Dad started to stand up. I think he was going to go over and ask what she had found out so far. But Mum asked him to sit back down again, and Dave agreed that he should, and Dad sat down but didn't look very happy at all.
It seemed like ages before Daisy and Faye came and sat with us. Faye put the i-pad back in her bag. Daisy didn't start talking straight away. I think she was deciding what order to tell us the things she had found out. When she came over, she said the signal had just gone, and she couldn't pick up anything else on the radio except static.
"What did they say?" Mum asked. "It's bad, isn't it? I can tell by the look on your face."
"It's not great. It was a radio-phone in. They were talking about English refugees."
"That's us," Ben told me.
I nodded. I wasn't stupid.
"There's a camp. At Sangatte, where the refugees used to stay when they still wanted to come here, only much bigger now. Our people are being detained, there."
"Detained?" asked Dad. "What do you mean, "detained"? They can't detain us! We're English!"
"That's what they said they were doing on the radio. But it gets worse than that."
"Kids, why don't you go and sit over there while we're talking?" Mum suggested. "They don't need to hear this."
"Faye knows," I pointed out. "We should hear it, too."
"She'll tell them later anyway," Dave agreed. "They might as well get it from the horse's mouth."
"I won't!" insisted Faye, but Daisy was talking again, so no-one paid her any attention except for Ben (who was still doing it sneakily, when she wasn't looking).
"There's a quota. They're taking in two hundred and fifty thousand refugees, and then they'll start turning people back. They're nearly halfway there already."
Dad shook his head. "They can't turn people back. We're both in the EU. Free movement of workers, and all that crap. After all the money we've paid their farmers, they have to let us in."
"Not according to the radio, they don't. Quarter of a million, and then the doors are shut. End of story."
"People will just go to Belgium instead. Or Spain."
"Belgium are taking twenty thousand over five years."
"You're joking! Twenty thousand! That's no effing good!"
"Can you not swear in front of the children, Ben? I can't ask them not to swear if they hear us doing it."
Dad said sorry, and stopped talking for a while.
Dave started talking instead. "What about Spain, though? Are they taking people in?"
"They didn't say. One of the callers just said that France should have the same policy as Belgium."
Dave looked like he wanted to swear as well, but he was better at holding it in than Dad. "Twenty thousand over five years? A country the size of France? You're kidding?"
"There was this one lady who didn't want any of us. She said she'd been on the waiting list for a council house for a year, and she was damned if she was going to go back to the bottom behind hundreds of thousands of "roast-beefs". And before you say anything, Ben, "damned" is not swearing."
No-one said anything for a while. I looked from grown-up to grown-up, waiting to see what they would say. Grown-ups always know what to do. It was a little scary that they were so shocked by the news. I wasn't sure what it had to do with us, though. We didn't want to go to France. We were off to see Nan in Canterbury. You don't even need to get on a boat for Canterbury, as there's a road all the way there.
"Maybe we should all go straight to Dover," Dave suggested. "Catch a ferry while they're still letting people in."
Mum shook her head. "We can't. I have to see Mum. I thought you were going to the barracks?"
"We were. But you heard what Daisy said. Everyone's going to France. They wouldn't go if there was anything here for them. We should go now, while we still can."
"Not until I've checked on Mum."
Dad touched her arm. "Maybe he's right. We've got the children to -"
"Don't you dare. We agreed. We agreed! This doesn't change anything. We find Mum, and then we go catch your stupid ferry if you still want to."
"Hold on, though. I don't think there'll be any ferries running," Dave told her. "Not with the bombing and all. But there'll be some sort of evacuation plan. We've got one of the best bloody navies in the world, for God's sake!"
"Not in front of the children."
"Sorry. But we have. They'll get us to France. But we should go now, before they lock the doors on us."
"To Sangatte?" asked Mum, determined to win the argument. "We can't have the kids staying at Sangatte! I've heard what it's like in refugee camps. There'll be disease; we could all end up with typhoid or something. We'd be lucky if we get half the food and drink we need, they're so underfunded. If we're going to starve to death, I'd rather do it in my own home."
"I've got plenty of sandwiches left," Dave protested. "And two-thirds of a family-sized pork pie."
Mum stared at him as if he was mad. I think he must have realized that he'd said something stupid, as he looked down at the floor and looked embarrassed.
"We're going to Canterbury, aren't we Ben?"
Dad nodded. He didn't look happy.
"And we are, too," Daisy said. "There's safety in numbers, like I said before. We've got to stick together, whatever happens."
"We'll be safe if we stick together," Mum agreed.
Dad and Dave looked at each other. I could tell from the looks on their faces that they didn't think that we would be very safe at all.
#
I spent the rest of the day trying to get to know Noah. He didn't say much; he just watched everyone else, and laughed when anyone said something funny. Sometimes, I wasn't even sure why he thought it was funny, but it was nice to have someone my own age around anyway.
We did that thing you do when you're trying to find something you both like, so you've got something to talk about.
"I support Liverpool," I told him. "It was my Dad's team when he was little. He says they're gonna be back in the Premiership one day."
"I don't really watch football much. Dad says it's too sweary."
"Sweary?"
"Yeah. He says they swear at the referee all the time. He says that one of the referees got beaten up last year and nearly died in hospital."
"Beaten up? By a player?"
"By a linesman, I think."
"A linesman? Why would he beat up the referee?"
Noah shrugged. "Don't know. I'm not allowed to watch it."
"I'll find out on Youtube when I get my battery charged. It sounds cool."
We were quiet for a while, while we thought of something to say.
"I like cricket," Noah told me.
"It's alright."
"And rugby."
"Me, too. Football's better though, don't you think?"
"Maybe."
We were quiet again.
"Do you like music?" I asked.
"It's not bad. We listen to the "Guantanamos" a lot in the car."
"I haven't heard of them."
"They're from the olden days, I think. Dad says they're from the Twenties."
"Oh. I only like new stuff."
More silence. There had to be something we both liked. I asked him if he liked Taylor Swift, because she started off in the olden days, too, but he wasn't all that keen.
We tried television, but he stayed up later than me so most of the programmes he watched were on after I'd gone to bed, and I thought he smirked a bit when I told him the programmes I liked so I changed the subject to films. He liked a lot of horror films, though, which children aren't supposed to watch. He told me about one, where a ghost started haunting a monster who had killed him when he was still a human, and the monster killed itself in the end as it got so scared, but I didn't really want to hear it as I was having nightmares already.
We finally gave up. Everyone knows that the only things to talk about are football, music, telly and films, in that order (although girls talk about clothes and
boys, too), and if neither of us liked the same thing as the other there was nothing left to say.
"It was scary when the plane came down," I said. I'd given up talking, so thought I'd just tell him what was on my mind.
"Really scary," he agreed.
Maybe we did have something in common after all.
#
I had my dream again that night, only it was different from before.
It started off the same. I was outside home, in my pyjamas, with Teddy to keep me company. Mum and Dad and Ben were walking towards me, and I knew that there were going to be bombs falling, and I shouted for them to run, but they couldn't hear me.
Noah was there. He was telling me about horror films. I turned round, and asked him nicely to stop talking as I had to save my family. He went away. I turned back, and Dad had gone. I looked all around, trying to see where he had gone, and all of a sudden he was back again, but now he was a ghost, and he was saying that he had been blown up and it was all my fault. And then I saw that Mum had gone, too, and it was just Ben left. I shouted at Ben to run, because I didn't want him to be a ghost, too, in case he blamed me as well. And then Mum was a ghost, and she was telling me off for not telling her about the bombs, and I started crying, but they kept telling me off all the same. And then Ben was a ghost, and all three of them kept shouting at me, really nasty shouting, that made me scared, and I kept asking them to stop it and leave me alone, but they just got louder and louder, and angrier and angrier, and then they were shouting at each other, too.
I woke up. I looked around. It was night time. Mum and Dad were sleeping nearby. Ben was on the other side of them. None of them were shouting. "It was just a dream," I told myself, two or three times until I really believed it. "It was just a dream."
I looked around to see if Noah and Faye were awake. I couldn't see them. They had been next to us when I had gone to sleep. Some other people had stopped nearby to sleep as well, but not many as most had kept going for Canterbury on the main road. It was just the ones with children and old people who were resting. And an old man in a wheelchair, with a lady who was probably his daughter. There were only about twenty people there apart from us.
I stood up and had a look around. It was cold; I was glad that I had my coat on.
It took me a while before I realized what had happened. Noah and his family had left during the night. They had promised to stay with us. Safety in numbers and all that stuff. But they had crept away when we were fast asleep.
They had left us all alone.
#
I woke Dad up to tell him they had gone. I thought he'd want to know. He woke up Mum. I was going to wake up Ben as well, but they wanted him to get his sleep, even though I was wide awake and I'm youngest so I needed my sleep more than he did.
Dad was not happy. He swore a lot, and said that he knew that they would sneak off as soon as they had the chance. He'd had a bad feeling about them from the start.
Mum was really quiet. She looked quite upset. I think that she had quite liked having another woman around so they could talk about things she couldn't talk to Dad about, and now she had lost all of that. Maybe she was embarrassed, too, because it was her friends who had left us.
"And they've taken the radio!" Dad complained. "What are we going to do without the radio?"
"It was an i-pad," she pointed out. "The kids have got i-pads."
"My battery's run out," I told them. "But Ben's is working."
"Can he get radio on it?" Dad asked.
I nodded. "Of course he can."
"And nobody thought to tell me that when I was trying to get the telly to work so we could listen to the news?"
"I thought you knew." This may actually have been a bit of a lie, as in fact I hadn't even thought of the radio at the time, but he was the grown-up and he should have asked for an i-pad if he wanted one, so it was his fault either way.
"It won't be any use, though, will it?" asked Mum.
"It's got batteries. We've been saving them for you specially. Just in case you might need it - for anything."
"But none of us speak French, Jack."
"Ben does. He does it at school."
"I've helped him with his homework. He can tell us that the cat is in the kitchen or the pencils are on the desk, but he's not going to be able to tell us whether Russia has reached Canterbury yet."
"He's only little," Dad put in. "He's doing very well for his age."
"Yes he is. I didn't say he wasn't. But there's no point making him listen to the news in French; he'll only pick out the odd word here and there, and that will just upset him. We press on to Canterbury, and see for ourselves."
"You're really sure you still want to go on? Your friends have given up on it."
"My friends? That's the way it's going to be, is it?"
"They were your friends. I've only met them a few times. They just effed off and left us on our own," (he didn't say "effed").
"I didn't hear you complaining about them when Daisy was telling us what they were saying on that chat-show!" Or when she was sharing out their food with us.
"She was alright. But he was a real know-it-all."
"Takes one to know one."
"That's just childish!"
"Good. Look, we're going to Canterbury, okay? I'm fed up having this conversation again and again and again. You must be, too. I'm going to Canterbury, and that's an end to it. You wait here with the kids if you think it's for the best. If you'd have let me go on my own, I'd have been there and back by now."
"If you hadn't been blown to pieces on the road, that is."
"But I wasn't, though, was I?"
"But you might have been if we weren't with you. You would have been further up the road. Anything could have happened."
Mum breathed a very deep breath indeed. She said nothing for about half a minute. I was expecting Dad to use the chance to have another moan, but he kept quiet, too. I think that was wise.
When she spoke again, her voice was quiet but firm. "I'm going when the sun comes up. Are you coming with me? You don't have to; not if you think it's safer for the kids to stay here. But I'm not going to leave my Mum alone for one more day. She could be buried under a pile of rubble for all I know, waiting for me to come and help her. When we've found her, we can do whatever you think best. You're the practical one; just tell me what you want us to do. But for now, I've got to do what I think best, and what I think best is to go and help my Mum, because she might really, really need me right now."
She started crying. Dad cuddled her, and stroked her hair, and told her that of course we'd come with her and he was so, so sorry. I went and laid down next to Ben. It was a bit embarrassing watching them have a cuddle, because they were quite old and it's cringey watching old people do that sort of thing, even when they're not kissing or anything.
Besides, I needed my sleep. It sounded like we would have a lot more walking to do in the morning, and my knees were hurting a lot already. I decided that I would walk into Canterbury, however sore my knees were, so that Mum wouldn't have to cry again, so the more sleep I had, the better. But it took me ages to nod off again, and when I did I had my dream about bombing again, only this time everyone started crying when the bombs came down.
#
Ben woke me up in the morning. He wanted to know where Faye had gone. He didn't say Faye - he said "the others" - but I knew that she was the one he was asking about.
I told him what had happened the night before. He told me that it was ever so important that I didn't keep stopping, no matter how tired I was, because we had to make it to Canterbury in time to catch a boat to France before they closed the doors on us. I asked him if you could catch boats from Canterbury, but he just rolled his eyes and told me that I was "such a child". I thought it was probably best not to ask him what doors they would be shutting.
Mum and Dad were still asleep, but some of the other people who were sleeping nearby were already on the move. As Ben seemed quite chatty for a
change, I decided to have another go at finding out more about why the Russians were invading us. At least I knew it was the Russians now, so that was something, but I wasn't really sure who the Russians were or why they wanted to fight us.
"Why are they invading us?"
"Who?"
"The Russians."
"Why do you think?"
"I dunno."
"You're such a child."
I know he was right - I am a child - but I was getting fed up that he kept saying it all the time. It was getting boring. He was a child, too, even though he'd never admit it. Just because he was born before me, it didn't mean that I was more babyish than him. George at school said that his brother was fourteen and had a big bushy beard and a job at the bank, which just goes to show that age doesn't matter all that much. There's not much that his brother couldn't do; he had a job at the circus last year, walking on a tight-rope over the tigers' cage. He said that he used to be a girl as well, but I don't think I believe that.
"You don't know either, do you? You're not telling me, because you don't know. You're just as babyish as me." (I wasn't babyish, but I knew it would make him cross saying that).
"No-one could be as babyish as you. You should still be wearing a nappy."
Dad woke up We might have been talking quite loudly.
"Are you two arguing again? Could you stop it? We've got a long way to go yet and it's not gonna help if you guys are bickering all the time." It was funny him saying that, bearing in mind that him and Mum bickered miles more than we did, but you can't say that to grown-ups so I decided to have a go at Ben instead.
"He's being nasty to me. He said I was a baby and that I should be wearing a nappy."
"I said you were a child. You are, in case you haven't noticed. You're eight." (He said the word eight as if it was the worst thing in the world).
"So? My friend George has a brother with a beard."
"Well that's relevant, isn't it?"
"Of course it is!"
The English Refugee: The Day It Happened Here Page 8