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and then another, with pigs rolling in the fresh black mud, and then down another road, past two ancient oak trees like giant dark umbrellas across the road, and they were there.
    The new house was small, or at least it seemed so to Heidi after the big house where she’d lived before. It crouched under the trees like it, too, was hiding from the bombs.
    But it had three bedrooms upstairs (narrow twisting wooden stairs): one bedroom was for Heidi and one was for Fräulein Gelber. The third was to be their schoolroom, where all their books would go. It had a big kitchen with a cold, paved floor and an even bigger cellar that you got to by going out the kitchen door and down some steps.
    Fräulein Gelber inspected the cellar thoroughly. She didn’t say why, but Heidi knew that the cellar was where they would go if enemy planes flew overhead. Bombs might crush the house, but the cellar would be safe.
    The cellar smelled sweet and musty. It had bins of apples stored in old dried leaves, and shelves with jars of jam and sauerkraut and honey, and cabbages all in a pile and two sacks of potatoes with just a few taken out of one, and a sack of golden onions, their skins floating off like yellow autumn leaves.
    ‘Where are the people who lived here before?’ asked Heidi, but Fräulein Gelber couldn’t say.
    ‘That’s none of our business,’ she said, though Heidi thought it was. It seemed odd to be wandering through rooms that other people had lived in not long ago eating their onions and plum jam, and then not even to know what they’d been like or where they were now.
    Only Heidi and Fräulein Gelber were to live in the house. Sergeant Amchell lived in the barn.
    He was old, with a long salt and pepper moustache that looked like it would fall out if he blew his nose too hard. He had been wounded in the leg in the last war, so he limped just like Heidi.
    She hoped he’d notice that she limped, too, and maybe joke about it—the two of them with only two good legs between them—or something friendly like that, but he kept to himself and tended the giant cabbages in the garden instead of standing to attention at the door like the other guards she’d known. Mostlyhe pretended he didn’t see her when she smiled at him, or hear her when she said ‘ Guten Morgen ’.
    He was the only guard they had now.
    The first night in the new house Fräulein Gelber lit the candles and sat her on one of the hard dark chairs in the sitting room.
    ‘A woman will be coming tomorrow to cook the food, and to look after the house,’ said Fräulein Gelber. ‘Her name is Frau Leib. She is just a farm woman, but I want you to be polite to her, even so.’
    ‘Of course,’ said Heidi.
    Fräulein Gelber hesitated. ‘Frau Leib has been told you are my niece, the child of my sister who was killed in the air raids.’
    Heidi looked up. ‘Was your sister killed in the air raids?’ she asked in alarm.
    Fräulein Gelber’s sister was married and lived three streets away from her mother. She had sent Fräulein Gelber a scarf last Christmas. Heidi had secretly hoped that one day someone from Fräulein Gelber’s family might send her a present too, but they never did. Perhaps Fräulein Gelber had never mentioned Heidi in her letters. Or maybe they thought she had everything she needed and didn’t need presents.
    ‘No, of course not,’ said Fräulein Gelber. ‘My sister is quite well, apart from a slight case of grippelast month. But it’s best if that’s what Frau Leib continues to believe.’
    Fräulein Gelber hesitated again. ‘I don’t want you speaking too much to her, you understand?’
    ‘I understand,’ said Heidi.

chapter seven
Frau Leib
    The rain pounded on the roof of the bus shelter like it couldn’t wait to get down from the sky. One of the cows moaned softly, a sad, wet complaint about life in general.
    ‘Go on,’ urged Mark.
    ‘The bus,’ said Anna.
    Mark looked at his watch.
    ‘We’ve got another five minutes at