‘You see how good it is I didn’t go,’ I had said to Mum.
But then came the summer of 1940, and now everyone realised that the war was going to last longer than they had hoped and that the Nazis had moved dangerously close. From June large-scale evacuations took place once more. Parents, particularly those who lived in London, were asked again and again by the government to send their children away.
Once more posters covered the centre of London. This time they carried a picture of children and in large letters the words: Mothers! Send them out of London!
However, no one was forced to do it. Parents could decide for themselves what they wanted to do. So for a while I managed to talk Mum out of her notions of getting me somewhere safe.
Now in the autumn my position started to weaken, which made me uneasy.
At the start of October our house had taken a direct hit. We were sitting in the air-raid shelter with other people from our house when there was a deafening boom above us. We thought our eardrums would burst. At the same time the ground trembled and quaked, and dust and plaster fell from the ceiling.
‘Out!’ screamed a man. ‘Everyone out at once!’
Some people swarmed to the door in panic. Others called out for calm. ‘It’s hell out there! Stay here. The roof will hold!’
Mum was for staying. There were so many bombs landing in quick succession nearby that, she thought, we would be more likely to die on the street than to be buried here in the cellar. I would have preferred to go outside. The fear of suffocating down here was making it difficult for me to breathe. Not that I was going to do anything that Mum had not given me the OK for. So I stuck it out, shivering and trembling, with my head in my hands.
In the early hours of morning the ‘all clear’ sounded and we crept out, fearful of what we would find up above. Our house was a pile of rubble. The one next to it too. And the one next to that one. In fact, apart from a few houses, the whole street was. We rubbed our eyes and stared incredulously at the sight of the devastation.
‘Now it’s happened,’ Mum said in the end. Like all of us, she had swallowed a lot of dust. Her voice sounded as if she had a cold. ‘Now we don’t have a home any more.’
We poked around in the ruins for a while, but did not find anything that was still in a usable state. I found a bit of cloth which had been part of my favourite dress, on whose red linen yellow flowers were printed. I took the scrap. The rest of the dress was not to be seen.
‘You can always use it as a hanky,’ Mum said.
Then we set out to find new accommodation. My father’s sister and her family, our only relatives, lived a few streets further on. Mum was sure they would take us in for a while. Auntie Edith’s house was indeed still standing, but they were not at all pleased to see us. The family of six was squeezed into a two bedroom flat on the ground floor and had already taken in a friend who had also become homeless.
In addition, Edith’s husband had just been sent back from the field hospital and was not – as Edith confided in a whisper – quite right in the head at the moment. He would sit and stare out of the window all day, now and then starting to cry for no reason. It was clear that Mum and I were all that was needed right then.
And now Mum spoke again about us separating, and she sounded serious. I heard her talk to Edith about it.
‘I’m thinking of sending Fiona to the country. They’re taking more and more children away. She’s not safe in London.’
‘Good idea,’ said Edith relieved. It meant one less person in the overcrowded house. Not that she wanted to send her own children away just yet. She claimed she would not be able to bear their leaving.
Unfortunately my mother was less sentimental. Although I cried and screamed and showed my complete despair, she did not back down. She arranged everything so that it could go ahead.
Soon I was on the list to go to Yorkshire with a group of children at the start of November.
2
The train was to leave Paddington Station at nine in the morning. The morning of 4th November was foggy, although we could see that the sun was trying to penetrate the grey.
‘You’ll see. Today will be a glorious autumn day,’ Mum said to cheer me up.
My mood could not have been blacker. I did not care whether the sun shone or not. I trotted along beside my mother with the obligatory gas mask over my shoulder and a little cardboard suitcase in my hand, which Edith had lent me. The government had put together lists of what the children should take with them, down to the number of handkerchiefs considered necessary. As we had been bombed and had little money, Mum had not nearly managed to meet all of these requirements. Auntie Edith had plundered her children’s old clothes for a dress that was too short for me, a sweater whose sleeves did not nearly reach to my wrists, and a pair of boots that were actually made for a boy. Mum had sewn a nightie for me and knitted two pairs of socks. I was wearing the checked dress that I had been wearing on the night of the bombing, as well as my old cardigan and my red sandals – they were the only belongings of mine that I still had. It was really too cold for those clothes and Mum warned me that I was bound to catch a cold. I insisted stubbornly. I had lost everything I possessed, my own mother was sending me away – I needed at least my dress and my shoes to have something familiar to hold on to. So let me catch a cold. Maybe I’d catch pneumonia and die. It would serve Mum right if no one from her family was left alive.
We had to walk down the street we had lived in until that October night. It was the most ruined street in London, it seemed to me. Right at the end a single house had been standing since the raid, but already from a distance we could see that it too had fallen victim to the air attacks.
‘I think they don’t want to leave a single stone standing in London,’ Mum said in disbelief, and with they she meant the Germans.
As we approached, we noticed the intense smell of burning that hung over this last bastion in our street – now finally vanquished. We saw that smoke was rising from the rubble. The house must have lost the battle with the bombers in one of the past few nights. We had known the families who had lived there a little, as you know each other when you live not many yards from each other in the same street. We knew who was who, exchanged pleasantries, knew a little about everyone’s lives but not in detail. The Somerville family had lived on the first floor. Father, mother and six children. I had played with their second oldest daughter sometimes, but only when I was bored and could not find anyone else to play with. The Somervilles were considered anti-social. Although no one spoke about this in front of a child, I had an inkling of this. Mr Somerville drank, and much more than my daddy. He drank from morning to night. You could never catch him sober. He was abusive to his wife, which had led to Mrs Somerville, who apparently also drank more than was good for her, walking around with a grotesquely crooked nose. It had been broken in a fight with her husband and mended wrongly. He was also abusive to his children. People said that some of them were a little soft in the head because of how often he had hit them, and that their mother’s excessive consumption of alcohol during her pregnancies had caused them damage. Whatever the truth of the matter, there was always the fear of appearing rather suspect yourself if you were too close to the Somervilles, and so for that reason too I had kept contact with the children to a minimum.
We stood in front of the smoking ruins for a moment and were wondering to ourselves with some apprehension what had become of all the people who had lived here, when young Miss Taylor came out of the neighbouring house. A small section of its ground floor was still there, and roofed. She came from a village in Devon and had come to London to try her luck; she worked at a laundry. She was leading a small boy by the hand, who I recognised as Brian Somerville. He was seven or eight years old and was reckoned to be rather dense.
Miss Taylor’s face was chalk-white.
‘That was an inferno these last three nights,’ she said, and I saw her lips were trembling violently. ‘It was … I thought …’ She
wiped her free hand over her brow, which in spite of the cold morning was wet with sweat. Mum said later that she had been suffering from shock.
‘I’m going to see if I can doss at a friend’s place,’ she explained. ‘She lives a little further out, and I hope they aren’t being bombed as much there. Anyway, it’s going to be too cold to stay in this ruin. And I can’t bear it all any longer. I can’t bear it any longer!’ She started to cry.
My mother gestured to little Brian who was staring at us with giant, shocked eyes.
‘What about him? Where are his parents?’
Miss Taylor sobbed loudly. ‘Dead. All dead. Even the sisters. All of them.’
‘All of them?’ exclaimed Mum, shocked.
‘They dug them out,’ whispered Miss Taylor, who had probably just realised what an effect this conversation might have on the already traumatised child holding her hand. ‘Yesterday, all day long. Everyone who was living in the house … or rather, what was left of them. The house was hit the night before last. They said nobody could survive it.’
Mum pressed her hand to her mouth in horror.
‘And then last night he suddenly appeared at my place.’ Miss Taylor nodded at Brian. ‘Brian. I don’t know where he came from. I can’t get a word out of him. Either he was buried in the rubble, but managed to survive and free himself, or he wasn’t at home that night. I mean, you know …’
We knew. Sometimes, when Mr Somerville was completely out of it, he just did not let his children into the flat. Often one of them had asked to kip in a neighbour’s place, and on summer nights they had sometimes camped out on the street. When I was younger and more foolish, I had sometimes envied them their freedom.
‘Where should I take the little tyke now?’ wailed Miss Taylor.
‘Can you take him to your friend?’ asked my mother.
‘Never. She works all day too. Neither of us can look after him.’
‘Does he have any relatives?’
Miss Taylor shook her head. ‘I chatted with Mrs Somerville sometimes. She always wanted to leave her husband, but she said she had no family she could go to. I’m afraid Brian … is now alone in the world.’
‘Then you have to hand him over to the Red Cross,’ Mum advised and looked pityingly at the pale boy. ‘Poor lad!’
‘Oh God, oh God,’ moaned Miss Taylor. It seemed the situation was too much for her.
And then my mother did something that was to have far-reaching consequences, something that was not like her at all. She was not by nature someone willing to lend a helping hand. She would always say that it was hard enough keeping our own heads above water, and that we could not afford to take on other people’s problems too.
‘All right, I’ll take him,’ she said. ‘I’m just taking Fiona to the train station. She’s being evacuated. I’m sure I’ll find someone there who can help me, one or other of the Red Cross nurses, for example. Then I can hand Brian over to them.’
Miss Taylor looked as if she wanted to hug my mother. Before you could say Jack Robinson, Mum had two children at her side: her own eleven-year-old daughter in a thin summer dress with a cardboard suitcase in her hand, and an eight-year-old boy in trousers stiff with dirt and a formless, sack-like sweater which, to judge by its worn condition, had already served whole generations of children as an all-purpose item of clothing. The boy moved as if in a trance. He did not seem to take in what was going on around him.
In this formation we arrived at the train station, at the very last minute as we discovered. Either Mum had got the times wrong, or we had been dawdling, held up by Brian’s ambling along. In any case, most of the children were already on the train. Clusters of them were squeezed at the windows, waving to their parents standing on the platform. Many of them were crying. Many mothers looked as if they would really have liked to climb onto the train themselves. Various children were screaming that they wanted to get off and go home. All of them had little badges, on which their names were written. Red Cross nurses and other helpers were scurrying here and there with clipboards and lists in their hands, trying to keep track of everything in the chaos.
Mum approached one of the Red Cross nurses determinedly. ‘Excuse me. My daughter was registered for this train.’
The nurse was a tall, large woman. She had such an unfriendly face that I felt quite afraid. ‘You’re late!’ she barked. ‘Name?’
‘Swales. Fiona Swales.’
The nurse looked down her list and ticked off something, no doubt my name. She fished a little card badge out from under her clipboard.
‘Write your daughter’s name on this. And her date of birth. And your address in London.’
Mum found a pencil in her handbag and squatted down to rest the name-badge on her knees as she wrote. The nurse stared at Brian.
‘And what about him? Is he going too?’
Brian reached for my hand, frightened. I felt sorry for him and did not pull my hand away, although I would have liked to.
‘No,’ said my mother. ‘He’s an orphan. I don’t know where to take him.’
‘And I’m supposed to know?’
Mum stood up and fixed the badge to my cardigan’s lapel.
‘You are from the Red Cross!’
‘But I’m not responsible for orphans! Can’t you see all that I have to do here?’ And with those words she hurried onwards, to snap at a little girl who, in tears, was trying to get off the train and was screaming for her mother.
‘You have to get on the train, Fiona,’ insisted Mum nervously.
Brian held onto me with both hands.
‘He’s not letting go, Mummy,’ I said, surprised at the strength in Brian’s little hands.
My mother tried to separate Brian from me. The conductor blew his whistle. In the blink of an eye, a wave of people had carried and pushed us to the carriages. There were children who had not been able to tear themselves away yet, parents who wanted to reach through the windows one last time and touch their children’s hands or cheeks. The farewells around me were heart-rending. I was determined mine should not be. I was angry with Mum for sending me away, and I was sure that I would never forgive her. I reached the iron steps of the carriage. Brian was still clinging resolutely to my hand, although I was trying quite brutally by now to shake him off. A wall of people pressed us onwards from behind.
I turned around. ‘Mummy!’ I shouted.
I had lost her in the turmoil. I heard her voice coming from somewhere, but I could not see her. ‘Get on, Fiona! Get on!’
‘Brian’s not letting go!’ I screamed.
A father standing right behind us lifted his daughter up into the carriage. Then with one arm he grabbed hold of me and with the other arm Brian, and in a second we were both on the train too.
‘Close the doors!’ shouted the conductor.
I pushed my way down the passageway, pulling Brian behind. He did not let go for a moment.
Well done, Mummy! Now I’ll have to see how to get rid of him!
‘I can’t believe how stupid you are!’ I snapped at him. ‘You’re not supposed to be here! They’ll send you back straight away!’
He stared at me from his huge eyes. I noticed how white his skin was and how clearly you could see the web of blue veins under his temples.
He had no badge, no suitcase and no gas mask. He was on no list. They would send him back in no time. It was not my fault that the man had just lifted him into the train.
I found a free seat on one of the wooden benches and sgueezed on beside the other children. Brian tried to sit on my lap, but I pushed him away. In the end he stood nearby.
‘Don’t be so mean to your little brother,’ said a girl of about twelve who was sitting opposite and eating a delicious smelling pâté sandwich.
‘He’s not my brother,’ I replied. ‘I don’t even know him!’
The train started to move. I had to swallow hard in order not to break into tears. Many children were crying, but I did not want to be one of them. We slow
ly left the train station. The sun had still not managed to break through the fog and the day was grey and dark. My future did not look any brighter. Grey, dark and uncertain, as if the damp, impenetrable fog lay over it too.
I felt that the end of my childhood had come. Without any tears, but with my heart as heavy as lead, I said goodbye to it.
3
It was late afternoon by the time we reached Yorkshire. The train timetable had been thrown into disarray, because our train had unexpectedly come to a stop a few miles outside London, where it had to wait three hours. The previous night’s bombs had caused two large trees to fall on the tracks. The clean-up work was already under way when we reached the spot. The nurses and teachers accompanying us on the train made an effort to keep us calm and in good spirits. Some organised games in little groups, others distributed paper and colouring pencils. The sun did finally break through, scattering the banks of mist and bathing the autumnal landscape in a gentle light. We were allowed to get off the train and stretch our legs. Some of the children started to play ‘it’ immediately. Others squatted down, leaning on trees, and began to write their first letters to their parents. Some were still crying. I kept to myself, unpacked the sandwiches my mother had made for me, and started eating.
Brian stuck to me like my shadow. He looked at me fixedly from his large, horrified eyes. I found him creepy and tiresome, and although on the one hand I was happy that he was not – on top of it all – chatting away to me, I found his complete silence rather irritating.
The Other Child Page 9