Part 4
Uncle Henrik’s world is everything Copenhagen is not: a crooked old farmhouse, a meadow running down to the water, a fishing boat called the Ingeborg, fresh air that smells of salt and apples. Kirsti adopts a gray kitten and grandly names it Thor, after the thunder god; Ellen, a city child, tastes real farm milk and — for an afternoon — something like peace. From the meadow’s edge the girls look across the sound: that low, hazy shoreline is Sweden — free, neutral, and achingly close. But the peace has machinery turning beneath it. Henrik and Mama trade sentences that carry double weight; Henrik announces that tomorrow will be ‘a day for fishing’ — and then comes stranger news: Great-aunt Birte has died, and her casket will rest in the living room tonight, with family and friends gathering to mourn. Annemarie is helping with the preparations when the floor drops out of the day: there is no Great-aunt Birte. There never has been. Her mother and her uncle — the two most honest people she knows — are lying, carefully, together, and the house is filling up for the funeral of a person who does not exist.
| Section | What you will practice |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary | Seaside words: meadow, neutral, casket, mourn, deceive… |
| Literary Elements | False peace, double-weight talk, and the invented funeral |
| Cross-Curricular | Codes and secret messages in wartime |
| Ch. | What happens |
|---|---|
| 7–8 | The House by the Sea — Henrik’s farm brings salt air, a kitten named Thor, and Sweden visible across the sound; then the machinery turns: ‘a day for fishing’ tomorrow, and tonight a casket for Great-aunt Birte — a relative Annemarie is certain has never existed. |
ⓘ The vocabulary words in this list are selected to help you understand and complete this workbook. Some may not appear verbatim in the original novel.
- The girls gaze across the sound at Sweden.
- News comes that Great-aunt Birte has died.
- Henrik announces ‘a day for fishing’ tomorrow.
- Kirsti adopts the kitten and names it Thor.
- The girls arrive at Henrik’s seaside farm.
Think back over these chapters. An old farmhouse leans into the sea wind, and a meadow rolls down to water that ends — just there, in the haze — at another country. A kitten with a thunder god’s name pounces through the grass. Real cream tops real porridge. And then, at dusk, the sentences begin to carry two weights each: an uncle speaks of fishing tomorrow as if fish were not the cargo; a mother sets chairs in a circle around a space where a casket will stand; and a girl who has never had a Great-aunt Birte watches the house prepare to mourn her.
In an occupied country, the enemy may be listening to any telephone line and reading any letter — so resistance movements learned to hide their messages in plain sight. The simplest tool was the open code: ordinary sentences with secretly arranged meanings. A call about a carton of cigarettes, a remark that tomorrow would be good weather for fishing — meant to deceive any listener, these sounded like errands and small talk, but to the right hearer they scheduled meetings, warned of raids, or announced that ‘cargo’ was on its way. Open codes were powerful because they offered deniability: even if suspected, a sentence about fishing could not be proven to mean anything else.
Governments used the same trick at broadcast scale. Each night the BBC’s radio service read out strings of odd ‘personal messages’ — nonsense to millions of listeners, but prearranged signals to specific resistance cells across occupied Europe: one strange sentence might launch a sabotage operation or confirm a supply drop. The stakes of such messages were absolute: a code understood meant families moved before a raid; a code broken meant arrests instead of a crossing to neutral Sweden. The novel wraps this whole world into its quietest scenes — a phone call about cigarettes no shop has sold in years, a fisherman’s weather talk — and into its narrator’s position, too: like most Danes, Annemarie hears the codes without holding the key, and must trust the speakers instead of the words.
“The safest message was often the one an accidental listener would consider too ordinary to repeat.”
This writing task is optional and is not part of your auto-graded score. The feedback below checks only the basics — length, spelling, and grammar — not whether your ideas are right or wrong. It is meant for classroom discussion and creative practice, so feel free to use your imagination!
Writing Task — Part 4 “A Day for Fishing”
Write the evening at the farmhouse from Uncle Henrik’s point of view — a fisherman preparing his boat for the strangest catch of his life, while nieces play with a kitten in the meadow. What does he notice? What does he deliberately NOT say at dinner? 6–10 sentences. End with the sentence he says aloud that carries two meanings.
No right or wrong — close the screen and tell someone nearby what happened in this part. Can’t find anyone? Tell yourself out loud. The moment you teach it, you truly understand it.
Part 4 Complete!
You finished Chapters 7–8 of Number the Stars.
Here are your auto-graded results:
The best last step is to teach it. In your own words, explain what happened — retell a favorite scene, teach a character’s big choice, or sum up the main idea for a parent, friend, or classmate. When you can teach it clearly, you truly own it.
Independent study guide by Garden Heights. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Lois Lowry. Contains original analysis only; no text from the novel is reproduced. Reference text: This workbook follows Lois Lowry’s classic text (the standard Puffin edition sold worldwide). Revised 2023 UK editions change some wording and may not match the vocabulary studied here.