The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Nights in the shelter, night after night. It was impossible to sleep through the
explosions and the gunfire. Susan had a flashlight, but flashlights needed
batteries, and batteries were hard to find. Instead she lit a candle inside a
flowerpot, and by its dim light read to us. Peter Pan. A Secret Garden. The
Wind in the Willows. Some were books she got from the library; others came
from her own bookshelves. On his own, Jamie was reading Swiss Family
Robinson over again. “We’re like them,” he said one night, as the candlelit
flickered off the shelter’s tin walls. “We’re in our cave, safe and warm.”
I shuddered. I had wrapped myself in a sheet, because it was too hot for a
blanket. I felt warm, but not safe. I never felt safe in the shelter. “You are,
though,” Susan said. “You feel safer in your bedroom, but you’re actually
much safer in the shelter.”
It didn’t matter how I felt. She made me go into the shelter every time the
sirens wailed.
Men came and removed all the signposts from the roads around the village,
so that when Hitler invaded he wouldn’t know where he was.
When he invaded, we were to bury our radio. Jamie had already dug a hole
for it in the garden. When Hitler invaded we were to say nothing, do nothing
to help the enemy.
If he invaded while I was out riding, I was to return home at once, as fast
as possible by the shortest route. I’d know it was an invasion, not an air raid,
because all the church bells would ring.
“What if the Germans take Butter?” I asked Susan.
“They won’t,” she said, but I was sure she was lying.
“Bloody huns,” Fred muttered, when I went to help with chores. “They
come here, I’ll stab ’em with a pitchfork, I will.” Fred was not happy. The
riding horses, the Thortons’ fine hunters, were all out to grass, and the grass
was good, but the hayfields had been turned over to wheat and Fred didn’t
know how he’d feed the horses through the winter. Plus the Land Girls
staying in the loft annoyed him. “Work twelve hours a day, then go out
dancing,” he said. “Bunch of lightfoots. In my day girls didn’t act like that.”
I thought the Land Girls seemed friendly, but I knew better than to say so
to Fred.