by Maile Meloy
“Does he mean me?” I asked Timothy, the spotty boy who had given me the letter to read.
“Sure,” Timothy said. “You’re Janie.”
“But I don’t know him.”
“Course you do! You were on the science team together!”
“What science team? There is no science team.”
Eventually our friends got used to the irritating amnesia. It was just a thing about Pip and me, like the fact that I was from California and Pip was from the East End: We’d both lost the same three weeks of our lives.
Some British agents in suits came to question my family, but we had nothing to tell them. They asked about Mr Danby, and I said I thought he’d been the Latin teacher at my school, but I had never met him, and now we had Miss Walsh. They also asked about an apothecary named Marcus Burrows and his son, Benjamin, who was my age. We knew there was a boarded-up apothecary shop around the corner, but that was all.
The Cold War carried on, and the Americans and the Soviets kept working on their nuclear weapons. There were rumours that England was about to stage a test in Australia. We still had bomb drills at school, but when the loud alarm bell went off and people started climbing under tables and desks, I didn’t feel afraid—though of course I didn’t know why.
Exactly a year after I returned to St Beden’s, I got a package in the mail, with no return address and with a strange postmark that I didn’t recognise. I took it into my room and tore off the brown paper. Inside was a small red diary.
I opened the book and recognised my own handwriting, but I didn’t remember writing the words. I flipped through the pages, reading a February entry about how furious I was at my stupid parents for dragging me to London. Then I read one about my miserable first day at St Beden’s, and how the only good part was meeting a boy named Benjamin Burrows who wanted to be a spy. One entry was interrupted when Benjamin climbed the tree outside my bedroom, because his father was missing and he had nowhere else to go.
Memories started coming back in bits and pieces. Something made me stop reading and flip to the blank pages at the end.
There was a note on one of those pages, and it wasn’t in my handwriting. It seemed to have been written carefully, with thought, and it said:
Dear Janie,
It should be safe now for you to have this. I’ve read it every day. I hope you don’t mind. I don’t think you would have minded, before. Reading it is how I kept you with me. I’m sending it back now to help you understand why we had to go away, and to tell you that I’ll come back. It might be another year, it might be more, I don’t know. But start working on your chess. I’ll expect a good opening.
Love, B.
It was a rare sunny day at the beginning of spring, and the tree that Benjamin had climbed to get to my window was bursting with green buds. I had a good chess opening, and I sat with the diary on my lap, feeling like I might spill over with a helpless, giddy laughter, and with a sad and serious ache underneath. I hadn’t understood the strange feelings I’d been having all year, but now I did. And I knew without question that Benjamin was out there somewhere with his father, looking out for us, risking his life to keep the world safe.
And that I would see him again.
Acknowledgments
I’m indebted to my friends Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin for the existence of this book, for bringing Janie and Benjamin and the mysterious apothecary to me, and for trusting me with the beginnings of a story they cared deeply about. They described what they had imagined as a movie, let me run with it, and talked through the convolutions with me as it changed. In the process I discovered two new worlds: wintry Cold War London, and the incredibly welcoming world of Penguin children’s publishing, and it’s been a life-changing adventure.
In writing the book, I drew on David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain 1945-1951, the exhibition The Children’s War at The Imperial War Museum in London, and Lyn Smith’s Young Voices: British Children Remember the Second World War.
The Adventures of Robin Hood was an early television program produced by Hannah Weinstein, who moved to London in the early 1950s and hired blacklisted U.S. writers to write scripts under pseudonyms. I have taken liberties with the real details of the show, as I have with the historical figure of the physicist Andrei Sakharov.
The real Chelsea Physic Garden in London is, in fact, a magical place, growing medicinal plants from all over the world. There really is a mulberry tree in the centre with draping branches under which you can hide. Whether the garden grows herbs that can make you tell the truth or become a bird, I’m not sure, but I think it’s important to allow for the possibilities.