by CJ (& GJ) Romer

AUGUST 1943 There is a full moon tonight, and the barn is decorated, and the big dance is about to begin. The boys and girls of the confirmation class of 1940 are all 18 now, and they are looking for fun, to find a good husband, or to find a good night. The bonfires are burning on the beach, the cider barrel is open, and the fiddler is ready to lead the dance tune. The problem is everyone knows each other, and even schoolyard sweethearts understand that familiarity breeds contempt... If only the German kids from the base were not banned form coming to the dance, and locked behind the wire!

Life in the village has always been slow, but the Germans have certainly shaken things up. At first everyone just tried to get on with them, and the German girls from the Luftwaffe Women's Training camp came to dances held in the barn where Per Rasmussen played fiddle and everyone drank the sweet sweet cider...

Then the Germans built the big dishes that supposedly track planes; then the rockets began to flash overhead, V2's fired from Peenemunde just over the horizon, and as you ice skated on the frozen sea one night you watched the British planes dogfighting Me-109's overhead. The tracer of that fight far above formed fireworks as you kissed the Larssen boy for the first time.

Then RAF pilots landed not far from the village, and the Resistance came from Lolland and spirited them away, just as you helped spirit the Jews across to Sweden when the Nazis came for them. The Gestapo arrived, and began to round up people who did not do what they wanted: and while they have never troubled the village the fact it has been two years and the boys still haven't managed to lay the concrete right for the runway might bring their wrath upon you.

Now attitudes are hardening, and the Germans have given the government an ultimatum to hand over all prisoners found guilty of sabotage, and all enemies of the Reich. That is all Copenhagen stuff though - it won't effect us here in Falster will it?

The drone of planes approaching, and then overhead in the moonlight a vast armada of big silver birds -- Yankee bombers! There must be dozens -- no hundred of them, and they are passing directly over the village. Then coming up the street, a handful of strangers, youth from Marielyst or Nykøbing invited by Elmond perhaps? And then a Rolls Royce approaches - the Baroness, the beautiful English lady with the castle across the Gulborgsund - what does she want this time?

A game about romance, families, espionage and community in a rural backwater unknowingly at the heart of critical events of the Second World War...