The Wartime Book Club

by Kate Thompson

Genres: World War II; War & Military; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Inspired by true events, The Wartime Book Club is an unforgettable story of everyday bravery and resistance, full of romance, drama, and camaraderie and a tribute to the joy of reading and the power of books in our darkest hour.

The Isle of Jersey was once a warm and neighborly community, but in 1943, German soldiers patrol the cobbled streets, imposing a harsh rule.
 
Nazis have ordered Grace La Mottée, the island's only librarian, to destroy books that threaten the new regime. Instead, she hides the stories away in secret. Along with her headstrong best friend, she wants to fight back. So she forms the Wartime Book Club: a lifeline, offering fearful islanders the joy and escapism of reading.
 
But as the occupation drags on, the women's quiet acts of bravery become more perilous – and more important – than ever before. And when tensions turn to violence, they are forced to face the true, terrible cost of resistance . . .
 
Based on astonishing real events, The Wartime Book Club is a love letter to the power of books in the darkest of times – as well as a moving page-turner that brings to life the remarkable, untold story of an island at war.

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 448

Sample

The Artificial Silk Girl, published in 1932 by German novelist Irmgard Keun, tells the story of a young Berlin woman who resorts to prostitution in her quest to become a cabaret star. The Nazis deplored its “vulgar depiction of German womanhood.” Irmgard’s own life reads like a novel. Following her blacklisting and unsuccessful attempt to sue the Gestapo for loss of earnings, she fled Germany, faking her own death in 1940 in order to visit her parents with false papers.

Beatrice Gold burned through life like a wildfire. Not a beauty in the traditional sense. Each individual feature was too much for her face. Lips a great wide dollop of strawberry jam, wild dark curls and a glint in her eye that spelt mischief. And right now, in about as much trouble as it was possible to be.

Naked, she lay crushed beneath a man’s hot body, his salt-brined skin burning next to hers, the sand dunes prickling the flesh on her back.

“Jimmy, you sod! Why did you have to distract me? I’ll have missed the last bus into town.”

He grinned and ran his hands down her arms, pinning them down into the sand.

“Distract you? How’s that for romantic!”

“You know what I mean.”

“Listen, you might as well stay. Don’t want you getting caught out after curfew.”

She smiled sweetly. “Oh please, the blockhead Boche won’t catch me. Most of them couldn’t find their own arsehole with both hands.”

He trailed kisses down her neck. “You’re so beautiful, Bea. Even if you do have a mouth like a sailor.”

“Behave,” she snorted. “Look at the state of me. I haven’t seen lipstick in three years and a coat hanger’s got more curves than me.”

Her thoughts instantly strayed to some of the Jerrybags in town walking round freshly rouged and scented. Some of the girls in Jersey would do anything for a handful of dirty Reichsmarks.

Jimmy leaned down to kiss her, but a well-placed knee in the groin soon had her free as she groped for her frock and pulled it over her head, before jamming her feet into an ugly pair of Summerland wooden clogs.

“I’ll get a proper tongue-lashing if I’m late,” she muttered, fastening up the buttons on her cardigan. “You know my mum… the only woman who can go on holiday and come back with a sunburnt tongue.”

Jimmy laughed, his cheeks creasing into dimples. The early evening sun brought out the deep muddy green of his eyes.

“Holidays.” He sighed, reluctantly getting to his feet. “Remember those?”

He pulled her close, trailed sandy kisses up her neck. “One day, Bea, we’ll travel all round Europe, no curfews, no barbed wire. Just empty beaches and cold beers.”

Jimmy La Mottée, a farmer’s son from St. Ouen’s. If she didn’t love him so much she would never have stuck it out. The cycle ride to his home on the west of the island from St. Helier was quite a feat on a bike with hosepipes for wheels. Bea’s physical health was at its lowest ebb. Before the war it had been a cinch, but now after each trip her lungs felt like they could split open.

The moment of purgatory began at 6 p.m. when the post office on Broad Street closed. Bea stared down at her skinny legs. The hunger was an actual gnawing pain in her tummy. It felt wrong to grumble—everyone was in the same boat after all—but three years of occupation had taken its toll. Even her soul felt emaciated.

Bea realized with a pang what she had actually missed even more than a good meal. Going to the library where Jimmy’s sister, her best friend Grace, worked and getting out any book she wanted. Losing herself in the glamour of a Hollywood motion picture. Skinny-dipping under the stars. The iron grip over the most petty details of their lives had tightened, the tentacles of Nazification slowly spreading.

Bea was still brooding when she realized Jimmy had asked her something.

“Huh? Did you say something?”

“That’s a charming response to my marriage proposal.”

He stared at her with a wry smile, grains of sand speckling his dirty blond hair.

“Don’t be so daft! Wait… you’re not serious, are you?”

“Please, Bea, just listen. It’s important.”

Jimmy pulled her back down into the sand dunes, hidden from view.

“I want to marry you.”

“You’re up to something. What is it?”

He laughed and rubbed his hands through his hair shaking loose the sand.

“Very well. I’m going to get off the island.” A nerve was jumping beneath his jawline.

“When?” she demanded.

“Tomorrow, if the tides are right. But listen, Bea, you have to believe me. When I make it to England, I’ll wait there for you. Then when the war is over you can come and join me and we can get married there. Maybe even move to London. You can’t stay working at the post office all your life.”

“B-but this is madness, Jimmy. You’re a farmer, not a fisherman. What do you know of the seas? The tidal currents around Jersey are lethal.”

“There are three of us, plus a French fisherman on the east of the island who has petrol.”

“But you can’t possibly escape from the east coast. It’d be suicide.”

“We aren’t. We’re going from the west.”

“But that’s even more dangerous! You’ll have to catch exactly the right current. If you don’t get blown up by a mine, you’ll be dashed against a rocky outcrop.”

“Denis Vibert managed to escape to England and in an eight-foot rowing boat,” he said, defensively, scooping up sand and letting it trickle between his fingers.

“Besides,” he continued slyly, “I have insurance.”

He opened his coat a fraction and she spotted the tip of a gun.

“Walther P38 pistol,” he said as proudly as if he were showing her a fatted calf.

“German?” she gasped. “Did you steal that?”

“Come on, Bea, it’s not considered stealing if it’s from Jerry.”

Panic slammed through her.

“And… and what about Dennis Audrain last year, and Peter Hassall and Maurice Gould? Dennis drowned. Peter and Maurice are in prison God knows where on the continent. No. It’s too dangerous, especially if you have that thing.”

The final grain of sand slipped from his hand and he turned to her.

“The point is, Bea, for every ten men that failed there’s one who didn’t, proving it can be done. I may end up in the Gloucester Street Mansion, but so what, at least I’ll have a story to tell the grandkids.”

A story to tell the grandkids?

There were no fables or heroic endings to be found in this occupation, just uncertainty, hunger and survival. Bea stared out through the dunes at the long sweep of St. Ouen’s Bay, its golden sands now smothered in an ugly scrawl of barbed wire and felt something calcify inside her. This island, once so beautiful, was now an anchored fortress. She felt hermetically sealed behind hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of concrete and all the other detritus of war. Day and night the engines smoked and machines pounded, to turn these ancient green islands into part of Hitler’s mighty, impregnable Atlantic wall.

She closed her eyes against the image of war and felt the cool ocean breeze combing her hair. Jimmy sighed into the wind. Being dissuaded by his parents from joining the British forces had been a bitter blow to Jimmy’s ego. He’d watched most of his friends virtually run onto the evacuee boats, champing at the bit to join the fight, leaving him behind to help on the farm as a reserved occupation. His parents had dressed his farming exemption up as a noble and heroic contribution to the war effort, but milking cows was never going to be enough for a man as patriotic as Jimmy.

“Bea…” He nudged her with his shoulder. “I’m not asking your permission,” he said. “I’m going.” He took her hand and his voice softened. “But I’d like to go knowing that you’ve agreed to be my wife. Please believe me. If I stay here, I think my mind’ll snap.”

“Oh, thanks very much!”

“No, you misunderstand, Bea. Try to see it through my eyes. My brothers are fighting alongside the British and what am I doing? Growing wheat for the Germans’ bread. Only today I had one of their agricultural commandos breathing down my neck. They don’t seem to understand that Mother Nature doesn’t abide by the orders of Feldkommandantur 515. I found one of the buggers in the yard the other day checking my cows’ teats and demanding stats on yields to see whether I’m selling on the black market.”

He broke off, wiped a hand across the stubble on his chin.

Jimmy’s anger was palpable. He bristled with it, like iron filings under a magnet. “I feel like a caged animal, Bea. Don’t you see? This island is a prison without walls.”

Bea ran her hand down his neck, feeling the tension of his corded muscles.

“Very well. You’ve made up your mind, but for the record, I think you’re barmy.”

“Are you barmy enough to be my wife?”

She laughed because if she didn’t she would cry.

“Certifiable.”

“Is that a yes?”

She nodded and dashed back her tears. She would never let him see her cry. Even when her father died, she hadn’t shown her frailty to anyone.

“Oh, Bea, I can’t tell you how happy you’ve made me,” Jimmy said, crushing his lips against hers with a scalding relief. But she tasted the fear seeping through his kisses and felt the cold hard weight of his stolen gun pressing into her chest.

He pulled something from his pocket.

“Oh, Jimmy…” She turned the battered tin ring over with her fingers.

“I engraved it with our initials. See.”

JLM. BG.

“It’s only temporary, until I can get something better,” he went on, scanning her face for her reaction. And in that moment she saw the whole of the occupation and its tedium and privation wash over his face.

She slipped it on her finger.

“This is something better.” Bea kissed him softly. “I love you so much, Jimmy La Mottée.”

She smelled them before she saw them, and fear rose inside her. Jimmy realized it too and pulled back, instinctively pushing her back down among the dunes.

Through the rushes, they spotted an Organisation Todt patrol, leading a group of Russian and Polish slave workers up the beach. There was a quarry not far from where they were sitting, and the prisoners were being marched back to their labor camp. Bea moaned softly at the sight of them dressed in nothing but rags, covered in mud and cement from a day’s labor, crawling with lice and disease.

Since the slaves’ and forced-laborers’ arrival on the island last August it felt like the trickle had turned to a flood and now, one year on, the place was filled with the wretched souls. She had seen their camps dotted round the island: long low wooden huts surrounded by barbed wire, full of people hollowed out with hunger and pain. There were no more sweet-smelling freesias and carnations, delicious tomatoes or new potatoes to be found in Jersey’s fields any longer. Just walking skeletons.

Their rigid, melancholy silhouettes grew closer and Bea found herself transfixed by their faces, eyes haunted under their peaked caps. Bea forced herself to look closely at one, trying to humanize a life that to the Germans was Untermensch—sub-human.

“He’s nothing but a boy,” she murmured in horror.

“Ssh. If they’re on their way back it must be past curfew. We’re in the military zone, don’t forget. They’ll shoot us on the spot if they see us here.”

The boy was 14… 15 at most. She winced as he trudged closer. She was thin, but he was nothing but bones draped in skin.

Before she could stop herself, she reached into her satchel and pulled out an old turnip she had found by the roadside. With all her might she flung it over the top of the dune and watched it bounce and roll up the beach, coming to rest at the boy’s foot.

Jimmy whipped round, horrified, his eyes so wide she could see all the whites.

“Halt!” screamed a guard, his harsh accent carrying on the wind.

The slaves fell on the turnip, but the boy, smaller and nimbler, grabbed it and devoured it, foam and mud bubbling from his mouth.

“What have you done, Bea?” Jimmy whispered.

The khaki-clad OT guard, hair gleaming like patent leather, face like a knife, strode up to the boy and as calmly as if he were stroking a cat, took his rifle and slammed it into the boy’s face. Bea heard the cracking of bone, as he crumpled to the sand.

“Nehmen Sie Ihren Hut ab!” Remove your hat. The boy lifted his head, blood streaming from a gash on his forehead, and yanked off his cap.

“Why is your hat off? Put it back on!” he ordered, winking at his fellow guards.

No sooner had the boy replaced it, the guard brought his rifle butt crashing down on his head. This time the cap flew off backward from the force of the blow. Laughing, another guard replaced the cap and gestured to his colleague. Two of the guards pinned the boy between them, his blood-soaked legs dangling off the ground.

The awful truth dawned on Bea. It was nothing but a sick game to these scum to see how many times they could knock his cap off before he died.

“I- I can’t watch this,” she whispered. Tears blurred her vision as she turned and crawled back along the dunes to where they had left their bikes, hidden in a thicket of trees by the coast road.

She leaned over the frame of her bike, consumed with guilt at the stupidity of her actions. The scorching pain of her anger dislodged other, darker memories that streamed over her uninvited. The dull thud of bombs. Blood seeping over the white planks of her father’s fishing boat. The fields of Jersey had run red with blood and tomatoes that summer’s day in 1940. Bea had been working late at the post office when the bombers had come. The night her father had bled to death in his fishing boat. And in their fear, confusion and grief, they had all wondered what would happen next.

Three years on, this was what.

“I hate them,” she seethed, feeling a sense of loathing sneak into every nook and cranny of her soul. “I hate the bastards!” Jimmy pulled her into his arms and moved his mouth to her ear.

“You see, Bea? You see now why I have to escape? People have to hear of this. The Nazis are telling England this is a model occupation. They have to know what is really happening here.”

She nodded, surprised to find herself agreeing, but more astonished to realize that, for the first time since her father had been ripped apart by a German bomb, she was finally crying.

The wind whipped through the long dune grass, spinning whirlpools of sand into their faces.

“I’m so sorry, Bea,” Jimmy said, struggling to hold back his tears. “Stay with me tonight, please.”

She nodded and lifted her sharp little chin. “I will. Because I’ve decided—I’m coming with you. I’m getting off this island too.”

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. Banned in occupied countries by Nazi Germany by order of the Propaganda Administration.

Grace La Mottée considered herself very lucky to be the acting Chief Librarian of St. Helier Public Library, or as it was known to most, the “Bibliothèque Publique.” One of the oldest libraries in the British Isles, established in 1736, as she was very proud to tell anyone who would listen (and those that wouldn’t).

It was her very own book-lined palace of dreams. Perhaps in the current climate, palace was overstating it. These days everything was subject to rationing and even their book stock had been severely depleted by the Germans’ idea of what constituted an affront to the Third Reich.

Shortly after the invasion, they had received a directive from the Feldkommandantur informing them the library would soon be visited for a full evaluation of stock and that all banned books must be turned over. She and Ash had weeded out most of the verboten—forbidden—books, hiding them in a secure place, leaving some behind as collateral damage so the Germans hadn’t suspected.

They had come back of course, three months after the invasion and again last year, little gray men with rat-like faces, and stripped yet more. More authors uncongenial to the Nazi regime had vanished from the stacks. The expurgation didn’t end there. Montagu Burton’s, the Jewish tailors on the corner of King Street, had also received a visit. It didn’t sell suits any longer, but was now a German bookshop. Mein Kampf and Famine in England were advertised in the window display under swastikas. It was so offensive that each time Grace walked past, she instinctively turned the other cheek.

Grace flicked her duster over the stacks and sighed. Not that they were faring much better! Her poor bookshelves looked like a smile with missing teeth. Jack London, H. G. Wells, John Steinbeck, Sigmund Freud and Ernest Hemingway all gone. Anyone considered by the Germans to be a “dangerous, disruptive influence.”

“But you’re still here, my old friends,” she said, smiling as she ran her finger down the spine of Pride and Prejudice and the very last Agatha Christie which had been delivered to the island on the mail boat before the Germans arrived: Cards on the Table.

Agatha looked down at her knowingly. Eight hundred new books, the lifeblood of a library were delivered yearly, but no more. This last book from England had had more loans than any other over the past three years. When the war was over, Grace was tempted to write to Agatha Christie, to tell her how her books had escaped a Nazi cull. Unlike so many others.

Grace slid her finger into her skirt pocket and felt the cold nub of the steel key with her finger, checking it was still there. This key was the last thing Ash had handed her before the Nazis had shipped him to a German internment camp, along with most of the other English-born nationals, the previous September. He had pressed it into her hand with a request. Keep these books safe. And secret.

In a locked cupboard behind a bookshelf in the Reading Room were “the others.”

“One day, you’ll all be back together on the same shelf,” she remarked. “Until then, Mrs. Christie, enjoy your shelf space.”

She spotted Jane Austen, chiding her gently from the shelf above.

“Come on, Grace, pull yourself together,” she muttered. “All this self-pity is most self-indulgent.”

“Do you always talk to your books, Grace, my love?”

Grace jumped. Five minutes before closing on a Saturday afternoon and the library was usually empty.

“Mrs. Moisan. Lovely to see you. Not usually,” she lied. “How can I help?”

She pushed down a flutter of anxiety as she glanced at the clock over her desk. He’d be waiting for her.

“Oh, you’re soaked,” Grace said, noticing the water pooling round the country woman’s wooden sabot clogs. “Is it raining?”

“Never rain, only liquid sunshine.”

Mrs. Moisan was an eternal optimist and with good reason. Everyone knew Mr. Moisan was handy with his fists and now that he was away fighting in North Africa, she had been spared the annual confinement.

Grace had no idea how she did it. Mrs. Moisan had once confided in her that she’d had 19 pregnancies and 11 children had survived. She was as tough as old boots, but with the occupation, for Mrs. M at least, had come a curious liberation now she was no longer under the thumb and fist of her husband.

“How’s Dolly?”

Mrs. Moisan’s cheerful demeanor faltered at the mention of her youngest daughter.

“Not good is the truth of it, Grace, my love. That’s why I’m here. Thought a book might cheer her up.”

A diphtheria epidemic had been sweeping the island for weeks now.

“Mrs. Rishon came round today, gave her some of her potions, so I’m sure that’ll work.” Grace wasn’t convinced the country women’s old folklore herbal remedies of crushed-up snails would do much to help little Dolly, but in the absence of medicine, it would have to do.

“Well, I know just the thing,” Grace said, heading to the children’s section.

She pulled out Milly, Molly, Mandy. Six-year-old Dolly gobbled up books and Grace had a feeling that the adventures of another little girl in a pink-and-white-striped dress would be medicine in its own way.

“And what about something for you, Mrs. M?”

Mrs. Moisan had a fondness for novels that featured heroines who clung to the chest of a dashing scoundrel, before finally succumbing to his affections in a hayloft.

“Shorts and Merries” as some of the fustier members of the committee dubbed their stock of romances. They could never hope to understand what these books might mean to women like Mrs. Moisan. What might seem like sentimental trash to them was pure escapism from the grind for the island’s women.

“How about an Ethel M. Dell? Can I tempt you with Juice of the Pomegranate?”

“Ooh, I should say. That’ll help me escape…”

“If only for a chapter,” Grace finished, stamping Mrs. Moisan’s library card.

Mrs. M left a slice of stale cake and an egg on the library counter.

“Really, there’s no need,” Grace protested.

“Hush now,” the bluff country woman ordered, gripping her hand with surprising strength. “It’s only this place keeping us going, my love.”

She knocked four times on the library counter. Three soft, one brisk. The “V Knock.” Then she stomped from the library. Churchill’s “V for Victory” had become a rallying emblem for those unfortunate enough to be living under occupation, but lately islanders had turned it into something even more subversive and ephemeral. The sound seemed to quiver through the stacks, almost reducing Grace to tears. Women like Mrs. M were why she did this. Reading was the only true form of joy and solace, the only intellectual freedom they still possessed and they cherished it like life itself.

Grace glanced up at the clock. Oh Lord. Now she really was late.

Outside the library the rain had died off and the light was softening. The streets glistened as she worked hard to get her rusty old bone-shaker bicycle to turn on its hosepipe wheels.

The library was in the Royal Square, which contained the offices of the States of Jersey, the seat of legislation in the island. She stared back at the rain-slicked windows, imagined all those Nazis beavering away. It was an affront to all that the library stood for to have to work next door to such a snakepit.

Shivering, she bumped her way through St. Helier, past the scoured faces of the mothers queuing at the Central Market for the last specks, shabby and downtrodden in their patched-up coats. The air was a stew of smells. Horse shit, asphalt, salt and the stench of something darker—desperation.

It wasn’t until she had made her way toward the coast road that the knot in her tummy unwound and she finally felt she could breathe in the fresh scent of pine. At the top of Jubilee Hill she paused to take in the breathtaking view of the glittering blue-green sea and the tip of Corbière Lighthouse in the distance.

A cuckoo called from a nearby tree and she listened, entranced.

The patrol was on her before she even realized. “Halt!” ordered the German. “Papers, Fraulein.” The branches rustled as the cuckoo’s wings took flight.

She pulled out her identification card.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m the librarian. I’m delivering books.”

He stared at her for what felt like an eternity, as if he couldn’t quite believe the notion of anyone using up precious energy to deliver books.

He lifted his hand and Grace thought he was waving her on, but instead he pointed at her satchel. “Open it.”

Grace’s heart picked up speed.

“Open it?” she managed.

“That’s what I said. Are you dumb?” He turned to the other German and laughed as if he’d told the funniest joke imaginable.

Slowly, as if in a dream, she pulled open the satchel, and felt as exposed as if the German had peeled off all her clothes.

She closed her eyes as he thrust his hand into her bag. Her heart was banging so loudly she was surprised they couldn’t hear it.

The German guard shrank back, a look of disgust on his face.

“Was ist das?” His fingers were coated in something sticky. Grace recognized the eggshell and started to laugh, more out of hysteria.

“It’s my egg. It broke.”

The German looked at her as if she was simple, and tutting, waved her on, wiping his hands on a handkerchief in disgust.

Twenty minutes later Grace pulled up at Louisa Gould’s, the widow who ran Millais Stores, still trembling.

The door opened with a soft tinkle of the bell and when Louisa saw her, she turned the sign to CLOSED and pulled down the blackout blind.

“Bouônjour!”

“I don’t speak Jèrriais, Lou.”

“You should learn then. It might be an archaic language to you youngsters but it has its uses in wartime.”

Grace said nothing.

“What’s wrong?” the older woman asked.

“I nearly got caught.”

“What? Where?”

“A new checkpoint they’ve set up, about a mile from here.”

Louisa shrugged.

“What’s the worst that’ll happen?”

“The worst that will happen? I think you know where we could all end up.”

Louisa sighed and slid her arm around Grace. “It’s all right. Those krauts are too slow and stupid to catch a cold. They want to get home as much as we want them to leave. They know the war’s finished for them.” She waved her hand dismissively.

“Maybe the ones round here, but not the ones in town,” Grace replied. “Do you know how many people have been marched to see the Secret Field Police for questioning? They’re so paranoid, they even threw a schoolgirl in jail last week.”

“Relax. I can deal with it.”

Grace sensed movement from behind the door at the back of the store.

“That’s my nephew. He’s over from France, helping me out,” Louisa said unconvincingly.

“I have something for you.” She pulled out the Russian–English dictionary and slid it over the counter.

“Thank you, Grace. This will be very helpful with my… houseguest.”

Grace nodded. She had so many questions. How much longer would the escaped Russian slave everyone knew simply as “Bill” be staying? He had already been hiding in plain sight at the store, masquerading as Lou’s nephew for too many months. He should have been moved on to another safehouse by now. Louisa was taking unnecessary risks and in doing so, risking the lives of all those around her. Guilt sneaked in at the edges. Wasn’t Grace doing exactly the same thing?

“What can I do?” Louisa said. “He’s another mother’s son. I’ve already lost one of my boys in this war and the other is away fighting. He’s a comfort to me.”

At this there was nothing Grace could say. She wasn’t a mother, she couldn’t hope to understand. Mrs. Gould was, and a grieving one at that. Her son Edward, an anti-aircraft officer, had been killed in action in 1941, fighting with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

“Our island is being stained with the blood of innocent men and women, Grace. To turn the other cheek is to be complicit.”

“You’re right, Lou,” she sighed. “But now I must go.”

At the door Mrs. Gould called her back. “You’re a brave woman, Grace.”

Grace smiled weakly. She didn’t want to be a brave woman. She wanted simply to be a good librarian and live quietly. But then she thought of the hidden box of books in the library. The others, where that dictionary had come from. Grace knew that to be a good librarian in wartime, it was impossible not to face terrible choices in the quest for freedom.

Back at home, her family farmhouse slumbered in the creamy moonlight. In relief she pushed open the door. Something to eat then she would at last go and see him.

“Surprise,” Bea yelled. The room was filled with blazing light, and people and music.

“What are you doing here?”

“Aren’t you pleased to see me?” Bea asked, throwing her arms around Grace.

“Yes, of course but what about curfew, Bea? You’ll never get back in time.”

“Your mum said I can stay over tonight. We’ve something to celebrate.”

And then she was waving her fingers in Grace’s face. It took a moment for Grace’s clogged thoughts to register the ring.

“Hello, sis,” said her brother, Jimmy. “She’s promised to make an honest man of me.”

“We’re getting married, Grace,” Bea said. “Isn’t it wonderful news?”

Grace tried hard to assemble her thoughts into an appropriate reaction. It wasn’t that she wasn’t pleased for the two most important people in her life. They’d always knocked about, she, Bea and her big brother. Bea had always been the tomboy, daring her and Jimmy to launch homemade raft. . .