Robin Scott-Elliot is an acclaimed writer of children’s books. His latest release, Sweet Skies, is a brilliant tale of a boy in post-war Berlin who dreams of being a pilot but is fighting to survive in a battle-weary city. In the extract below, Otto witnesses the victorious US pilots coming to the city’s rescue.

Sweet Skies
By Robin Scott-Elliot
Published by Everything With Words

Chocolate was falling from the sky. Otto watched it fall, head back, mouth open, and if he’d been able to tear his gaze away, he would have seen that every child gathered at the end of the Tempelhof runway was a mirror image. Every head with every shade of hair colour, red to blonde to jet black to brown pigtails and yellowy stubble like a cornfield after harvest, was tipped back, mouths open as if in hope the chocolate might float straight in.

It was like watching parachutists leap from doomed planes, except the parachutes started small and stayed that way. They were handkerchiefs after all. Soon they could make out the bounty hanging beneath them and, as if someone had barked a command, eager arms stretched skywards.

They’d arrived early as Ilse instructed and argued about where the best spot would be. In the end they split up. Karl hopped and hauled his way up the rubble mountain, giving him the best view to direct Otto and Ilse in their candy collection mission.

There were more children gathered than the day before. As Ilse predicted, news of the candy drop had spread (it was an impossible secret to keep). Ilse was close to the fence, where most children gathered. They clustered together, moving this way and that like a flock of starlings, trying to estimate where the parachutes would land.

Otto was at the foot of the mountain, but the noise of the plane engines meant he couldn’t hear Karl’s shouts. It was the waving crutch that caught his eye. Karl was pointing to the cemetery. Otto looked up again. Karl was right, several parachutes were drifting that way.

Otto leapt over the ragged wire fence. The cemetery was one of the new ones dotted across the city – this is what happens after wars. The graves were wooden crosses, hammered into the ground in ragged rows and fighting a losing battle against straggly bushes and weeds. There was not a lot of time for looking after the dead when staying alive was such a full-time occupation.

A few others followed Otto, noticing Karl’s direction. They eyed each other, like runners at the start of a race… how quick is she? He looks slow? Why’s he looking over there? Because here comes one. A makeshift red parachute was nearly down, attracting every eye in the cemetery. Which meant Otto wasn’t looking where he was going and tripped over a loose brick. He sprawled forward, head just missing the cross of a tilting grave marker.

He was up again in seconds, but his fall was enough for a girl of about his age, hair pulled into a ponytail and a fierce look on her face, to leap and catch it. She clutched it to her chest and spun round to face the others. The red handkerchief parachute made it look like she’d been wounded.

‘Mine,’ she snarled, a declaration accepted at once by the others, not least because several more parachutes were about to touch down.

Otto saw one hanging from the corner of a cross and ran. A boy tried to trip him but he jumped over the outstretched foot and dived for his target, yanking it off the cross and pressing it to his chest as he rolled into a ball ready for the other boy’s attack.

But like the girl – who was sitting on a grave marker staring at her chocolate bar as if she couldn’t believe what was happening – he was left alone. Finders/keepers was the Kinder Code: the unwritten rules between children trying to make their lives among the ruins of the adult world. Besides, why fight over one chocolate bar when plenty others were falling from the sky?

Otto rolled onto his back to catch his breath. Above him was another parachute, heading right for him. Chocolate falling from the sky. How ridiculous. He was laughing as he scrambled to his feet and reached one hand for it and didn’t stop laughing even as another boy leapt across him and grabbed the precious package.

The laughter spread, a happy infection, and as they darted after the parachutes, beneath the shadows of the Skymasters, child after child began to catch it, even as they pushed and shoved and leapt and dived for the chocolate from the sky. The cemetery was full of laughter.

When it was done, Otto, who’d forgotten a bag, scrambled up to Karl’s vantage point with his booty rolled up in the front of his baggy old jersey. It was his father’s and he had to roll the sleeves up to reveal his hands. He dropped his treasure in front of Karl and pulled himself out of the tangle of jersey. It had been chilly when he left home before the sun was up. He was hot now, sweating, and still laughing, although it was more of a gasp for breath.

A last plane roared overhead and a last mini-parachute dropped. They watched it flutter down into the upstretched hands of a small boy dancing a jig in anticipation. Otto scanned the skies then switched his attention to the ground.

Over the fence in the airfield, lorries were rushing to the parked planes. The unloading began at once; sacks were humped out of the planes, collected by groundcrew and lifted into lorries. Once the planes were emptied, their engines spluttered back to life and the ch-ch-ch-burrrrr of propellers jerked them forward.

Otto waved as the first Skymaster rose towards them from the runway. He could make out the pilots in the cockpit, caps jammed on tight by their headphones, dark glasses in place, setting a course for their home base far away in the safety of the west.

Otto kept waving, Karl joined in and below them the rest of the children did too. A number flashed into view on the plane’s fuselage – 712 – and as it did, the wings waggled. Otto raised both hands to the sky and yelled in delight. He was still yelling and punching the air when the next plane took off and that too waggled its wings as it flew over.

‘Where’s your bag? What did you get?’ Ilse’s face was red from the climb up the rubble and her parachute-chasing.

Otto ignored her first question and pointed at his jersey. On it lay three bars of chocolate.

‘One each,’ he said.

Sweet Skies by Robin Scott-Elliot is published by Everything With Words, priced £8.99.