The Sky is Falling Read online

  Praise for Kit Pearson

  “Kit Pearson is a great talent in Canadian children’s literature.”

  —The Guardian (Charlottetown)

  “One of Canada’s best junior fiction writers.”

  —The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)

  “Pearson is a strong writer whose work puts to shame most of the books that kids spend so much time reading these days.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “Kit Pearson gives young readers a strong testament of the interlocking nature and power of reading, writing and living.”

  —The Vancouver Sun

  “Another magical tale from the master.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Dazzle. It’s not the right word for what Kit Pearson manages to do … but it’s close. Closer would be a word that catches the irregular glint of light reflected on water, street lights suspended in fog, an opalescent fracturing of time and genre to create something with its own unique glow.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Through the vivid observation of two summers, Pearson weaves a summer out of time and weaves as well a spell over her readers.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “The very best in fiction for young adults. Kit Pearson does herself proud.”

  —The Windsor Star

  “Kit Pearson’s careful and exact research brings the period vividly before us.”

  —The London Free Press

  “The woman is a brilliant writer.”

  —Kingston This Week

  “Pearson superbly and gently captures the welter of emotions that beset a young teen who is experiencing the onset of adolescence and having to cope with its physical and emotional demands.”

  —CM

  “This is a writer at the top of her craft.”

  —Quill & Quire

  “Pearson’s real strength … lies in her ability to convey the texture of a specific time and place…. So vividly and lovingly evoked that it is almost possible to smell the pine trees.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  PUFFIN CANADA

  THE SKY IS FALLING

  KIT PEARSON was born in Edmonton and grew up there and in Vancouver. Her previous seven novels (six of which have been published by Penguin) have been published in Canada, in English and French, and in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, China, and Korea. She has received fourteen awards for her writing, including the Vicky Metcalf Award for her body of work. She presently lives in Victoria.

  Visit her website: www.kitpearson.com.

  Also by Kit Pearson

  The Daring Game

  A Handful of Time

  Looking at the Moon

  The Lights Go On Again

  Awake and Dreaming

  This Land: An Anthology of Canadian Stories for Young Readers

  (as editor)

  Whispers of War:

  The War of 1812 Diary of Susanna Merritt

  A Perfect Gentle Knight

  The Sky is Falling

  GUESTS OF WAR BOOK ONE

  KIT PEARSON

  PUFFIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, Auckland, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in a Puffin Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1989

  Published in Puffin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1990

  Published in this edition, 2007

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)

  Copyright © Kathleen Pearson, 1989

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-14-305634-8

  ISBN-10: 0-14-305634-4

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  For my parents

  It was a long journey they set out on,

  and they did not think of any end to it …

  “ALENOUSHKA AND HER BROTHER”

  (RUSSIAN FOLK TALE)

  PART 1

  1

  The Plane

  Norah, armed to the teeth, slithered on her stomach through the underbrush. She gripped her bow in her right hand and bit on a kitchen knife. A quiver of arrows made from sharpened twigs and decorated with chicken feathers slid sideways on her back, getting tangled with the string of her gas mask case. Pulling herself forward by her elbows, she finally reached the clearing.

  There she stopped to wait for Tom’s signal. The knife had an unpleasantly metallic taste. Spitting it out, she looked up and gaped in wonder.

  In front of her, glittering in the August sunlight, was a shot-down German aeroplane—a Messerschmitt 109. Norah recognized its square-cut wing tips and streamlined fuselage. But it looked more like a squashed dragonfly than a plane. Its wings stretched lifelessly over the ground and its split body exposed its innards. One propeller blade was bent back and twisted. Bullet holes spotted the metal corpse and a burnt, sour smell like vinegar rose from it.

  The mangled machine looked alien and out of place in Mr. Coomber’s peaceful field. Most sinister of all was the bold black swastika on the plane’s tail. When the war had begun a year ago, the Nazis had been safely on the other side of the Channel. Then they had started flying over England. And now, here was one of their planes only a few hundred yards away. A choking fear filled Norah, as if there were a weight on her chest.

  She took a deep breath and pulled herself to a sitting position, careful to stay concealed. In front of the aircraft, puffed with importance, stood Mr. Willis
from the village, his crisp new Home Guard emblem around his sleeve.

  Across the field, Tom waved his arm. Norah waved back and watched the answering signals from Harry and Jasper. Tom pointed to Norah. Good, they were going to assemble here. Maybe if she weren’t alone this strange new fear would leave her.

  “Isn’t it smashing?” whispered Tom a few minutes later. He and the younger two crept up to join her, dropping their weapons.

  With three warm bodies pressing close to hers, Norah breathed easily again. They all stared greedily at the plane’s parts: its instrument panel, machine guns, fuel caps and hanging shards of aluminum. Harry and Jasper were too awed to speak.

  “The tailfin’s completely undamaged,” said Tom softly. “If only Mr. Willis wasn’t there and we had a hacksaw, we could cut it off.”

  Several older boys broke through the trees on the opposite side of the field and hurried towards the plane, halting with frustration when they saw Mr. Willis.

  “Get away!” he called. “This plane will be guarded until the lorry comes, so there’s no use hanging about.”

  One of the boys darted behind the plane, snatched up some metal from the ground and bolted with his companions. Mr. Willis shouted helplessly after them.

  “I wonder where the pilot is?” mused Tom. “See his gear?” He pointed to the parachute pack, leather helmet and goggles abandoned in front of the wreck. “He could be lurking somewhere!”

  Norah had trouble breathing again as she took this in. One of Hitler’s men! The Enemy, the Hun, who wanted to conquer Britain, except Britain would never give up.

  “He’ll probably surrender,” said Tom, “or they’ll capture him. Or we will,” he added. Norah glanced doubtfully at her fragile arrows and the dull knife lying in the dirt.

  They watched the plane for an hour, until their arms and legs were cramped and Jasper complained he was thirsty. Finally, when it became obvious that Mr. Willis was not going to leave his post, they crept through the trees to their waiting bicycles. Slowly they rode back to Ringden, squeezing through the side of the barbed-wire roadblock. The guards knew them well and didn’t bother asking for their identity cards.

  As they neared the edge of the village, they waved to old Mrs. Chandler, who had had her noon meal in her front garden every day this week so she could watch the fighting planes in the sky. They parked their bicycles and crossed the lumpy grass behind her house to their tree fort.

  Tom handed around weak lemonade. The four children sat in companionable, exhausted silence, each intoxicated with the thrilling danger of the plane.

  2

  The Skywatchers

  Old Mrs. Chandler didn’t know there was a secret society in her orchard. Her house was the largest and highest in Ringden and looked out over the Weald. Last summer Tom and Norah had discovered the old tree fort hidden in an apple tree; it must have been built by one of her sons. They had reinforced it with scraps of wood and added a rope ladder to get in and out quickly.

  At first, the fort had been a good place in which to play Cops and Robbers. But this spring it had been named the Lookout when the Secret Society of Skywatchers was formed. Now they were on the alert for real enemies: the Good Guys were the English and the Bad Guys the Germans.

  Pinned on the walls of the Lookout were pictures cut out of the newspaper of the troop-carrying aircraft to look out for. They especially hoped to catch sight of a Junkers 52, the enemy plane most commonly used for parachute dropping. They owned a copy of Friend or Foe? A Young Spotter’s Guide to Allied and German Aircraft, but Tom and Norah were such experts, they no longer needed it.

  The Skywatchers looked at strangers suspiciously and longed to meet nuns, monks or nurses who might be Nazis in disguise with collapsible bicycles under their loose clothes. In the Lookout was a supply of grey, lumpy sugar, painstakingly saved from their rations, to pour into enemies’ petrol tanks and neutralize them.

  Norah sipped her sour lemonade and looked around the cluttered fort with satisfaction. Ranged along a shelf were their war souvenirs: twisted bits of shrapnel, uniform badges and tins of cartridge cases. It was too bad they hadn’t been able to get anything new from the Messerschmitt.

  A government leaflet was attached to the tree trunk: “If the Invader Comes”. Her eyes focused on the words, “If you run away … you will be machine-gunned from the air.” Again, Norah felt as if there were a weight on her chest.

  “Whose turn is it to keep watch?” asked Harry.

  “Mine,” said Norah, glad of a diversion. She squatted on the edge of the Lookout, pressing her father’s old field glasses to her eyes. They were so heavy they made her arms ache, and after a few seconds she put them down and scanned the sky and landscape without them.

  Below her stretched the rolling Weald, dotted with sheep and the gleaming white caps of oast houses. She could just glimpse where the land levelled off, like the edge of a table, as it dropped to Romney Marsh. Beyond that was the Channel and from across the Channel the Germans came…. West of the Lookout was the village, its stubby church spire poking up past the rooftops. Norah could even see her own house and her brother Gavin playing with his wagon in the garden.

  She stared so intently at the dazzling sky that her eyes watered. Never before had the weather been as consistently clear as in this summer of 1940. “Hitler and the rain will come together,” the grown-ups predicted.

  Then, for the last month things had been falling out of the sky: stray bombs meant for the coast or the airfields; German propaganda leaflets that ended up being sold at raffles; and distant, floating parachutes like tiny puffballs. During the air battles, showers of empty cartridge cases tinkled on the roofs of Ringden; last week one had splashed into Mr. Skinner’s bucket as he was milking.

  Yesterday a pilot’s boot had plummeted into the grass behind the Lookout: a worn, black leather boot with the imprint of a man’s big toe creasing the top. They were certain it was a Nazi boot, and it now had the place of honour in their collection.

  Every day this week they had seen dogfights, as the clean sky became covered with a cobweb of the tangled white contrails of fighting planes. This morning’s battle had been the most exciting. The planes had come lower than usual, and they could pick out the tiny, silvery Messerschmitts circling protectively around the moth-like Dorniers. Then they had heard the growl of RAF fighters tearing in to give battle. For once they were Spitfires instead of the more familiar, humpbacked Hurricanes. The graceful Spits had tilted and twisted, machine-gun fire had sounded faintly and the children had cheered so wildly they’d almost pushed each other off the platform.

  That was when one of the German planes had dropped through the blueness. The Skywatchers had scrambled to their bicycles, but it had taken hours to find it. While they’d paused to eat their sandwiches, a passing boy had told them the plane was in a field at Mr. Coomber’s farm.

  There was no more activity now. The only sound was the purr of threshing machines and the raspy quarrelling of rooks. The countryside had been practically empty of cars since gas rationing, and the church bells would not ring again unless there was an invasion. Norah’s eyes kept closing as she tried to concentrate on the sky. She was glad when her time was up and Harry took her place.

  Behind her, the others had been reading comics and mending their bows. “We should write to Pete and Molly and tell them about the plane,” said Norah. The Kemps had been active Skywatchers until, along with several other members, they’d been evacuated to Wales. Norah missed Molly; she had been her best friend. Now she supposed Tom was, although he was sometimes bossier than she liked.

  “It would be better not to tell them,” said Tom. “It’ll just make them angry to know what they’ve missed.”

  “The Smiths are being sent away, too,” Jasper said. “To Canada! My mum heard from their mum this morning.”

  “Canada?” Norah sputtered. She took down the Boot and examined it again, trying not to listen.

  Tom looked disgusted. “Anyone wh
o leaves England is a coward,” he declared. “Derek and Dulcie and Lucy are so feeble, they probably want to go.”

  Harry turned around from his post. “Mum and Dad thought Jasper and me might go to our auntie’s in Devon if the bombing starts. Now they’ve changed their minds, because it’s just as dangerous there.”

  “My mum says that no place is safe, so her and me may as well stick it out together,” boasted Tom. “She wouldn’t even consider sending me away. And Norah’s parents wouldn’t either. We’re lucky!”

  “I’m going to fetch some water,” said Norah abruptly, climbing down with the pail. She wove through trees heavy with ripening apples to the stream at the end of the orchard, thinking of everyone in Britain scurrying around like ants under a large, descending boot like theirs, all trying to find a safe place when there wasn’t one.

  She sat down by the water, took off her socks and shoes, and dangled her hot feet in the stream. She would linger here until they’d had time to finish talking about being sent away. For a few seconds the fleeting blue of a kingfisher distracted her. But she couldn’t help brooding about evacuation.

  Last fall her village had been considered safe. Hundreds of London children had been sent to the Ashford area, and one whole school had come to Ringden. They boarded with different families and had their own classes in the church hall. For four months the’vaccies and the village children had waged a battle of hurled mud and words. The visitors complained about having to go all the way into Gilden to see the pictures; the village mothers objected to the bad language their children were learning. When nothing seemed to be happening in the war, the evacuees had returned to London.

  But then the “phoney war” had ended and the danger had become real. When France fell and Churchill said the Battle of Britain had begun, Norah had helped pull up all the signposts in the village to confuse the enemy. “We shall fight in the field and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills,” Churchill’s solemn voice chanted from the wireless.