The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

You could get used to anything. After a few weeks, I didn’t panic when I went
into the shelter. I quit worrying about the invasion. I put Jamie up behind me
on Butter and we searched the fields for shrapnel or bullets or bombs. Once
we came across an airplane shot down in a hops field. Soldiers had already
surrounded it by the time we got there, and were keeping civilians away. “A
Messerschmidt,” Jamie said, eyes gleaming. “Wonder where the pilot went.”
The pilot had bailed out; the plane’s canopy was open.
“Caught him,” one of the soldiers said, overhearing. “Prisoner of war. No
troubles.”
On a day in early August Susan went to a WVS meeting. Jamie was tending
the garden—he loved it—and I took off on Butter for my daily ride.
I went to the top of the hill. I paused, the way I always did, to search the
sea and sky. No airplanes. No big boats. But then I saw something in the
distance, something small on the surface of the ocean. A tiny boat, a rowboat,
pulling for shore. I watched it, wondering. It was headed not for the town
harbor, but for one of the barbed-wire sections of the beach. Was the person
lost? Surely he knew better than to land where there were could be mines. I
kept watching, frowning. The man—it looked like a man, I thought—in the
boat continued to row straight for shore. Surely he could see the village from
the water. Surely he knew it would be safer there.
Unless, I thought, my blood running cold, he was a spy.
A spy! I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it. I always looked for spies from
the hill. It was a habit. But that didn’t mean, despite the posters, despite the
rumors, that I actually expected to ever see a spy. But yet—a single rowboat,
so far out—where had he come from? Did he get dropped off by a submarine
—a German submarine? If he wasn’t a spy, why was he headed toward the
deserted beach?
I heard Susan’s voice in my head. “Improbable,” it said. That mean not
likely.
Still, it was one of the rules: Report anything suspicious at once. I turned
Butter down the face of the hill, weaving through brush and tall grass, trying
to keep the little boat in sight. It disappeared from my view as I got lower, and
I sped up, cantering along the road that led to the barricaded beach. I stopped
Butter in a copse of trees just as the beach came into view.
It was low tide, and the sand stretched out wide and flat for a mile along