There were two boys already in the compartment – both rich kids, he could tell. They wore round school caps, and blazers with a golden badge and Latin words on the pocket. The boys were deep in conversation, comparing notes about their different schools. They glanced up when Vinnie closed the carriage door behind him.
‘I say, do leave the door open,’ one of the boys said. ‘It’s so beastly stifling in here.’ His cardboard label said his name was Ralph DuPreis.
‘Yeah, sure.’ Vinnie let the door swing open. He sat at one of the window seats, looking back along the platform at the unhappy stream of children boarding the train.
With that interruption sorted out, Ralph DuPreis ignored Vinnie and went on with what he’d been saying: ‘And they’re making our school into a hos-pital. The cricket pitch is to be the car park. I ask you. It’s been played on since the eighteenth century. Lovely pitch. Bally waste if you ask me.’ He sighed. ‘Horrid.’
‘Yes,’ the other boy added, ‘it’s a dashed shame.’
Vinnie thought, The stick of German bombs that flattened the pub and street and killed dozens, that was a dashed shame. But he said nothing.
Just then he saw the girl with the distracted mother, Kathleen, coming along the platform. She held hands with her little brother, Joey, who kept faltering and looking back. Vinnie heard him ask, ‘Kathleen, isn’t Mummy coming to say goodbye to us?’
‘She already did, Joey, back at the gate, so come on. Don’t fuss. Please.’ Kathleen reached Vinnie’s compartment. The door was still open; in fact, it was the only one still open, as almost all the other carriages had filled with children by now. ‘In you go, Joey,’ she said. ‘Step up.’
It seemed as if the little boy had lost everything in the world. Vinnie knew that look; it was all over the station. If you wanted more, a glance in the mirror was all it would take. And it was good to feel sorry for someone else. It made his own pain less. Vinnie rose from his seat. ‘Why don’t you sit here, Joey? Maybe you can see your mum back there. Give her a wave, eh?’
Without a word, Joey took Vinnie’s seat and Kathleen followed her brother into the compartment. ‘Thanks.’ She put their suitcases and gas masks up in the luggage rack, then took the opposite window seat.
Kathleen had dark hair to her shoulders and wore a round school hat with a ribbon on it. Vinnie thought she looked quite nice – the only word he had for girls. At his school, if you said any more they’d think you were soppy. He sat beside Joey and said, ‘Sister and brother? It’s good you can be together.’
‘It’s something,’ Kathleen agreed.
Ralph DuPreis regarded Joey and his sister as if they were interlopers. He soon returned to his conversation with the other boy. ‘So why’s your school being closed?’
‘They’re turning it into a billet of some kind,’ the boy explained. ‘Barracks for French refugees.’
‘M-mm.’ Ralph gave a small chuckle. ‘My father says refugees are all right – in their own country.’
His friend snorted in amusement. Kathleen gave them a sharp look, which they ignored.
Isaac was a refugee. He was all right in his own country, or out of it. But he was not all right now. Never would be.
Another boy came striding along the platform and tossed a soft bag in through the open door. ‘Got room for a little one?’ The joke was that he was very tall and appeared to be all arms and legs. ‘Dobbs is the name, evacuation’s the game,’ he quipped like a music-hall comedian. Without having to reach, he put his bag on the luggage rack, then folded himself into a seat beside Kathleen.
A porter came along, slamming carriage doors; then the guard’s whistle sounded at the rear of the train.
‘I can’t see her,’ Joey fretted. ‘I can’t see Mummy.’
‘You will,’ Kathleen assured him. ‘Just as soon as soon. Mum’ll visit us. She promised.’
There came a hiss of steam from the engine, and slowly the train began to move.
‘I wonder where we’ll end up?’ Dobbs asked.
‘Somewhere in the north, I heard. My name’s Vinnie Cartwright.’
‘Dobbs Stefanski. Short for Dobroslaw. A mouth-ful, eh?’
‘I’m Joey,’ Joey told them. ‘Joey’s short for Joseph.’
‘Thought it might be.’ Vinnie nodded.
‘What’s Vinnie short for?’ Joey asked. ‘Is it vinegar?’
Kathleen said, ‘Don’t be rude, Joey.’
Vinnie grinned. ‘It wasn’t rude. A bit of fun, that’s all. Right, Joey?’
Joey relaxed for the first time and said, ‘I’m nine. Kathleen’s twelve.’ In the same breath he asked, ‘Why aren’t you wearing a label, Vinnie, like everyone else?’
‘It fell off,’ Vinnie lied. The truth was, he wouldn’t be seen dead wearing a cardboard luggage label. It was like they were parcels being sent somewhere. Might as well write ‘fragile’ as well. That’s how most of the kids in Euston Station looked, if their tears and sobs were anything to go by.
Kathleen showed her label and said, ‘Kathleen Pearson.’
Vinnie glanced at Ralph DuPreis and his chum, but they were not going to play this name-swapping game. Suit yourselves, Vinnie thought. He caught Kathleen’s eye. She nodded and murmured, ‘M-mm, quite stuffy in here.’ Then she smiled at Vinnie.
Nice, he thought. It was the first smile he’d seen in a long time. The train gathered pace, taking them away from London, out past the suburbs, then who could say where.
Joey asked, ‘Are we there yet?’
‘Joey, we don’t even know where there is,’ Kathleen answered. ‘So let’s wait and see.’ They’d done a slow hour of stop-start travelling with few words said between them.
Joey gazed out of the window as the train rolled through a small station. ‘This place is called Nowhere,’ he reported, ‘because it’s got no name.’
‘No, silly,’ Ralph DuPreis spoke up at last. ‘All station names have been taken away in case German spies use them to work out where they are.’
Kathleen flared up: ‘It wasn’t silly. It was just a remark! Nothing silly about it.’
‘Give him a chance,’ Vinnie said. ‘He’s only nine.’
‘I’m just pointing out the facts.’
Vinnie responded, ‘So point them out the win-dow.’
‘Hey, hey, what’s this?’ Dobbs butted in. ‘Why the aggravation all of a sudden? I thought we were at war with old Hitler, not each other.’
‘Everybody knows about station names being removed,’ Ralph persisted. ‘It was in the Daily Telegraph.’
‘Well, that proves it.’ Dobbs folded his arms and shook his head from side to side. ‘That jolly well proves it.’
‘Is that a mouth organ?’ Kathleen pointed to the silvery flash sticking out of Vinnie’s breast pocket.
‘Harmonica.’ Vinnie took it out.
Joey brightened and asked, ‘Can you play Ten Green Bottles?’
‘Sure,’ said Vinnie, and began to play.
Ralph folded his arms and exchanged looks with his chum from the posh school that would soon be a billet for French refugees. Their expressions showed lofty disdain.
Kathleen and Joey began to sing. When the last green bottle had fallen from the wall, Dobbs said, ‘And now, I give it to you in Polish. Music, maestro, please.’
There was laughter as Dobbs sang the verses using what he said were Polish words. It sounded something like: Dziesiec zielonych butelek wiszacych na scianie.
Kathleen and Joey tried to join in, but the pro-nunciation was tricky and there were too many syllables in the Polish version to fit the tune.
‘Okay, Ralphie,’ Vinnie challenged, ‘How about you give it to us in Latin?’
‘I think not.’ Ralph crossed his legs and looked out of the window.
V
innie shrugged and began to play ‘One Man Went to Mow’. Then he stopped, held up one finger and said, ‘Listen.’
Half-a-dozen small voices in the next compart-ment had taken up the song.
Dobbs remarked, ‘Catching, eh?’
‘You’ve started something,’ Kathleen said. After a pause she added, ‘Vinnie.’
***
Playing the simple, familiar tunes had taken Vinnie’s mind off his sadness. The locomotive started slow-ing down, then pulled into a small country station where it shunted back and forth for several busy minutes before coupling up to the rest of the carriages and steaming away into the distance. They had been disconnected from the train and were left in silence.
After a minute, Joey whispered, ‘We’ve been abandoned.’
‘Marooned in the middle of nowhere,’ Dobbs added.
‘Another engine will come for us,’ Kathleen assured Joey, but still they sat.
It was Ralph who stood up and said to his chum, ‘Shall we stretch our legs?’
‘Yes, let’s.’ Without another word Ralph opened the compartment door on their side and strode out onto the platform.
As they moved away from the carriage, Ralph added, ‘I say, what a dashed relief.’
Kathleen looked at the open door. ‘We might as well take a look. What do you think? There should be a toilet here.’
‘And a drink of water,’ Joey added as they left the compartment.
‘Water, water!’ Dobbs clutched his throat, pre-tending to be overcome with thirst. ‘Give me water.’ He staggered out after Kathleen and Joey, wobbling on his long legs as he went.
Along the carriage, other evacuees began to open their doors and step out onto the platform, cautiously, as if some overbearing adult might appear and order them back again. But they were left in peace to explore the station, not that there was much to see: a few milk churns and a baggage trolley with nothing on it.
Vinnie stayed alone in the compartment and let the memories flood back, every one full of pain and loss. The air raid, the destruction and what he’d seen there in its midst. The ‘scum of the earth’ remark, the rest centre, then the misery of Euston Station; one hurt piled on another. He no longer belonged in London, nor here, and probably not where he was going either.
He remembered a morning in the upstairs bed-room. It had been early, about a quarter to five. Isaac was up and dressed, while Vinnie still lay curled in his blanket.
‘Come on, Vinnie,’ Isaac had said. ‘Out of bed.’
‘Another five minutes. Please. I don’t feel like playing this morning.’
‘Sometimes musicians don’t feel like it either. But they do it. It’s what makes them musicians.’
So Vinnie had got up, dressed, splashed some water on his face and gone downstairs to the piano, where Isaac said, ‘If you want something, you must work for it.’
In his lonely railway-carriage compartment, Vinnie thought now, Even if that something is wanting to belong?
He stepped out onto the platform. Further along, in a patch of sunshine, two small girls had a length of skipping rope that they turned between them. Dobbs was already in the middle, galumphing awkwardly, ducking his head because the girls couldn’t swing the rope high enough. He chanted as he jumped: ‘Salt, pepper, vinegar, mustard. Salt, pepper, vinegar, mustard.’
Joey and some of the other evacuee boys and girls clapped their hands in time to the rope. Kathleen was smiling. When Vinnie approached, she said, ‘The toilets are just there, Vinnie. And a water fountain.’
‘Thanks, Kathleen.’
***
They stayed half an hour in that station; then a smaller locomotive came and was coupled up to their single carriage. A porter suddenly appear-ed from the ticket office and ushered them into their compartments; he closed all the doors and they were off again, but no longer on the main line.
Some time later, the one-carriage train came to a stop with a squeal of brakes. An elderly porter began opening compartment doors, calling out, ‘Netterfold, this is Netterfold Station.’
Dobbs announced, ‘Looks like this is it, folks. We’re here.’
Joey said, ‘Thanks for the music, Vinnie.’
‘It was very good,’ Kathleen added. ‘Cheered us up.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Vinnie said. ‘Any time.’
Kathleen stepped out of the compartment and Joey followed. Like a seasoned traveller, Ralph DuPreis gathered a pigskin suitcase from the overhead luggage rack, then pushed past Vinnie and stepped out onto the platform too.
‘Excuse me.’ Ralph’s still nameless friend left the compartment next, stepping out along the platform as if this were something he did every day. He caught up with Ralph, exchanged a word. They moved off together, laughing.
Ralph’s friend carried his gas mask in a neat leather holder. Most people made do with the cardboard box their mask came in, hanging it from their shoulder with a string. Vinnie didn’t have a gas mask, but everyone else did. Come to that, he didn’t have anything at all, except a harmonica. He’d left London in such a rush, without clothes or pyjamas to sleep in. Or money. If he’d thought more clearly in the rest centre, he could have asked someone about it.
‘I’ve never heard of this place,’ Dobbs observed as he stepped out onto the platform. ‘Are we in England, Wales or Scotland?’ He waited by the open door.
‘Don’t know,’ Vinnie answered. Then it happened.
Dobbs said, ‘Are you coming?’ He added his name: ‘Vinnie?’
‘Yeah,’ Vinnie agreed. He left the compartment and joined Dobbs.
Kathleen had waited for them outside, with Joey. ‘Shall we four keep together?’
Suddenly Vinnie felt better.
***
At the station exit a woman called, ‘Welcome, boys and girls. Welcome, welcome.’ She wore the Women’s Voluntary Service uniform. ‘Now, come along this way, please. Mr Preston is waiting outside for you in his bus.’
Vinnie made sure Kathleen, Joey and Dobbs were with him; then they moved through the station exit together.
The bus outside was an old one. Mr Preston sat at the wheel, looking surly. The evacuee children climbed aboard and sat nursing their cases. Vinnie counted fifteen evacuees who’d arrived on the train, excluding Ralph and his chum, who weren’t on the bus.
‘Come on, you lot,’ Mr Preston growled. ‘I don’t have all day.’ He started the engine and moved off before Dobbs had sat down.
‘Watch it, squire!’ Dobbs stumbled and landed heavily in the seat next to Vinnie.
‘You got a precious cargo here,’ Vinnie added.
Mr Preston ignored this and kept driving, hunched over the wheel. He was a young man, maybe twenty or so, which was strange because since the war had begun it was women who drove buses, or older men. You look young and fit enough to be in the army, Vinnie thought. Are you a draft dodger? Conscientious objector? Is that what’s making you so bad-tempered – folks having a go at you all the time? In any case, Vinnie concluded, Mr Preston’s attitude was not doing the evacuees any good. So Mr Preston, you might as well have stayed home. He hoped they’d get a warmer reception from the other people they met in this town.
The slow bus journey took them through quiet country lanes, past fields of grazing cows and sheep. It was very pretty, Vinnie decided, like a country scene in the 1939 calendar that used to hang in the butcher’s shop near the pub. They rolled into the village, where a group of kids, about six of them, stepped back from the roadside to let the bus pass. One tall boy with red hair shook his fist at the evacuees and shouted something.
Kathleen recoiled. ‘What did he say?’
‘I don’t think it was, Welcome to Netterfold,’ Vinnie muttered.
‘He shook his fist at us!’ Joey said.
Dobbs suggested, ‘M
aybe it’s a local custom.’
The bus pulled in at a village hall, and Mr Preston just nodded in the direction of the building. ‘Right. In there, you lot.’
The evacuees scrambled off the bus and made their way uneasily into the hall. No one spoke or made eye contact.
Inside, they found tables on which a smiling vicar and his wife had laid out plates of sandwiches, one jug of milk and another of very pale orange juice. ‘Grub,’ Joey whispered to Kathleen. ‘Should we just help ourselves?’
‘Better wait until we’re invited. And it’s not grub. It’s food.’
‘Tastes the same as grub,’ Vinnie said. ‘Unless Mr Preston put a curse on it.’
The WVS woman who’d greeted them at the station bustled in and raised her hands for silence. ‘I’m Mrs Ormsby-Chapman, and I’m sure you’d all like something to fill your raging tummies, so do tuck in, children – but remember there are food shortages, so please only take what you can eat. Then we’ll see about your billets.’
And who should have come into the hall behind Mrs Ormsby-Chapman, but Ralph DuPreis and his friend? At this, Vinnie shook his head and muttered, ‘What was wrong with the bus?’ But nobody heard him. The evacuees had already moved towards the tables, because many of them hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He followed the others.
Joey asked, ‘What’s a billet?’
‘It’s a bit of wood,’ Kathleen answered.
‘Yeah, about that size.’ Dobbs held his hands apart to show how long.
Vinnie remembered the conversation on the train, about one of the posh schools being turned into a billet – barracks for French refugees. He said, ‘No, I think it’s the place where we’ll stay.’
Mrs Ormsby-Chapman went on to explain that they’d be looked after by foster-parents, who would arrive presently. ‘So just wait there, girls and boys,’ she instructed them, then turned away to talk importantly with another woman.
Vinnie thought, Here we go again.
Ralph DuPreis and his friend made a point of ignoring the sandwiches.
‘How’d they get here?’ Joey whispered to Dobbs.
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