France

Luc Morin is eleven years old, and the best part of his day is the bicycle — his father's bicycle, and the little brass bell his father gave him to keep. In the Loire-valley town of Sainte-Croix, the Morins bake the bread the whole town lives on.

Then, one warm morning in June 1940, grey trucks roll into the square, and the young soldiers who climb down are unfailingly polite. They want bread, and they pay for it. Luc watches his mother take their money and say nothing. Nothing, he notices, is what everyone in town has begun to say.

One soldier comes back most mornings. He carries a creased photograph of a little girl with braids. He is kind — and he is the enemy. And Luc is learning that under occupation the hardest questions don't arrive with bombs. They come to the counter, and ask for a loaf.

Sainte-Croix-sur-Loire, 1939. Madeleine Morin keeps the counter of the family bakery while her husband Henri works the oven in the dark before dawn. Their boy Luc is mad about the bicycle; little Colette has just started school; the market is full and the river runs high. It is an ordinary, good life — in the last summer it will ever be quite so ordinary.

Then, that August, the mobilisation papers arrive. Henri reads them, folds them into his pocket, and says only, We'll need to arrange the deliveries. And when the day comes for him to go, he presses a small brass bicycle bell into Luc's hand and asks him to keep it safe until he comes home.

Madeleine cannot stop the war. But she can keep the oven warm, and the family whole, and the light on through the door of the dark — for as long as it takes.