Heartwarming and emotional story of one girl's courage in WW2 Fenella Miller (best books for 8th graders txt) 📖

He didn’t wait for an answer, just assumed she would do as he said. If there were two assailants, then it would be better if there were two of them as well. She didn’t hear him leave but felt a slight draught as the door opened and closed.

Should she get dressed before she went down? Would the time it took to put her clothes on prove critical? Her dressing gown was cumbersome and flapped about her ankles. With this off and wearing her slippers and pyjamas she was perfectly decent and able to move about freely.

Greg hadn’t put on his shoes – he would want to be as quiet as possible. She slipped through the door and pressed herself against the wall expecting to hear shouting or shots – but the house was eerily silent. Edging closer to the stairs without making a sound was more difficult than she’d thought. Several floorboards creaked when you stepped on them and she had to keep pausing, trying to remember which ones they were.

She was halfway down the stairs before she could hear voices coming from the kitchen. There was a knot in her stomach and her legs were trembling. Where was Greg? She didn’t want to bump into him if he was carrying a loaded shotgun.

The sitting room door was across the hall to her left, at the bottom of the stairs. To access the kitchen and dining room you stepped into the central passageway which led to the back door. The man who had captured Jack must have been standing there when she’d heard him.

There was only one weapon – Greg must be ahead of her. She picked it up and from the moonlight filtering in through the open curtains she found two cartridges and dropped them into the barrels. The smell of cordite still lingered in the room as an unpleasant reminder of what had taken place in here earlier.

Something made her decide to exit via the window and not creep through the house. Instead she would make her way around the outside where she was less likely to be heard and would have a better chance of surprising the attackers.

With the cartridges back in her pocket and the gun safe to carry she scrambled over the windowsill and dropped into the flowerbed that ran directly underneath. The quickest route to the kitchen was to go past the front door and turn right. She would have to crawl almost immediately if she wasn’t to be seen.

She paused beside the window to listen. Someone was talking quietly and she recognised the speaker as Greg. For a second she was unable to breathe. How had they taken him captive so easily and so silently? She edged back until she was at the front of the house again. These men now had two hostages and at least three guns and she only had the one.

However, she had the advantage of surprise. Her heart was racing, her palms damp. She couldn’t think straight. Then her head cleared and she had a brainwave. There was a box of fireworks in the barn and she was pretty sure there were bangers amongst them. They were several years old but that shouldn’t be a problem. She only needed a couple for her plan to work.

*

Jack instinctively raised his hands. The press of cold metal on his naked flesh was more than enough to make him cooperate without argument. The gun barrel dug into him, forcing him to move towards the kitchen.

All he could think was that he didn’t know where Ellie had hidden the envelope. They’d have to fetch her and he didn’t want her downstairs with these two bastards.

He stubbed his toe painfully on the wooden doorstep and stumbled into the kitchen and would have crashed to his knees on the flagstones if his capturer hadn’t grabbed his shoulder. Luckily, it was the left one.

There was sufficient light from the room to see where he was going. The second bloke must have been waiting inside to close the door behind them.

The pressure in his spine continued. Why didn’t one of them speak? If he was fit, he would have risked disarming the bugger with the gun but now had no option but to obey. He pulled out one of the chairs from under the table and swung it round so he could sit.

It was a relief to have his back safely pressing against the back of a chair. ‘I don’t want anyone else to be hurt. You can have the bloody paper but I don’t know where it is. Someone hid it whilst I was asleep.’

‘Did you read it?’

Jack hesitated, not sure if it would be better to admit they all knew the contents or deny having looked at it. Sod it! ‘I know it’s a page from the membership book listing the treasonous shits who are members of the fascist party.’ The atmosphere changed. He ploughed on regardless. ‘If I’d wanted to give it to the authorities I’d have done so already. That bastard Humphrey happens to be Ellie Simpson’s grandfather. So family comes first and you can have the bloody list and bugger off.’

The light was switched on and he blinked in the glare. The two men pulled off their balaclavas and dropped their handguns on the table with a clatter.

‘We were sent by someone else on the list and didn’t know there was any family connection. This is an unmitigated disaster and our employer will not be happy that we broke into the house of Sir Reginald’s granddaughter.’

The speaker, not much older than himself, seemed genuinely upset. What had been a life-threatening situation now seemed to be something else entirely.

‘Which one of you bastards shot me?’

The other guy turned to face him. He looked the tougher of the two. ‘It was me. I apologise wholeheartedly. But I can assure you if I’d meant to kill you, you would have been dead. It’s only a flesh wound.’

The door swung open and