Out of the Blackout

by Robert Barnard

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  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 1

  When the train containing the children pulled into Yeasdon Station it was nearly four hours late. Several among the little knot of people waiting to meet them had become restive: one man said—almost hopefully, it seemed—that it didn’t look as if they were going to come at all; and one woman said that her George would be wanting his tea. These eruptions of shuffling and discontent were given short shrift by Mrs Sellerman.

  ‘Your George can get his own tea for once,’ she said. ‘After all, there is a war on.’

  Mrs Sellerman saw it as her duty to keep up the spirits of the waiting foster families, and she kept up a constant stream of bright commentary and admonition: it would be so bewildering for the poor little things she said, shunted off to a strange place, away from their homes and their mothers, many of them in the country for the first time in their lives, very probably. It was up to them, she proclaimed, to make them feel safe and welcome. It was the least they could do.

  Takes too much on herself, does Nan Sellerman, was the unspoken thought in many a waiting breast. For though she was a kindly woman, and a capable one, this first taste of responsibility had rather gone to Mrs Sellerman’s head, and had certainly made her more than a little sententious. But the thought remained unspoken, for this was 1941, and her place in the upper ranks of the village hierarchy protected Mrs Sellerman from outright criticism.

  So everyone was still there when the train drew in. The children leapt and ran and rolled off it, shouting and laughing and displaying very few signs of disorientation. Mrs Sellerman, aided by Mr Thurston the headmaster and Mr Wise the vicar, quickly got them together into a little group—twenty or more, there were—outside the waiting-room, and prepared to allot them to their new homes and their temporary guardians. Mr Thurston insisted on making a little speech of welcome (he was all too fond of little speeches, which usually, like Topsy, growed), and while he was talking about ‘these difficult times’ and ‘all doing their bit,’ Mrs Sellerman surveyed the children. A few were quite respectably dressed and still fairly neat, but most of them were in the range from the untidy to the frankly deplorable.

  ‘I know they’ve had a long journey,’ said Mrs Sellerman under her breath to the vicar, ‘but you’d think some of the mothers could have made a bit more effort. In times like these . . .’

  Mr Wise saw no oddity in regarding tidy children as part of the war effort. He murmured: ‘Remember, they will not be at all the sort of children we are used to here. Slum children, you know . . .’

  For Mr Wise, and for most of the people of Yeasdon, all children from big cities who did not come from impeccably middleclass backgrounds were ‘slum children.’

  At that point a boy in the group, a heavy-limbed lout of fully nine years, rather proved his point by shouting:

  ‘Stow it, mister. We’re ’ungry.’

  Mr Thurston brought his remarks speedily to an end, and took from Nan Sellerman the list of names.

  ‘Ah yes, now. Who’s first? Sally Bates—you’re to go with Mr and Mrs Carter. Mary Nicholls—you’ll be living with Miss Petheridge. Are you there, Miss Petheridge? Good—this little girl is Mary. Yes, do take her along now. Terence Stope—oh no, Terence isn’t coming, after all. William Smithson . . .’

  And so it went on. One by one the children, sobered a little as they were separated from the rest, trotted off with their foster parents, to be caught up in linguistic entanglements as cockney met West Country, to be bewildered by the smells and spaciousness of the countryside, cheered by the unaccustomed lavishness of country fare, and in some cases to be terrified by the first bath of their young lives. Mostly they were tough kids, and cheerful, and while they commented rather disdainfully on everything that was different from home, they seemed ready enough to adapt.

  ‘ ’Ere, they say there’s not even a cinema here,’ said one, as he was taken off by a local farmer.

  ‘Still, at least there won’t be any air raids,’ said another.

  ‘Worse luck!’ shouted the heavy-limbed boy, still uncollected from the group. ‘Zoo-oo-oom! Kerr-rash!’

  In the space of twenty minutes Mr Thurston came to the last name on his list, and Ellen Tucker was taken off by a nervous retired couple who had put away all their ornaments in a high cupboard preparatory to her arrival. Rural peace began to descend on Yeasdon Station.

  ‘Well, that seems to be that,’ said Mr Thurston, removing his spectacles. ‘And I think we can congratulate ourselves—’

  ‘Er—Mr Thurston—’ said Mrs Sellerman. He looked in her direction, and she gestured towards a small boy, still standing near the door of the waiting-room, a diminutive case clasped in his hand.

  ‘Oh dear!’ said Mr Thurston, fussily donning his spectacles again. ‘Have I missed one? One, two, three . . . No, I’ve been through them all. Ah—I have it: you must be Terence Stope. I heard your mummy wouldn’t part with you, but she’s decided to send you after all, has she? Very sensible of her.’

  The boy looked up at him thoughtfully.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Not Terence? Or Terry? Do they call you Terry?’

  ‘No,’ said the little boy. ‘I’m Simon. Simon . . . Thorn.’

  He was a pensive, reserved child, perhaps five or six years old. He was neater than the average child in the group: his clothes were far from new, but that was not unusual in that year of grace 1941, and Simon’s were clean and pressed and newly darned. He wore grey short trousers, grey socks, and a fawn pullover with a little blue band knitted into the V-neck. Home-knitted, Nan Sellerman’s appraising eye told her, not bought. He was less skinny than many of the others, and certainly suffered from none of the diseases of malnutrition or poor heredity that one or two of them had been burdened with.

  ‘Simon Thorn . . . Simon Thorn,’ said Mr Thurston with concern, and he consulted his list yet again. ‘No, you’re definitely not on the list. Goodness me—how can that have happened? Did they send you when Terence Stope dropped out, I wonder? Most inconsiderate not to have informed me—but then, these last few nights in London have been so dreadful . . . Well, what’s to be done? Tomorrow I shall have to telephone to Hackney. But in the meanwhile . . . ?’

  ‘If I may make a suggestion, Mr Thurston,’ put in Mrs Sellerman, tentatively. Mr Thurston was a perfectly good-natured man, but the village was somewhat in awe of him, as they were of all teachers. ‘Mr and Mrs Cutheridge were awfully disappointed when they heard that Terence Stope wasn’t coming. He’d been assigned to them, you know. They’re childless—a really nice, responsible couple . . .’

  She turned to the vicar in search of confirmation.

  ‘They’re Methodists,’ Mr Wise murmured, ‘but as far as I know, yes . . .’

  ‘Ah!’ said Mr Thurston. ‘Well, that would seem to be the solution. Until we can sort things out, find out the position . . .’ He turned to the little boy. ‘You are sure you�
��re not Terence Stope, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m Simon Thorn,’ said the boy, now with more confidence.

  ‘Yes, well, we’ll see to it that you’re all right. I suppose this Mr Cutheridge is not on the telephone?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t think so, Mr Thurston. He’s stockman to Sir Henry.’

  ‘Ah—no, of course. Now I wonder who could take him along.’

  ‘I’ll go with him,’ said Mrs Sellerman. ‘It’s not above a mile.’

  And so the little difficulty was sorted out, for that night at least. Simon Thorn and Mrs Sellerman trudged through the darkening village, the little boy walking determinedly, and looking around eagerly as if to impress this first, dim view of Yeasdon on his memory. ‘Is this all the houses there are?’ he asked at one point. Before long they came to a substantial cottage just beyond the outskirts of the village, a cottage tied to Sir Henry Beesley’s estate. Mrs Cutheridge was surprised to open the door to Nan Sellerman and a little boy, after her disappointment of the day before, but the matter was soon explained. Dot Cutheridge displayed openly a quiet satisfaction which concealed a deep inner delight. Simon was hustled into the warm, close atmosphere of the cottage, was sat up at the table by Tom Cutheridge (who was big and homely and smelt of barns), and was given a great plate of Lancashire hot-pot (Mrs Cutheridge, that evening, had only ham and bread and butter). Then he was given a bath by the fire in a little tin tub, and was soon put lovingly to bed. He was clearly exhausted. He fell asleep almost at once. Dot Cutheridge knew, because she listened at the door.

  Mr Thurston and the evacuees’ committee had plenty on their plates next morning, so that Simon, so quiet and well settled, was the least of their problems. One boy had already run away (it was one of the ones who had been given their first bath), but some of the others had made themselves all too thoroughly at home. So it was not until midday that Mr Thurston found time to telephone through to Hackney. It was then that he became aware—for in the sudden uprush of activity caused by the evacuees’ arrival he had missed both the nine o’clock news and the early morning news that day—that during the evening and night of May 10th London had been bombed as savagely as at any time during the war to date.

  Eventually he got through to the school the children had attended. They had sent no extra boy to replace Terence Stope. Then he rang through to the Town Hall. They were running an emergency service only, due to bombing the night before, and his call was interrupted by another air-raid siren. When finally, in the late afternoon, he spoke to the overworked official responsible for the party, he was unable to explain the surplus boy. There had originally been twenty-two children on the list. The refusal of Terence Stope’s mother to part with him left twenty-one. His place had not been filled by any other child. Of the twenty-one, eighteen had come from the Bradlaugh Street Primary School, three from the Jubilee Green Primary School. The children had been put into their carriages on the special train by a teacher from Bradlaugh Street. Naturally there would have been a few children she had never seen before.

  ‘Will you check your records, then, to see if you have anywhere a boy called Simon Thorn?’ asked Mr Thurston, mystified, but not at this stage worried.

  ‘Records!’ said the official. ‘We’ll do what we can, of course. It’s chaos here, as you can imagine—offices being bombed, things being shifted God knows where. There’s plenty of records have gone up in flames, though none of the education ones, so far as I know.’

  But when the man at Hackney Town Hall rang back the next day, he had found no trace at all of a Simon Thorn.

  Meanwhile Simon himself had settled in nicely. Mrs Cutheridge pronounced him ‘a love of a child’, and glowed in his company. She had discovered that he had no ration book with him, and had already commenced battle with officialdom to get him one. Tom Cutheridge said he was ‘that sharp’, and had already shown him round Sir Henry’s estate, and given him a ride on one of the old shire horses. At school Simon was pronounced ‘a good little reader’ and ‘quite forward for his age’—which no one quite knew, but which he said was five.

  None of which solved the problem of who Simon was, or how he had come to be there in Yeasdon. After some frustrating days of telephoning in the intervals he had from teaching (for twenty-one extra pupils caused great disruption in a village school, particularly sharp, mischievous, cunning town children), Mr Thurston took to writing letters.

  But if telephoning into a London blitzed into near-chaos was difficult, writing was hardly more satisfactory. Sometimes he got a reply, sometimes he did not. He established that there had been one other train for evacuees leaving Paddington at around the same time as the one for Yeasdon, but when, after innumerable frustrations and misconnections, he talked with the teacher who had gone with that train, now evacuated to rural Oxfordshire, she told him there had been no child missing from her group, and nobody by the name of Simon Thorn was known to her. When, eventually, he wrote again to Hackney to ask them to check up on the boy called Terence Stope, he had a letter back to say that Terence, with his mother, had been killed in a raid two weeks after Simon Thorn had arrived in Yeasdon.

  People began to talk. Some of the foster parents asked their billeted kids if they knew who Simon Thorn was. Oh yes, they all knew who he was: he went to school with them in Yeasdon. Yes, but had they known him before they were evacuated? None of them had ever seen him before that momentous journey from Paddington Station. Then one of the foster mothers had a bright idea. The Hackney boy who was now mixing fairly happily with, and lording it over, her own children had been one of the last to be collected from the group. His name was Simon. And on the station platform, just beside the waiting-room outside which they had all been assembled, was a thorn bush. What if . . . ?

  The mother kept this idea to herself for several days, but when no solution was in sight to the mystery of who was Simon Thorn, she mentioned it to Mrs Sellerman.

  Obviously they had to talk to Simon himself.

  But here they came up against the barrier of Dot Cutheridge, who was a formidable countrywoman, and very protective.

  ‘It’ll all sort itself out,’ she said, comfortably. ‘He’s got a good mother, that anyone can see from the state of his clothes. She’ll make sure she finds out where he is. It’s some official up there who’s got himself into a right ol’ tangle. What do you want to go worriting the poor child for?’

  But when she said this, Mrs Cutheridge was not revealing all she thought on the subject. For she had wondered—over and over, if the truth be known—whether Simon’s mother might not have been killed in an air raid after Simon had left for the station, or on any one of those terrible nights of early May. And wondering did lead to hoping, sinful though she knew this to be. Still, in the long run, even Dot Cutheridge had to back down, and concede that some sort of unofficial investigation would have to take place.

  ‘But I’m not having you bully the child,’ she said, and she sat in on all the questioning.

  Simon’s possessions, Mrs Sellerman found, were unexceptionable but sparse. A change of outer clothing and a spare vest and underpants. A pair of pyjamas. No spare socks or tie. A flannel, but no soap, or toothpaste, or towel. A Teddy-bear, and a large model of the Royal Scot locomotive. Several model cars. There was a little drawing pad, but no name on it, or school. It had pictures of houses, large flowers with an immense sun behind them, and some matchstick people. On one page there was the beginning of a story: ‘There was once a boy cald James who went to the moon.’ The story petered out after two or three sentences. Mrs Sellerman said to the Rev. Wise, who was helping her with the investigation, that there were very few clothes to an awful lot of children’s things, almost as though he’d packed himself. Because the toys must have taken up most of the space in the tiny suitcase.

  ‘It doesn’t quite fit with the care she’s taken of his clothes,’ she said. ‘And then not to send his ration book!’

  ‘But then, Londoners,’ said Mr Wise.

  When Simo
n was asked, he said he lived in Sparrow Street. He didn’t know where Sparrow Street was, but that was where he lived. Or if not in Sparrow Street, just off Sparrow Street. He lived with his Mummy. What was his Mummy called? Why, Mummy of course. And there were others in the house—Grandma, and Auntie and, oh, others. Nothing in the way of names could be got out of him at all. They asked him what Sparrow Street was like, and he said it had houses down both sides. Was there anything notable nearby? Anywhere he liked to go? Oh yes, there was a sweetshop, but he didn’t remember what street that was in. Did he go to school? Yes, he went to school. Where was the school? Just down the road. What was the name of the school? Simon said that at home they just called it school.

  The investigation committee went off to make what they could of this information. Dot Cutheridge imagined them scanning street maps of London for Sparrow Street, and that indeed was what they did. They found only one, and the Rev. Wise, on one of his rare wartime visits to his club in London, actually made his way there. It was in the Alexandra Palace area, and it contained a gas works and three houses, one of them bombed and empty. Neither of the other two housed anyone by the name of Thorn, nor did anyone in the two streets leading off from it know anyone of that name. Sparrow Street was a washout.

  Mrs Cutheridge had rather thought it would be. She was getting a very good idea of how Simon’s mind worked, and even during the questioning she had remembered how earlier that morning her Tom had been telling Simon the names of the birds in the back garden.

  Mrs Cutheridge, in fact, was beginning in her level-headed, commonsensical way to be confident. Simon was a lovely child, she knew that, and loving too. Nothing could be warmer or nicer than his gratitude for all she did for him, for the wonderful farmhouse food she cooked, for the clothes she managed to buy, or procure the material to make. Soon—and this was even better—gratitude was replaced by a simple acceptance: he took it as a matter of course that she and Tom were his protectors and providers. And though Tom said often enough: ‘We mustn’t build up our hopes,’ everybody knew he had built them up long ago. As he often used to say at work: ‘We’ve become a family.’