The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

looked at her, and I said, “Maybe you could show me how to read.”
She looked up disinterestedly. “Now?”
I shrugged.
She sighed. “Oh, very well.” We went to the kitchen table and she got out a
pencil and paper. “All the words in the world are made up of just twenty-six
letters,” she said. “There’s a big and a little version of each.”
She wrote the letters out on the paper, and named them all. Then she went
through them again. Then she told me to copy them onto another piece of
paper, and then she went back to her chair. I stared at the paper. I said, “This
isn’t reading. This is drawing.”
“Writing,” she corrected. “It’s like buttons and hems. You’ve got to learn
those before you can sew on the machine. You’ve got to know your letters
before you can read.”
I supposed so, but it was boring. When I said so she got up again and wrote
something along the bottom of the paper.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“‘Ada is a curmudgeon,’” she replied.
“Ada is a curmudgeon,” I copied at the end of my alphabet. It pleased me.
After that, with help from Jamie, I left Susan little notes every day. Susan
is a big frog. (That one made Jamie giggle.) Butter is the best pony ever.
Jamie sings like a squirrel. And then some papers I kept, because they were
useful, and I could put them on the kitchen table whenever I needed to leave
Susan a message. It made her happier when she knew where we were. Ada is
at Fred’s. Ada is riding Butter. Jamie went to the airfield.
He wasn’t supposed to, but he did. They’d gotten so used to him sneaking
in under the fence that they hardly bothered to scold him anymore. “Only, if
they say I have to leave, I have to leave right away,” Jamie told us. “If they
don’t say so, I can stay and talk to them.” Planes fascinated him. He made
friends with the pilots, and they let him sit inside the Spitfires when they were
parked on the field.
Susan asked us how we usually celebrated Christmas. We didn’t know what
to say. Christmas was a big day at the pub, so Mam always worked. She’d get
lots of tips, and usually we’d have something good to eat, fish and chips or a
meat pie.
“Do you hang up your stockings?” Susan asked.