The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

We woke to a vicious pounding on the door. Jamie clutched me. “Invasion?”
he whispered.
My heart thumped in my ears. Should we hide? I was ready to push Jamie
under the bed when I heard Lady Thorton yell from downstairs, “Susan! Get
up, we need you! We need everyone!”
While Susan flung on her WVS uniform, I clambered down the stairs.
Lady Thorton stood in the open doorway, breathing hard as though she’d been
running even though her automobile was waiting in the drive. “What’s
happened?” I asked.
“A ship just docked in the village,” Lady Thorton said. “Full of soldiers.
From Dunkirk. And they were strafed on their way across the channel.” She
yelled up the stairs. “Susan!”
“Coming!” Susan hustled down, stuffing her hair beneath her WVS cap.
She paused in the doorway and put her hand on my cheek. “You’ll be okay?”
she asked. “Both of you?”
“Yes,” I said. I put my arm around Jamie and we watched Lady Thorton
reverse her car in a whirl of dust. “It’s not an invasion,” I said.
Jamie looked up at me. “Strafed,” he said.
Strafed meant shot at from above, by an airplane. I took a deep breath.
“Yes,” I said.
We’d listened with dread to the radio the night before. The British Army
had retreated so far that it was now trapped against the ocean, near a French
port called Dunkirk. The water was so shallow near the beach there that the
Royal Navy, trying to rescue the soldiers, couldn’t bring big ships close. The
man on the radio had asked anyone with a small boat, one that could go close
to shore, to loan it to the navy for getting the men away.
I’d seen our village’s fishing boats. They could maybe carry a dozen men. I
tried to imagine 370,000 men climbing onto boats a dozen at a time.
It couldn’t happen. There would never be enough boats. If the Germans
were strafing them, they would all die.
“I’ll make breakfast,” I said, putting on a cheerful face for Jamie’s sake.
“I’m not hungry,” he said.