoeboxes but they don’t all contain shoes. Some have got other things in them.’ Lucy lifted lids at random.
‘Such as?’ Clara asked with an uninterested tone.
‘Letters, newspaper clippings, photos.’ Lucy rifled. ‘I thought it was a bit odd there were no photos at all in the house. They’re all in here.’
‘Photos?’ Clara sounded interested now. ‘Why would they be hidden in a box?’
Lucy shrugged and held a little stash of photographs out for her sister who put the outfit down, dipped to her knees and sat beside her, flicking through the square, sepia images. They were mostly scenery from before the war, Lucy realised, the garden at Deux Tourelles in better days, the local beaches – the concrete fortifications yet to have been built when these were taken. She pulled out a sepia image of four young people laughing on a beach. Two teenage girls, wet hair falling about their shoulders and two young men, all of them in old-fashioned bathing suits and looking as if they were jostling each other good-naturedly for space in front of the lens. Lucy couldn’t help but smile back at them.
She turned the photograph over and read the caption on the back. ‘Persephone, Jack, Stefan and Dido. Summer 1930.’
‘Persephone? What a mouthful of a name,’ Clara said.
‘It’s Greek,’ Lucy replied, turning the photograph back over and looking at the foursome on the beach. ‘Persephone was queen of the underworld in ancient mythology.’
Clara looked at Lucy, amused. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Pub quiz. It came up once. I didn’t know the answer though. I’m mostly in charge of literature and celebrity gossip.’
Her sister laughed. It was a lovely sound, and Lucy knew right then that deep down she missed Clara. She would tell her. Later.
‘Now I think about it, Dido is from ancient mythology as well,’ Lucy said thoughtfully. She ran her finger over the faded ink on the back of the photo. History lessons at school in Guernsey had taught her that roughly a decade after this picture was taken the Germans invaded the Channel Islands and Hitler’s obsession with Guernsey and the surrounding archipelago, nestled in between England and France, had begun in earnest. But she knew, or rather she remembered, very little about the islands’ history before that time. She traced the name Persephone with her finger. ‘What a beautiful name. Do you think she’s the sister? She has to be the sister. Bit coincidental to have two girls with ancient Greek first names unless two sets of parents were being particularly pretentious,’ Lucy mused.
‘You should hear some of the ridiculous names of the kids that Molly’s at school with. I can’t spell half of them,’ Clara said.
‘She looks older than Dido,’ Lucy said, examining the teenage girls in their bathing costumes, wet hair around their faces.
‘She looks taller, which is not always the same thing,’ Clara reasoned, looking at Lucy who was two inches taller than Clara and always had been since they were sixteen. Clara looked at her watch. ‘Molly and John will probably be hopping up and down wondering where we are.’
Lucy opened the lid of another box. This one was older, sturdier, browning with age. Inside was a stash of papers, wafer thin, carbon copies as if ripped hastily from a receipt pad. Each page was filled tightly with indiscernible lines, swoops and squiggles. Lucy groaned, recognising it at once as shorthand, something she had half-heartedly toyed with learning almost a decade ago on her graduate trainee course when she’d temporarily been a journalist on a local newspaper. But she’d bunked off from most of the classes, realising she could type faster than she could compile shorthand.
Clara peered down at the papers. ‘What on earth? Was someone blind drunk when they wrote this?’
‘It’s shorthand.’ Lucy laughed. ‘Strokes and loops represent words. Phonetically I mean. At first glance I can’t work out any words on this page and …’ Lucy looked at the next one. ‘Maybe only one on this one. I’m so rusty.’ She didn’t dare tell Clara she’d skipped most of the classes.
‘What’s the one word you can make out?’ Clara asked as she stood.
Lucy studied the pen marks. ‘I think I’m guessing more than anything.’
‘Go on …’ Clara said.
Lucy folded the papers up gently and replaced them in the box. ‘I’m not sure but … I think, possibly, it says “resistance”.’
Summer 1940
Persephone jolted as the bedroom door was pushed opened so abruptly that it crashed into the wardrobe behind it. Her younger sister Dido ran into the room, blonde hair falling from the pins in which she usually kept it elegantly rolled, blue eyes flashing with a mix of fear and excitement.
‘They’re here, Persey,’ Dido said. ‘The Germans. They’re actually bloody here.’
Persephone closed her eyes, tipping her head down, letting her brown hair fall around her face. ‘We knew it would happen. I just didn’t think it would be so soon.’
After the trucks laden with tomatoes had been bombed in the harbour at St Peter Port, as they waited for export to England, the Islanders had all known it was only a matter of time before the Germans walked in. When the British army had demilitarised and left the island only days before, it was as if the door had been held wide open for the Nazis.
‘Do you think it’s too late to leave?’ Dido asked, glancing down at their mother. She had been in bed with influenza for the best part of the week and Persey was more than a little worried.
‘Yes. It’s too late. How would we ever get off the island now? How would we get Mother off? She’s too sick to be moved. It’s why we never went days ago. I thought she would recover sooner. I thought we’d have time,’ Persephone muttered.
‘There must be a way,’ Dido remonstrated with panic in her voice. ‘There’s always a way. If only Mother—’
‘It’s not her fault, Di. You could have gone without us. There’ve been boats leaving for England for days. You could have got on any one of them.’
‘I didn’t want to leave you, then.’
‘But now?’ Persey asked.
‘Now it’s different,’ Dido explained. ‘Now they’re actually here. Planes have been landing. Troops have been seen. I could go and see if there’s a boat or … It’s the best time to go, now, before the Germans get their feet under the table, before they know what’s what.’ Dido sat on the end of the bed, causing a dip in the mattress and making their mother murmur in her sleep. ‘What do you think, Persey? Shall I go and see?’
Persey reached out for her sister’s hand and spoke softly. ‘It’s
