“Good God, man. You’re joking.”
“That’s what it says here.”
“Canterbury’s another city. And it’s halfway to Berlin. They’ll all be incinerated before . . .”
“Hush, sir. Pas devant les enfants.”
It was all too ludicrous. Evacuating children to Canterbury was like, well, carrying coals to Newcastle. The place would be torched for the cultural value alone. It could only be some embittered, Trinity double first’s idea of ironic retribution for his clerk’s job at the ARP: send a band from Southwark to the holy martyr’s shrine.
The children were spent by the time they reached their destination. But the hard part had not yet begun. Canterbury Station was decked out in banners, but any welcoming committee had long since gone home. Chriswick huddled the little ones outside the station. The afternoon began to turn crisp. A terse billeting officer arrived, with forehead this time, but without chin. “We were told you’d be in at one.”
“Yes, well, we weren’t.”
“Evidently.” They packed the children on buses and brought them to the market square outside the cathedral gate. There, patriotically obligated villagers gathered round, sizing the wares, every so often issuing a sceptical “I’ll take that one,” or “Have you got two girls around eleven? We want a pair.”
People came looking for cheap labor, replacements for dead offspring, a government subsidy. The Shirley Temple look-alikes went first, to the local child molesters. Some brothers and sisters refused to be split up; other sibs were dispersed to opposite sides of town without so much as a swap of address. The billeting officer made hurried notes of who had whom, but Chriswick knew the scribbling was worse than worthless. These children would never be found again.
Today’s trip had already dispersed them past recall, even before the town had turned out to bid for them as for so many second-string elevens. And the solid Canterbury middle class, clucking at Hemming’s head lice and the fungus behind Davis’s ears: by tonight, these redoubtable folk would learn words long since banished from England’s green and pleasant land.
In a modest few hours, an entire nation had abandoned itself to a scavenger hunt with consequences at least equal to those of the world war’s latest test match. Was the country counting on being home for Christmas again this time? These children, doled out so freely in the butter market, would grow up away, in the homes of strangers. A whole generation scattered at random, scientifically indifferent, city to country, south to north, Catholic billeted on C of E, Formby fans descending on the lords of the manor, the desperately poor laid out on the thick linen of the privileged. The island had conducted an irreversible sociological experiment at a clap, almost without thought.
By tea, all the potential providers had disappeared, leaving Chriswick and the billeting officer with the South Bank’s least marketable. One of the Shillingford twins was wailing that nobody wanted them, while the other shouted excitedly how that meant they got to go back home. The rest of the rejected sat about fiddling with gas mask boxes, all in.
“All right then,” the officer declared. “We’ll just place the rest of these door to door.” This they did, as if delivering milk. They paced the circuit of city walls, knocking on houses with known spare rooms. When the residents resisted, the officer bullied them. The Shillingford girls were split up, one going to a black-and-blue woman whose husband roared from a hidden back room, the other to a widower who had his paws up the girl’s knickers before the door closed. The billeting officer mumbled something about correcting the situation tomorrow. Levy went to a mother of five who first ran an interrogating hand through the boy’s hair, feeling for horns.
At length, they chiseled the group down to a grim cadre of remainders. The billeting officer sneaked a look at his watch. “Would you excuse me a moment? The wife’s expecting me for dinner. I’ll be back directly.”
And Chriswick was left in the dark, in a strange city, alone with half a dozen dirty, cold, starving, fatigued, senseless children not his own. He ducked into a stall and bought them chips with salt and vinegar, out of his own pocket.
Down the lane, an ancient parish church held out the possibility of a place to sit. At the door, a tiny fist restrained Chriswick by the trouser turnup. “Sir, what sort of church is it?”
“What? Oh, for God’s sake, Evans. Don’t be an idiot. It’s just to rest a minute.”
Evans kept from breaking down only by viciously inscissoring his lip. “Really, sir. I can’t go in if it’s a . . . you know.”
“It’s a Saxon church, boy.”
“Oh. Very well then.”
The children collapsed in the pews, two or three finding the strength to genuflect. Chriswick busied himself with the tourist plaque—yet another Oldest Parish Church in England—to keep from ulcerating with murderous intent at the billeting officer, headmaster, the ARP board, and Hitler. A sudden, pure-pitched resonance rang out through the church, and Chriswick spun about in surprise.
In silence, while his back was turned, the chancel had filled with choristers. Boys, no older than his own vitiated group, stood decked in white surplices over crimson cassocks. They must have hid in some vestry and filed in while Chriswick wasn’t looking. They now formed two reverent banks facing each other in the stalls, and, with no adult to be seen, they launched into a late evensong.
Chriswick rushed to the pews to discipline his group, sit them up straight, or drag them out of the church while he still could. But such was unnecessary. First, there wasn’t a soul in the place for his Clink deportees to disturb. Further, Chriswick’s children, amazed at a handful of boys their own age conducting an unassisted musical service, sat rapt on their benches, entranced by the sound.
The versicle line fell to a boy who couldn’t have been more than fourteen. He sang the plainsong in head tones of a purity that would disappear with the arrival of adult conscience. While the last, long note of his chant still hung about in the vault, its answer arrived in a rush of chorus, slipping off into conductus, flowering full with Renaissance polyphony.
Chriswick knew something about church music, had even partaken once, when younger. But he was unable to place this setting. The moment he thought Dunstable, the piece slid off a further century and a half, to Tallis or Byrd. After another measure, it sounded like one of those imperial, last-century anachronisms, returning to ancient and better days while the world around this island went down in flames.
It started out Latin, but it soon became very Anglican. The text turned into a dog’s breakfast—bits and pieces from the Book of Common Prayer. It had been too long to be sure, but Chriswick seemed to make out familiar lines, like forgotten but still familiar faces from old school photographs. Give peace in our time, O Lord. (You’d think they might have suppressed that bit of questionable taste this evening.) Defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. All that are in danger, necessity, and tribulation. All that travel by land or by water. All sick persons, and young children. All prisoners and captives. The fatherless children, and widows. Keep us from the craft and subtilty of the devil and man.
Doubly odd: the setting did not correspond to any service Chriswick had ever heard. No speech—no invocations or readings or prayers. Only this pure singing, from voices of shockingly high calibre. How could a small parish barn, however historic, put together such a choir? Child voices, usually selected for sightsinging ability to perform two hundred settings a year while the trebly tint lasted, seemed here to have been chosen for nothing short of transcendent throats. Every lad in the dozen possessed uncanny musical maturity; they’d been singing for twenty minutes, a cappella, without straying from pitch.
The singing—at the end of evacuation, after hours in flight from the penultimate urban raid, deciding lifetimes by lot—was too much for Chriswick. Those pitches of absolute tone stripped of vibrato cut into his muscle like angel scalpels. A religion that worshipped always like this would have counted Chriswick still among the believers. Freely expanding p
arts—shared out among twelve boys, the lower voices pitched up into the innocence of airy rapture—interrogated the scar where his abdomen had been.
Assertion and response sounded fifths so clean it made no difference whether the purity was put on or not. This one thing alone of his race might be worth saving from the coming bombs. These soaring, high, head voices said what it was to be alive, to be anything at all. To be displaced, begging temporary address, a choirboy in this alien, bass body, under attack from on high. To be a child from the East End, father a sot, mother numbed by tons of others’ washing, a boy duped by a good matric into going on and becoming a teacher, winding up by perverse twist of fate back in the Clink, now subaltern to a war that will send all England to final sleep. To be a functionary, assigned the pointless task of stripping children from their one anaemic chance at temporary home, children by adoption and grace just now discovering too late that all they ever wanted to do while alive on this earth was to sing out blamelessly, however laughably, Make us an acceptable people in thy sight.
Alarmed by silence, Chriswick looked up to find the choristers filing toward the vestry. He called out, “Hallo. You boys.” The choir turned in unison, as if noticing for the first time that the nave was inhabited. Chriswick’s speaking in church wiped away some cobweb restraint from the boys. At the common signal, choirboys and frayed evacuees met in the transept crossing, converged on each other, touching, talking rapidly, collapsing back to their proper ages.
Chriswick found himself unable to take the few steps to where the children gathered. He sat in the pew and gazed on this meeting between mutually uncomprehending races. The choirboys paid court to Chriswick’s two youngest girls, giving them chocolate that appeared by magic from cassock pockets. He overheard one of his toughs compliment a singer. “You don’t ’alf sound like a host of bleedin’ serabim.”
Each group sniffed the other, excitedly. The spent children had found a second wind. The day, the evensong had so drained Chriswick that he could barely open his mouth. From the back of the nave, he called out to the youth who had sung solo, “Are you boys at the cathedral school?”
The boy jerked. “What cathedral?”
Chriswick’s surprise was even greater. The boy was American. Imperceptible when singing, the speech was unmistakable. Something in the boy’s reticence suggested secret transatlantic alliances, affairs of state ahead of their time.
“Where is your conductor? Are you rehearsing for something?”
“We’re touring,” the boy replied, in churchly whisper. The Southwark children, awed by his accent, crowded around. The Yank began spinning them a fantastic travelogue, an adventure Chriswick could not make out from the narthex. The chanter handed over for examination a metal pendant hanging on the end of a chain. Some High Church bauble, an excellent Norman copy it seemed from Chriswick’s distance. A trumpet-toting angel, but with an astonishing, disfigured face. The street urchins fingered it in hushed admiration.
A fatigue suddenly swept over Chriswick, a heaviness past describing. Sleep penetrated into the rote core that had kept him moving for the past twelve hours. He felt as if St. Martin’s were filling with a gas that made him want to curl up and fall blessedly, permanently unconscious. He pinched his jowls with his nails and shook himself. With effort, he stood and left by the west portal, needing air.
He stood in the churchyard, wanting a cigarette badly and a pint even worse. It was pitch dark; English evensong was over. Where was the billeting officer? Where would they sleep this night? Perhaps it would be best to bring the remainder back to London on a night train. They had spoiled enough lives already, condemning those children to the whims of strangers. He did not believe for a minute that any spot on this entire island would be safe from the coming nightmare.
The pilgrims’ town was settled in for its night of sacrifice. All across the country tonight, in towns sheltered and forgotten, in Somerset and Devon and Dorset, in minuscule specks in East Anglia named Diss and Watton and Scole, in unpronounceable Welsh stone settlements, on the coastal ports, in Seaford and Hastings and Skegness, steeped in the Midlands, streaming over farms off the moors and dales and downs, ranging out to Lands End, Penzance, the project was coming home. Schoolchildren fleeing Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and London scattered like factory workers at history’s closing whistle. From the southeast, over the coast, Chriswick could hear a low, mechanical hum, still far away but rushing toward the cliffs with each tick of earth’s politics: the blanketing engines, the flotillas of their common, aerial destruction.
He turned back into the church to gather the remaining children and find at least temporary shelter for them. But the building was empty, as bare as the old woman’s cupboard. Chriswick, in a daze, checked the niches and sacristy. There were no chapels where a group that size could hide. He was tired, tired past telling. He could not even remember, from any past so distant as an hour ago, how many he had come inside with. No one could have left by the west porch without his knowing. And yet, choir and makeshift congregation—both gone.
After the doomed city, the impassable Southwark streets, escape’s debacle, the chaos of Waterloo, the market humiliation, the door-to-door desperate soliciting, the last sung service of innocence, the children had shaken loose of the real. The young had abandoned him to whatever fairy survival adults might still believe in at so late an hour.
QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY
What is the historical background behind these events?
Who is “that spineless wonder waving his little scrap of paper around out on the tarmac”?
What is the source of the allusion “into the valley of Death”? How does this irony contribute to the description of the evacuation?
Where, do you imagine, do the children disappear to at the story’s end?
Define: elevenses, matric, Cadbury’s, Norman, Saxon, Baden-Powell.
The nationwide evacuation of children described here really happened. Research this strange event and speculate on the impact it made on the life of a nation.
Interview a contemporary who has had to live through a similar experience. Gather his or her life history, and tell it.
They beat him within an inch of his life. While it’s too much to say that he loves every minute of it, Kraft does come back for more. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Where’d that come from? Takes a beating, comes back bleating. Takes a mauling, keeps on crawling.
And not just on account of the student loans, which he could pay off easily from behind a desk at some university health center, pushing antacids and peddling the bland diet sheet to overwrought undergrads. Something inside him must prefer this, the assembly line of cases spilling out of packed cutting rooms, this dance marathon of service, sacrifice, and salvation. Op ’til you drop. Only intolerable fatigue keeps at bay the worse punishment awaiting him in slack hours. Whenever he’s dealt more than three free hours in a row, he winds up on the phone, long distance to lost friends, philosophizing, predicting things, asking acquaintances spooky and proscribed questions.
Idle too long, he dallies with the idea of social reinstatement. A little free time, and he begins to believe he might be able to settle in somewhere. Memories of the place still lodge like lost baggage in the base of his brain. Sky-blue, home free, nights of lazy music while elaborate shaggy dog jokes drift in and out of attention. The kegger tap, the stoked fire, voices in the kitchen exchanging book and movie titles like spent mistresses. Close shoulder-brushes with strangers and intimates. Men to postmortem the latest big-league box scores and international fuck-ups. Women for declaring long unspoken love, just for the hell of it. Two consecutive days off fill him with yearning for the whole forsaken orchestral palette of human contact. Maybe a mortgage, for once, instead of the perpetual twelve-month lease.
When the free hours grow too expansive, he takes Schwartz, the Board cram book, up to the hospital roof. This aerial view, distance perfecting the taillight-as-platelet metaphor, never cease
s to calm him with scale. Sheer surface area, baroque Brussels-lace intricacy of civilization’s switchboard interconnects, insists that he need never worry about leaving anything undone. It’s all being checked off the To Do list somewhere, looked after deep inside this city circuitry. Somebody’s taking care of it in a remote strip mall, office complex, or underground research facility out on the periphery. Or if not here, then within another city matrix elsewhere in the megapole, along the freeway, further down the continuous data stream.
During heavy call assaults, his beeper ponging every few seconds, the phone machine LCD stacking up a Sisyphean queue of unpluggable leaks, Kraft tends to stray into the contempt bred of familiarity. (And what could be more familiar than pawing minors’ privates from the inside, hands not just on their dollhouse genitals but underneath them?) The temptation during unstructured R & R is even more dangerous. Sentimentality sets in, fueled by nostalgia of the worst kind. Nostalgia for events that haven’t happened yet.
On the roof, along various rays streaking off from Carver’s ground zero, Kraft picks out his recent ports of call: Hollywood Pres, Hills Brothers General, St. Tomography’s. The so-called skyline of this city is so low—all the potentially tall buildings demurring at sissy altitudes, each lisping, After you; No, after you, what, with all this free land and the Big Quake ratcheting up to unleash any century’s end now—that the place names on his résumé spread around him as clearly as the castles on a cartoon postcard of the Rhine.
He can take them in at a glance, opaque oxides and noxides permitting. Photochemical smog, tucked in lovingly by heat inversions, welcomed Cabrillo himself, three centuries before the first car. Ozone in the wrong place, that’s all. What we need’s a multibillion-dollar bailout, a five-mile-radius undershot waterwheel to hoist the O, back up where it belongs.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 6