Danielle Byers

“It didn’t take long to remove all the stars.
‘What do we do with them now?’ a boy at the front asked.
Mrs. Simmons gestured to the coal stove that burned in a corner of the classroom. But Esther shook her head: ‘Can everyone put their star into the pocket of the coat they removed it from, please?’
Mrs. Simmons looked confused. ‘Can’t we throw them away?’
‘They’re not yours to get rid of,’ Esther replied firmly. ‘What happens to each of those stars now is entirely up to the person who had to wear it.’
She was right: those stars were other people’s stories, not ours.”
― Emma Carroll, Letters from the Lighthouse

“It was then I saw on the side of the box – a name, a date: ‘Marcus Epstein: Frankfurt, March 2nd 1940’. It was today’s date, a year ago. And, at the bottom, a specific time.
2:10 p.m.
‘Romantic’, Mrs. Henderson had called Queenie’s clocks; but to me, realising what it probably meant, it made my throat thicken with tears. No wonder Mum had understood what a stopped clock might mean.
Something must’ve happened to Marcus Epstein that day, at that time. Something terrible that made Queenie’s life stop dead.
My brain tried to fill in the gaps. Perhaps Marcus was a Jew. Perhaps this was why she was so set on helping Hewish people, and had such guts when it came to standing up for what was decent.
I didn’t know. In many ways it didn’t matter. It was Queenie’s private business. She was the person who’d thrown stones at German aircraft, and yet protected the injured pilot from more harm. She fought for people, that was what Queenie did. Beneath our race, our religion, we were all human beings. We all hurt in the same ways.
Upstairs in front of the hall mirror, I could hear her now repinning her hair and fastening her coat.
‘Right, Olive, I’m ready,’ she called down.
I went to join her, taking in her smooth, tearless face, the newly tidied hair. You’d never know from looking at her that her heart was still breaking. But that was the awful thing: life did go on, and so did that horrible empty ache you felt when someone wasn’t there any more.”
― Emma Carroll, Letters from the Lighthouse

“Bit by bit, the noise died away. The pupils began to look quite intrigued. Some sat forward, chins in hands. You could see the mockery still lingering in their faces like they were waiting for something to make fun of. But as Esther explained the yellow stars and what they meant, their expressions changed.
It was like watching newspaper catch light when you made a fire. Once it took hold, the flames began to spread and glow. At last, the class were starting to understand. This was someone their age, who they sort of knew, explaining what prejudice felt like from the other side. That horrible sense that if people were your enemy it meant they didn’t feel, didn’t breath, didn’t think like you did. Really, they were hardly proper people at all. So it was all right to drop bombs and destroy people’s lives, or treat them no better than animals.
Except it wasn’t.
The mood grew ever more sombre. By the time Esther finished talking, a few pupils were wiping their eyes. The rest of the class looked stunned.
‘Thank you for listening,’ Esther said, her chin held high. I was close enough to see the tiniest tremble in her bottom lip. And it made me think her even more magnificent.”
― 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