by Rose Tremain
Madge was relieved. It had been decided of course that the child would sleep upstairs in one of the servants’ rooms and have meals with Sadler and Vera, but still, it was nice to know she’d be able to choose the face she’d see from her window, a face she’d have to meet from time to time.
‘It sounds a very sensible arrangement,’ she told Miss Reader. ‘We’ll be there.’
‘We’ meant Madge and Sadler. The Colonel stayed at home, treasuring perhaps his last few hours of peace. He sat in his study, listening to the wireless, and the news announcer told him that still no bombs had fallen on London and that there were ‘disturbing signs’ that many of the families evacuated from the East End had failed to adapt to the country wastes and were trickling home. The news reassured him. The unwelcome intrusion into his quiet life might soon be gone.
The train came in. It was only a short walk from Hentswell station, but the children, herded along by volunteer chaperones, began to run. The long hours spent in the stuffy, crowded train had snuffed out any excitement they might have felt and had left them thirsty and tired. The promise of a beaker of orangeade as they left the station was enough to send them scuttling down the village street, shouting and jumping, some laughing at long last and others crying as they were pulled along. Their homes vanished now as their new surroundings pressed in on them, but they were too bewildered to know what to make of them, too thirsty to do anything but keep running. The mothers, the few that had come, were forced to run, too, pulled along by their children.
‘Don’t run, stop running!’ they shouted, hating this embarrassing, disorderly progress.
As they passed, the silent, safe community of Hentswell received them with little titters of laughter.
Once inside the church hall, the children jostled for the orangeade laid out on long trestle tables, and the mothers hung back, aware of the group of people sitting to one side and looking them up and down. Miss Reader and the vicar’s wife came forward: there was a cup of tea for the mothers, if they liked, and then perhaps, they’d like to collect their children and wait in family groups. They drank the tea, glad of that at least. But time was casting them adrift and they looked about them in blank misery. They felt like beggars.
‘Go on, Sadler,’ said Madge.
Her eye had singled out a pale, fair boy, standing on his own, holding his beaker of orangeade, but not drinking it, staring in awe at the strangers come to meet him.
He was remembering what his Ma had said before he left: ‘Don’t look so bleedin’ miserable, Tom, or no one’ll choose you. For Gawd’s sake smile, can’t yer?’ He couldn’t. He hadn’t known till the evening before that he was going. No one had told him. And he’d stayed awake all night, frightened to go to sleep in case they put him on the train before he’d said goodbye. Then the morning had come and a coach had arrived to collect him, and his Ma in her dressing gown, shivering in the early morning cold, hadn’t even hugged him, just held his shoulders and kissed his forehead and told him to hurry up.
‘He looks a nice quiet one,’ Madge said. ‘Go and talk to him, Sadler.’
‘Sadler crossed the room to where the boy stood.
‘Hello, lad,’ Sadler said, smiling. ‘What’s your name, son?’
The boy fingered the top button of his coat.
‘It’s on the label, mister.’
Tom called everyone ‘mister’. Except Madge, whom he never addressed at all, and Vera, whom he liked and called ‘auntie’. The Colonel, of course, would have preferred to be called ‘Colonel’ or ‘Sir’. ‘You should call me “Colonel”,’ he told Tom, ‘or “Sir”.’ But Tom was confused. The only people he’d ever addressed as ‘Sir’ were his schoolteachers, and in his history books Colonels only popped up when there was a war going on and they had to go off and command. They never seemed to have homes, let alone stay in them, when everyone else was outside fighting. To Tom, this argued that Colonel Bassett couldn’t be a real Colonel. He thought of asking Vera, but as far as he could see, Vera and the Colonel had never met, so he doubted that she knew anything about it. Only much later did he think to ask Sadler and Sadler told him that the Colonel was ‘retired’ – a word Tom believed meant some kind of incurable illness. After that, he did call the Colonel ‘Colonel’ when he remembered, mostly out of pity.
Tom’s first comment about the house as they drove up – Madge and Wren in front, Tom and Sadler behind – was that it looked like Buckingham Palace.
Madge, feeling light-hearted now that it was ‘all over’, said: ‘I’m afraid you won’t find the King here, dear.’ And Tom said flatly: ‘No. I know. The King’s in London. My Ma said she thought ’e was quite brave to stay there.’
‘Oh I agree,’ said Madge, ‘I agree with your Ma.’
The car and his empty stomach had made Tom feel sick. His face was as white as chalk as they led him up the stone steps and into the great, dark hall. Looking at him, Sadler could imagine the nightmare he was going through, so he took his hand, anxious to spare him any further meetings and told Madge that he thought it best if Tom went straight to the kitchen and had a warm drink and something to eat. Madge agreed. Best to get it sorted out right from the start, she thought, he’s Sadler’s responsibility.
When Vera greeted him with her ‘come on in, duck,’ sat him down at the scrubbed table with a mug of tea and told him she’d fry him a couple of sausages, he felt better.
‘Ta,’ he said.
‘’Ad an awful journey then, love?’ she asked him.
‘They didn’t give us no drinks,’ said Tom, clasping his tea.
His eyes followed her as she moved around the kitchen. All the women he’d ever met – until today – had been a bit like Vera. Fatter or thinner, with different hair, different aprons, but like her in essence. Even his Ma, though younger, had a manner something like Vera’s. He hoped he could just stay there in the warm kitchen, watching her.
Sadler was watching him. He was a thin boy and quite small for what, judging from his face, his age appeared to be. His eyes were a washed-out blue, large in a bony face, and they looked steadily and carefully at things. He was still wearing his coat, too short in the sleeves, and with the label on it.
‘You warm enough, Tom?’ Sadler asked.
‘Yes,’ said Tom.
‘Like to take your coat off?’
‘Yes.’
Tom put down his tea reluctantly, then stood up and unbuttoned his coat. Sadler took it from him, reading the label as he hung it up: Tom Trent, 68 Woodbridge Buildings, Coston Lane, London. E.5. Aged 11 years.
‘When’s your birthday, Tom?’ Sadler asked him.
‘Nineteenth of March, mister.’
‘Well, that’s funny – day after mine.’
Tom grinned at last.
‘How old are you, mister?’
‘Same age as the year. You didn’t know that, did you, Vera?’
‘Lor no, Mr Sadler,’ she teased, ‘I always thought you was older than me.’ Then to Tom: ‘Certainly looks it, don’t ’e?’
But Tom was looking away.
‘My Ma’s thirty-one,’ he said.
It was this business of Tom’s Ma, the way, during his first weeks at the house, each conversation ended with some reference to her, that made Sadler want to care for Tom. Trying to remember what it was like to be eleven, Sadler decided that had he been separated from Annie at that age, he would have wanted to die. So close to her had he stayed, so absolutely necessary to his life had her almost constant presence become, that even one night away from her would have been torment. And if – for whatever reason – she’d sent him away, as Tom’s mother had done, he knew he would have resisted all communication with the strangers who replaced her and withdrawn into total silence. Sadler thought he saw in Tom something of what he himself had been, would make this the excuse for loving him.
But he was mistaken. Tom was nothing like Jack Sadler had been. Despite the careful ways in which the boy kept stating apparently random bits of informati
on about his Ma so that no one would forget that he belonged to her, he had long been forced into an unwilling independence from her. She’d come and gone. Gone, often, by the time he kicked his way home from school. Don’t go out, notes on the kitchen table had read, Sausage roll for your tea. He always stayed up waiting for her, reading his Champion, had fallen asleep sometimes, till she woke him up putting the light on.
‘Aunties’ replaced her. Once or twice a Nigerian woman from the flat next door called Martha-Ann brought him round a great spicy bowl of something or other for his supper, and laughed and clapped her podgy hands while he gulped it down. He liked Martha-Ann. They would play noughts and crosses on a slate and he could beat her. Or listen to the wireless. He wasn’t allowed to touch the wireless if no grown ups were there, but Martha-Ann always turned it on for him and at that time in the evening there was usually a funny show that they enjoyed; and Martha-Ann would laugh at all the jokes.
Tom’s Ma – so different from Annie Sadler – couldn’t bear to do any fussing and petting over her kid, it didn’t seem natural to her. Tom had never been hugged much, or had her attention for longer than was necessary to keep him quiet. Tom loved her because she was his Ma. He was glad when she stayed in and talked to him. But he had also come to realize that as Mas went, she wasn’t all that good. Martha-Ann’s children were often picked up and given wet kisses and taken to the funfair on Saturdays. They even had a sweet tin on the window sill with lemon sherberts in it, and on Sundays they sat down to huge dinners that had taken all morning to cook. Tom once said to Martha-Ann that he wished she was his Ma, but the remark brought instant disaster. He immediately felt ashamed of having ‘betrayed’ his own Ma, and Martha-Ann started shedding a great Niagara of tears.
When the war had started and people said the Germans would drop bombs on the East End, Tom’s Ma thought it best to heed the Government’s warning and send Tom away. She told herself that this would be ‘best all round’. Tom would have a nice time in the country and, bombs or no, at thirty-one she would at last have regained her freedom. When the bus left, taking the boy away, she made herself a cup of tea and lit a cigarette, feeling happier than she had done for years.
For his part, Tom experienced a very real despair as the bus turned out of his street. It wasn’t leaving that was so bad, it was the feeling of having failed.
It was some weeks before Sadler could piece together enough of what Tom had told him to be able to follow the muddled turnings the boy’s life had taken. But on that first evening, climbing the stairs to the top landing with Tom, Sadler racked his brain for something to say, some promise, he thought, some word to reassure the child that he could give him – what? Friendship? He supposed that was it: friendship. But Sadler had never really understood the term. He’d either loved people, or been indifferent to them. Understanding, then? But understanding was so close to pity and children recognized pity for the base emotion Sadler knew it to be. So keep quiet, he told himself, say nothing. Instead, he took Tom’s hand as they went into his little room.
‘You be all right, then?’ Sadler asked him.
‘I’m OK, mister,’ Tom said.
Sadler drew his curtains and left him to himself. Tom sat down on the bed, took a dirty rubber out of one of his pockets and started rubbing his knee.
Miss Reader called after a week. She made a point, she said, of going round all the evacuee foster homes as often as she could, to find out how things were going. Clothes, she explained, had turned out to be one of the biggest problems. The long summer was tb blame. The weather had been so hot in the south of England that many of the London children had been sent off wearing sandals and cotton blouses. And now, of course, it was beginning to turn cold, and some of them didn’t even possess a warm coat. The Government was to blame in part, Miss Reader stressed, so little warning was given that many of the mothers panicked and forgot to pack properly, just sent the youngsters off with what they had to hand.
‘Oh Tom has a coat,’ Madge assured her, anxious for Miss Reader to be gone. ‘Anyway, if he needs clothes and things, you can be sure we’ll get them for him.’
‘Good,’ said Miss Reader. ‘Now what about bed wetting? Have you had any trouble?’
‘Oh good heavens no! I don’t think so. I don’t make the beds, you understand, but I’m sure Jane or Betty would have reported anything like that.’
‘You would be sure not to scold, if it does happen, wouldn’t you? It’s the strange surroundings, you see. They get over it in time, when they get used to you.’
‘I see. One can’t help feeling sorry … It must be … I don’t know … terrible, I suppose.’
‘It’s a social upheaval quite unparalleled in recent years. But at least we know they’re safe, don’t we?’
‘I don’t expect anyone knows how long it’ll last, do they?’
‘Months – or years. Our lives will change, maybe for the better.’
Madge couldn’t imagine a ‘better’. Money had bought her such treasures and when she moved among them she believed she was perfectly happy. There was Geoffrey, of course, so much less bright than all those shiny medals he’d won at Gallipoli, and a bit disorientated these last years, with no orders to give. He’d taken to making inventories: inventories of his library of military history, inventories of everything in the house worth more than a hundred pounds, inventories of the things he kept in his bedroom cupboards – stud boxes, button shiners, clothes brushes, shoe horns, cigar cases, innumerable ties and pairs of cufflinks, and his medals. Gives me something to do, he explained. And Madge thought he’s probably a bit batty by now – perhaps we both are. But Geoffrey loved her. Geoffrey had cherished her all these years, without asking for much in return. She hated to think of a life without him.
‘Don’t you agree?’ Miss Reader asked.
‘What did you say?’
‘Don’t you agree that change can be for the better? Take the last war.’
‘Oh,’ said Madge, ‘we were still quite young then. It makes all the difference, doesn’t it?’
Miss Reader abandoned the conversation. Madge told her that she’d find Tom in the garden, if she wanted to see him. Out at the back, Madge thought, or down at the stream.
‘He seems to like the stream,’ she said.
Miss Reader went out and made rather ungainly progress through the damp orchard grass. She had caught sight of Sadler standing on the bank of the stream and welcomed the chance to talk to him again. Because he puzzled her. Behind the butler’s convention of playing deaf, she judged him to be an intelligent observer. He himself seemed to invite observation. He looked, not down, when he spoke to you, but right at you and Miss Reader liked that look.
Tom was down in the stream. He’d collected as many large stones as he could find and was trying to make a dam. But the current was stronger than it seemed; he could hardly get two or three stones together before the water parted them and sent them scudding into the bank. Sadler was watching him, biting on a pipe that had gone out.
‘It’s no good, Tom,’ he was saying, ‘we’ll have to go and look for some bigger stones.’
‘There ain’t none any bigger.’
‘Or use something else as a foundation, a log or something.’
‘Yeah, OK.’
Miss Reader waved to them.
‘Hullo there!’
Sadler turned and Tom looked up. Miss Reader sensed that they resented the intrusion.
‘What a lovely stream, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Wot she want?’ Tom asked Sadler.
‘Oh, I’ve come to see if everything’s all right. You remember me, don’t you, Tom? I was at the Centre when you all arrived.’
‘I don’t remember you.’
‘We’re OK though, aren’t we Tom?’ Sadler cut in quickly.
‘I dunno.’
Tom climbed up the farther bank of the stream and began to wander off. Miss Reader turned to Sadler.
‘He’s with you most of the time, is
he?’
Sadler’s eyes were following Tom.
‘Yes.’
‘I suppose everyone’s happy with the arrangement?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Of course, it’s very wrong of them …’
‘My choice, Miss.’
‘Oh I see.’
Sadler called out: ‘Don’t get lost, Tom!’ But the boy didn’t turn. Just kept walking in his aimless fashion.
‘Well …’
Miss Reader would have liked to talk to Sadler. She felt like telling him not to bother with all that politeness, not with her. She might belong by birth to the class it flattered, but she only recognized its superfluousness. What hope for understanding can there possibly be, she felt like saying to him, if all we can say is what’s expected of us, the things charted and set down? But it was coming out with questions of that sort that had so often landed her in trouble at her father’s dinner table with everyone looking at her in astonishment and her mother asking: ‘Is this another of your Equality things, Mary?’
She felt suddenly miserable, thinking to herself how nice – how right really – it would have been to take Sadler’s arm and walk gently along, comfortable as she walked, with her arm tucked in like that, and just talk. She was so conscious of the weight of her loneliness. It would have been a blessed relief to have rested it, if only for a while, on him.
‘Well …’ she said again.
She followed Sadler’s gaze and saw that Tom was almost out of sight now, gone right across the big meadow. Sadler took his pipe out of his mouth and knocked it against the tree. Then he turned and looked at Miss Reader.
‘He’s best left alone, I think. For a while yet, anyway.’
‘Tom?’
‘He keeps most things inside him. Never even answers a question straight.’