Danielle Byers

“Every Monday and Friday night, leaving us with awful suppers to reheat, our mum didn’t work late shifts at the printworks. She went to an office in Shoreditch. And from there, by radio, by note, by telephone and letters, she exchanged messages with Miss Carter and Mrs. Henderson and Queenie and others like them on what she called ‘humanitarian war work’. She’d never met any of them in person.
‘I can’t tell you any more details. It’s secret work. How you know even this much is really quite beyond me,’ she admitted.
‘I worked most of it out myself,’ I told her. She might’ve hidden it from me all this time, but I wasn’t stupid. ‘Sounds like Sukie did too.’
‘Your sister spied on me,’ Mum replied bitterly. ‘She stole paperwork, listened in to private conversations. She was very foolish to get caught up in something she knew nothing about.’
‘She did know about it, though. What Hitler’s doing really got to her. She was desperate to do something about it. All that post from Devon? It wasn’t from Queenie. Those were letters from the lighthouse, written by Ephraim, who feels the same about the Jewish people as Sukie does.’
‘It was stupid, impulsive behaviour,’ Mum argued, ‘of the sort your sister’s very good at.’
Yet to me she had missed a vital point.
‘You know Sukie wanted to help you, don’t you? She saw how ill you’d got over Dad. By standing in for you on this job, she was making sure you’d get some rest, like the doctor said you should.’
‘I might’ve known you’d stick up for your sister,’ Mum remarked. ‘But it didn’t help me – it worried me sick!’
‘It did help thirty-two refugees, though,’ I reminded her.
‘She was lucky she didn’t get arrested straight away.’ Mum went on as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘When I found out that night what she’d done, I was all for going after her, hauling her back and locking her in her bedroom, till this frightful war was over if I had to. But it was too late by then. She was already halfway to France.’
‘You knew the night she disappeared?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘And admit that I do undercover work and Sukie was doing it too?’ Mum cried. ‘Good grief, Olive, it’s secret business. It was too dangerous to tell you. There’s a war on, remember!’
‘People always use that excuse,’ I muttered.
It stunned me that Mum had known all this time. But then, hadn’t there been signs? The looks in our kitchen between her and Gloria, the refusal to talk about Sukie, the bundling us off out of the way – to here, the very place Sukie might, with any luck, show up. It was a clever way of making sure we knew the moment she set foot on British soil again.”
― Emma Carroll, Letters from the Lighthouse

“Hearing their stories made me sadder, somehow, because these people weren’t strangers any more – they had names, did important jobs, had exciting futures ahead. One of them was only five days old.
Like the people in that miserable newsreel, they all had yellow badges sewn on to the left breast of their coats. They were star-shaped, the word Jude written in handwriting clumsier than Cliff’s. They weren’t badges to be proud of like the ones we got at school for good work. Their only purpose, it seemed, was to make sure people know: you were one of those ‘types’ Hitler loathed.
How could these people be made to feel ashamed of who they were? I hadn’t thought I could hate the Nazis more than I already did. Now, though, I really understood why Sukie was so distraught at what was happening in Europe. We weren’t Jewish, but we were human beings and that was more than enough reason to be outraged.”
― Emma Carroll, Letters from the Lighthouse

“The Jenkins family, who took her in after the Kindertransport, gave her their surname. She didn’t expect to see any of her family again. This was supposed to be a fresh start for her, here in England. Her mother, God bless her, was already dead. Her father was in trouble with the authorities.’
‘For doing what?’ Though I had pretty much guessed the answer: he was Jewish.
‘It’s just so stupid,’ I said, drying the plate rather roughly. ‘How can you hate someone just because of how they live their life?’
Mrs. Henderson sighed. ‘People like to have something to hate – it makes life easier when things go wrong if there’s someone to blame. Think about what happened here today with that pilot, Olive.’
She meant how quickly the crowd turned on him. It was frightening how easily normal, pleasant people got whipped up into nastiness. The possibility that something similar had happened to Esther’s family disturbed me.
‘But it’s worse than that, isn’t it?’ I said, thinking ‘The German pilot was a fighter from the enemy side. Esther’s family were… well… just people.’
‘Yes, my dear,’ Mrs. Henderson sighed again, blowing damp strands of hair off her face. ‘Normal, educated, cultured people. It was all very well, the Kindertransport, but what good’s a child without its parents? You saw what it did to Esther.’
‘Well, I’m glad they’re all here,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you helped them.’
Mrs. Henderson looked sad. ‘But we can’t save everyone… our government needs to take some responsibility and do much, much more. We should be helping them flee Hitler, not turning them away. We’ve had to smuggle these good people in like criminals.”
― Emma Carroll, Letters from the Lighthouse

“I still didn’t understand everything. People, it seemed to me, were much harder to crack than codes. Yet it didn’t matter where we came from, our language, our nationality, or our religion. As long as we all looked to the light.”
― Emma Carroll, Letters from the Lighthouse