Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

  The assembled boys’ eyes widen. He can see them nudging each other.

  ‘We used to hunt rabbits.’ It is a lie, but only a little one; you’re allowed to tell little lies. ‘They don’t like rabbits in Australia. All those big open spaces are perfect for rabbits, and they run everywhere. So we’d hunt them, and then we’d skin them and pop them on a fire — and, like magic, that’s your dinner! Now,’ he says, beaming, ‘that’s better than soggy cabbage and gristly stew in this old Home, isn’t it?’

  ‘Can you catch a kangaroo?’ somebody pipes up.

  They have looked at pictures of kangaroos and wombats. He has even shown them a Tasmanian devil, but told them not to fear — they’re frightened of oranges, and all you have to do to drive a devil back is scatter some orange peel on the ground. Judah Reed has brought with him an embalmed platypus, but the boys do not believe such a thing can really exist. They are, they know, being made sport of. There are dragons in Australia, and dinosaurs still in the desert.

  ‘Kangaroos are brave and intelligent,’ George declares, standing tall and lifting his fists like a boxing ’roo. ‘You don’t pick a fight with a kangaroo!’

  Afterwards, the boys are permitted to look at a big book full of pictures and postcards. In one of the photographs, George sees Jon Heather, lined up with all the other boys in his dormitory. Jon Heather always got on better with the boys in the dorm after George was gone; George has always known that he held him back. If Jon was here now, he would say: thank you, Jon. But Jon Heather wouldn’t want to know.

  Martin marvels at the photographs too. He finds himself, at thirteen years old, showing the little ones how best to go about the village muster.

  ‘When was the last time you saw Jon Heather?’ he asks. ‘The day he left the Crusade?’

  ‘No,’ says George, lost in the picture. ‘There was one more time. It was …’ He can hardly think about it; it is the same way he sometimes thinks about his mother, as if he might hold her hand one final time. ‘… 1958,’ he whispers.

  The boys file back to the dormitories, there to chatter and think about what they have been told: we are going on a grand adventure, like the heroes of old. In the chantry, Judah Reed pats George mechanically on the shoulder — he might act like a father, but he has never had a father’s touch — and tells him he has done well.

  They stand at frosted windows and look out. In the snow, the boys who will not be joining the voyage have been playing. There are two black boys out there, but black boys will never be sent to Australia. Charlie plays with them, but he is not on either side; he does not know where to throw his snowballs, so he just stockpiles them in a big mound by his feet.

  ‘I want you to tell him tonight,’ says Judah Reed.

  George nods. ‘Do you remember …’

  ‘What is it, George?’

  ‘I was just thinking,’ he says. ‘Do you remember when you told me my mother was dead?’

  Judah Reed holds his eye. ‘I’m afraid not, George,’ he says. ‘I’ve broken the news to so many boys.’

  ‘We were here, in this very room. I don’t think I cried. Not at first.’

  Actually, he bawled. Peter had to tell him to stop. Then, when he met Jon Heather, he started crying again, just so that somebody might ask for his name.

  ‘I think it will be that way with Charlie too. Tell him …’ Judah Reed pauses, as if to contemplate a tactic of battle. ‘… that she loved him very dearly, and wishes for him all the best things in the world. Tell him … she asked us to provide.’

  It is the very thing George’s own mother said about him, before she passed on. Mothers the whole world over, George reflects, must be made of the same things.

  He sits with Charlie that night, reading a book from the library shelf. In the book, there is a castle and an enemy pilot has crash-landed, taking refuge in the keep. He is befriended by a group of local children, who swear not to betray his presence to their mothers, even though he speaks in a nasty, guttural accent: probably he is a German who came to kill them all, but he shows them how to make bows and arrows and to ford a river — and, when one of the boys tumbles into an abandoned mine shaft, it is he who makes the pulley to hoist him out and sets his broken leg with a splint. This is the sort of story Jon Heather would have loved.

  By the time they have come to the end of the second chapter, Charlie is so enthralled that George cannot bring himself to break the bad news. Instead, he ploughs straight into the third chapter — and, after that, the fourth. By then, it is too late to bring a boy to tears. George packs him off to bed, with the promise of more story tomorrow.

  So that he might not have to face Judah Reed and admit to his cowardice, he decides to wander out again. Out there, in the builders’ yards, he might even find a latrine at which he can relieve himself before retiring to bed.

  He retraces, as best as he can, the route he took the night before. When he stops thinking about the terrace, though, a most strange thing happens: his feet seem to find a different path. Blindly, he follows. Can your body remember things your mind cannot? Might that be the reason that he flinches every time Judah Reed swings around, even though it is Judah Reed who has nurtured him, taught him, brought him back to England?

  His feet take him north; he knows, somehow, it is north, though the stars are not the ones he learnt the names for with the Children’s Crusade. He imagines, suddenly, an old man, weathered face and breath like gravy, telling him: the Pole star shines the brightest, and she shines due north. He imagines a tumbledown run of terrace, where bombs have carved big craters, and a lollipop that tastes like mint. The men in black have always said he has a versatile imagination — though, in truth, George knows full well where he gets the stories he tells. There is no such thing as imagination; you just cannibalize things you have heard or seen or done.

  George stops. Every thought is a road that leads back to Jon Heather or Peter. Yet, you’re the one back in England, he tells himself. For the first time in your life, you’re the one leading the way. Can’t you let yourself be proud?

  His feet have brought him far, to the banks of a glowering heath. He imagines a little fat boy cavorting here at the height of summer, wearing only a striped shirt, tumbling on a bedspread used as a picnic blanket. Too late, he recognizes it as the tract of land in the photograph of Charlie with his mother. That mother is dead now; so, too, is the fat little boy he sees in his mind’s eye.

  He wants to go back. Night has hardened, and the banks seem to deepen as the frost encases them in hard shells. Yet, while he has no will to press on, his feet push him further. Over a rise between towering oaks he goes; past air raid shelters bricked up and covered in ice. Down a steep hill there is a taproom, but he does not go in. His feet lead him, instead, to the door of a nondescript terrace, where a blue lantern is suspended over a door.

  Vividly, he imagines a little boy holding an old police commander’s hand and going through those doors. The little boy, round as a barrel, has a face flushed with tears, but the old policeman speaks gently to him and gives him a sweet that tastes of nothing he has ever tasted: it is called liquorice and it tastes of black. The little boy is led through the doors and waits in a windowless room, until a nice lady brings him sugary tea and biscuits. He sleeps in the same room that night, the policeman sitting near, with a crocheted blanket on his lap. The next morning, he is taken to the Chapeltown Boys’ Home of the Children’s Crusade.

  Yes, he realizes, there really is no such thing as imagination; you just cannibalize the things you have heard and seen and done.

  He rises long before dawn and heads back to the police station. This time, both his feet and his head know the way. The city bursts forth in torrents of memory. Streets come alive. He remembers a terrace where boys kicked a ball and he would sit on the kerb to watch. He sees a house charred black and abandoned, nestled between two lovely gardens where flowers grow and washing hangs to dry in the factory smoke, and thinks: the witch woman lived there; you could only
see her at night, if there were no stars; she used to have children, but she magicked them all into mice.

  At the police station, a lady with a bob of thin black hair sits behind a counter. She has tea and toast, and she splutters as George walks nervously in.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  He must look as if he has been a victim of some horrible assault, because then she moves to comfort him. In truth, it is only another attack of memory: I was a little boy, sitting in that corner, watching big ogres of men come and go and talk about me.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he says. ‘I do hope so. I’ve a rather odd question, actually. I wonder — is there still an old captain here, a big stocky man, sombre-looking … He had rather sad eyes, I think. And …’ George doesn’t know whether to say it. ‘… a big old nose, almost as big as his whole face.’

  ‘I think you must mean Captain Matthews. He doesn’t work very much anymore. He keeps trying to retire, but keeps coming back.’ She tilts her head. There is something about this boy, dressed up like a man but still wearing a little boy’s puppy fat, that can mean no harm. ‘You might find him at the tearoom on the corner of the moor. He potters around there most mornings.’

  Somehow, George’s feet know the way there too.

  The tearoom is a drab little affair, a counter and scattered tables and chairs. There, at the table nearest the back, sits an old man, sixty or seventy years old, with a newspaper spread out before him and a pot of coffee at his side. On the old man’s lap, there sits a boy. He is, perhaps, three years old; his face is smeared in jam deeper than on the old man’s toast. A woman emerges from a back bathroom and swoops the little boy up.

  George hovers at the door for an unnaturally long time, and then pushes in. Thinking himself too ridiculous to approach the man straight away, he takes a neighbouring table and orders toast. Too late, he realizes he has no money with which to pay.

  ‘I’ll help you out, son,’ the old policeman begins. ‘You look like you need a good feed.’

  It is not true; George did not look as if he needed a good feed even when he was at the Mission, starving on breakfast slop and hunks of billy-goat meat.

  On hearing the voice, the memories start rampaging. His body must remember how it felt the last time he heard that voice too, because suddenly he wants to cry.

  ‘Son,’ the policeman replies. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Are you Captain Matthews?’

  ‘Is everything all right, boy? Has something happened?’ He stops, as if he too is being assailed by memories only a shred of him can recall. ‘You’re Bethan’s boy … Bethan Stone?’ He says it as if he is bewildered, but he cannot be as bewildered as George.

  He merely mouths the words: am I?

  ‘Here, drink up, son. You look like somebody’s bled you dry.’

  The policeman pours coffee and presses it into George’s hands. ‘Now, son,’ he begins. ‘Why don’t you tell me what it is? Whatever it is, we can get it sorted …’

  ‘I haven’t been back for a long time,’ he begins.

  ‘I can tell that, boy,’ the captain says, risking a grin. ‘You sound as if you’re from the moon.’

  ‘I’ve been away.’

  The boy might be an imbecile, but the old man has dealt with imbeciles before. He nods, considering.

  George twists around, as if some unseen hand is forcing him from his seat. ‘I was wondering,’ he begins, the words slurring in their rush to get out. ‘Could you tell me what it was like, that night …’ He is about to say: that night you took me away. ‘… that night I had to leave my mother?’

  The old captain kneads his brow. He makes eyes at a waitress, who brings him fresh coffee and bread thick with butter.

  ‘It’s a hell of a time ago,’ he says.

  ‘I can hardly remember.’

  ‘You and your mother were our neighbours. That was back before we moved house: too many memories in my old place, you see. But I used to know your father, before he went off fighting. Got himself killed somewhere in Africa, didn’t he?’

  George nods, though in truth he has no idea.

  ‘Your mother had a hard time of it after he didn’t come back. She was slaving almost everywhere she could to make it work, but that meant leaving you with neighbours and friends and … I suppose, when she got sick, she thought she couldn’t stop working, or else the pair of you would starve. That’s probably what did for her, in the end.’ The captain shakes his head dolefully. ‘She loved the hell out of you, and it put her in the infirmary. She had them call me right from there. Well, I hadn’t heard from her in the best part of three years, but off I went … You were with one of the neighbours. They had a little boy, too, much younger than you, but you liked to play with him. You might have been brothers.’

  ‘You took me to the police house, down in Burley …’

  The captain nods. ‘Fifty years old, and there I was, creaking in a chair, my legs seizing up — and you slept, sound as pup, on a blanket on the floor.’

  ‘You had liquorice.’

  The captain leans in, conspiratorially. ‘Son, I’ve always got liquorice.’ He fumbles a short black stick from his pocket onto the table. ‘Your mother had made provisions, of course. She knew she wasn’t well. And she’d leant on her neighbours too much already …’

  Now he stands up, tossing some coins on the counter, and shuffles to the door. When he is almost gone, he looks back. ‘Strange, I’d have thought your mother might have told you all that. You being all grown up. How is your old mother doing, any road?’

  George stops. Coffee scalds his lips. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘London was never a place for me. I spent some time in Southwark once, but couldn’t wait to get out. Too much …’ He shrugs, as if there isn’t a word for it. ‘… weighing down on you. Still, you go where the money is.’ He puts on a cap and opens the door. Winter, that desperate marauder, steals quickly in. ‘Look after yourself, son,’ he says, and bows his head to the snow.

  George sits until his coffee gets cold, and a waitress asks if he would like her to boil it up. For the first time, he doesn’t even feel like crying.

  George lifts his fist and raps, three times, at Judah Reed’s door.

  A voice calls out that he may enter. As if it proves a point, George waits a beat before pushing through.

  ‘We missed you at the assembly this morning,’ Judah Reed begins.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ George replies. ‘I lost track of time.’

  ‘And?’

  He asks it pointedly, as if it is to be assumed that Judah Reed knows exactly what he has been doing, out there in the terraces.

  ‘I have a question,’ George says. ‘If I may?’

  Judah Reed nods, but he would ask it anyway; in his head, he can hear Jon Heather and Peter saying that he must.

  ‘How did Charlie’s mother die?’

  ‘I don’t have the details, George. She had been ill for some time.’

  ‘But you have her death notice, don’t you?’ When Judah Reed looks up, George is staring straight into him. ‘I think Charlie would like it, when he’s older. When he understands.’

  Judah Reed pauses, as if he must consider this. He stands and makes certain that the door is closed.

  ‘George,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you?’

  It is on the tip of his tongue to say it: you lied to me; my mother isn’t dead. And yet — he is silent a moment too long. An insidious thought has ensnared him, throttling him back into silence: if your mother still lives, why, then, did she never send for you?

  Jon Heather stood up to you once, Judah Reed, and he was hardly ten years old. Surely, I can do it now?

  ‘Charlie’s mother isn’t dead, is she?’

  Judah Reed returns to his desk, lifts a file from a deep drawer. He removes a letter and sets it down. The page is a typewritten form, with two spaces where names might be filled out: in the first one, Charlie’s own; at the bottom, his mother’s signature. Steeling himself,
George reads it over and commits the name to memory.

  ‘If she is not dead,’ Judah Reed begins, ‘she is surely dead to him now. Do you understand, George?’

  ‘She told you to tell him she was dead, did she?’

  Judah Reed has never heard George raise his voice. It is almost comical; it breaks like a boy bewildered by his own pubescence.

  ‘She affords us the right to do what we feel is best for the boy. If that means we offer him the chance of forging a new life for himself, in a new country, without anything holding him back, then that is for us to decide. We are, in effect, the boy’s parents now, George. We want what is best for our sons.’ Judah Reed hesitates. ‘Or perhaps you think he would be better left to rot here, in this sorry town, wasting his life at some lathe until he can pump out little boys of his own? This place is a warren, George. You escaped it. Why shouldn’t he?’

  George trembles. ‘You didn’t answer my question. Does she know about Australia? Does she know he’ll think she’s dead? What if … what if a mother came back, wanted their boy again? It’s happened, hasn’t it? God help us, we spent every night here waiting for it to happen … Didn’t you?’

  ‘It isn’t every boy, George. But sometimes a boy needs help in … readjustment. Charlie is a nervous sort. I have seen it a hundred times, George, and you will see it a hundred more: it is better for them to believe.’

  It is only a little lie, George thinks. You’re allowed to tell little lies.

  ‘Do you remember when you were little, and you were ill, and you had to take a horrible brew to make you well again? It’s a little like that for Charlie.’ Judah Reed’s face pales. ‘He has to take his medicine.’ He stops. A thought, it seems, has occurred. ‘Have you told him yet, George?’