The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

I looked at Stephen in alarm. “How old are you?” I asked.
“Thirteen,” he said. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “I didn’t really try
to join, I just told him I did. So he wouldn’t be disappointed in me. It’s nearly
a full-time job taking care of him. Who does he think would queue for the
groceries if I had to go off and drill?”
The Local Defence drilled with broomsticks because they didn’t have
rifles. Stephen said the colonel had donated his guns from when he fought the
Boer War. They were fifty years old and full of rust. “Useless,” Stephen said.
“But it made him feel better.”
We had to queue for groceries every day now. Meat was on ration and a lot
of other things were hard to find. Onions were so scarce they might as well
have been solid gold. No one had realized that all England’s onions were
imported until they couldn’t be imported anymore, and onions took a long
time to grow from seed.
In the middle of May, Hitler invaded France. The British Army had over
370,000 soldiers stationed there. They fought, and the French fought, but the
Germans pushed them back and back. Then came June, and Dunkirk. Later,
people called it a miracle, but in our village it felt like a disaster.