“Yes, you can.”
The three boys ahead of them stopped to look at a dead bird on the sidewalk. “Come on, boys,” Emmy said.
“I dare you to touch it, Julia,” one of the boys said.
“I dare you to eat it!” Julia challenged, her hand tighter now in her sister’s.
Emmy kicked the tiny carcass with her shoe. It landed in the gutter. “You can compose dares later. Off you go.”
They continued on their way, past shops and cafés and businesses. The town was like Brighton in some ways. The buildings were close to one another, and there were few taxis and no red double-decker buses. But therewas no fragrance of the sea, no one selling pasties or ice-cream cones on the sidewalk. And in Brighton, no one seemed to even notice when they had arrived or cared when they left. Here, everyone stopped whatever they were doing to look at the line of children, from the barber sweeping his front step, to the grocer standing by wooden crates full of turnips, to women in unremarkable dresses going about their afternoon errands.
Two young mothers pushing prams on the sidewalk moved aside so that the group could stay together. Emmy heard one whisper to the other, “Oh! These are the London children. The poor dears!”
And the other one replied, “Can you imagine sending your child away like that?”
“Or taking one in? Good heavens, you wouldn’t know anything about them.”
“Nor do we know anything about you,” Emmy whispered as she and Julia walked by them.
She heard nothing else from the two pram pushers and did not look back at them.
After another block they were at the town hall on High Street. The curbs were crowded with parked cars on either side. A few adults, mostly women, were standing outside on the steps, watching as the children made their way past them.
“Welcome to Moreton-in-Marsh,” one of them said, but her tone suggested she was nervous about the children being there. The young evacuees were the evidence that everything was different now. The war was no longer phony, as some had called it. It was real. And here were London’s children to prove it.
They were ushered into a large reception room filled with tables, folding chairs, and people talking in smallgroups. The luggage had arrived, and two men were now unloading it from a cart and lining the suitcases like dominoes against the back wall. At one table officials sat with their papers and clipboards. At another were cups of water, tea biscuits, and meringues. The boys in Emmy’s care rushed to the food table and she let them go. She had done what had been asked of her—she got them there without losing them.
Emmy looked around for a sign indicating a privy, found one, and started to head in that direction, Julia’s hand in hers.
“You need to stay with your group,” a woman wearing an armband said to her.
“My sister needs to use the loo,” Emmy said, and kept walking.
“What are those people doing back there?” Julia asked as Emmy led her down a narrow hall to one of two doors markedWC.
“They’re here for all of us.” Emmy opened the door for her.
“But why are they looking at us like that?”
“They’ve never seen children from London before, so you and I are like two princesses to them. That’s why.”
This satisfied her. She let go of Emmy’s hand.
When they returned to the big room, Julia said she was hungry. They made their way to the refreshments, and Emmy could not help but notice how the people in the room watched as she and Julia approached the table, studying how the girls respected their hospitality. For one crazed second Emmy wanted to lean over and lick all the meringues.
“Just take one,” she murmured to Julia. “Until you know everyone’s had something.”
“I know how to share, Emmy,” Julia murmured back, her brow crinkled in annoyance.
A woman stepped up to a microphone and tapped it. A loud clunking and a short squawk followed. “All right, then,” she said. “If all the children could stand behind me here, we can get started. If you are here to collect an evacuee or two, if you could please make your way to my left so that we can keep everything in order. Splendid.”
Everyone did as they were told.
As the crowd of adults moved to stand where they could face the children, Emmy noted that the expressions on the faces were no different from those she had seen hours ago in the school yard. These country people wore the same look of apprehension mixed with hope. They wanted to believe, just as the parents in the school yard did, that this was without a doubt the course of action to take; the evacuation was how their nation would do battle and yet protect the blameless. Some would have to release a child into the care of a stranger, and some would have to take in the beloved child of someone they had never met. The war demanded that strangers could no longer exist in England.
It wasn’t until the villagers began to pick whom they would take home that Emmy saw how the two groups were different. The parents in the school yard had not been able to choose anything; not which bus their child would board, not which town they would go to, not which family would take them in. These people, on the other hand, looked the evacuees over as though they were shopping for their Christmas goose.
The foster parents, as the woman at the microphone called them, were invited to come speak with the children so that they could “all get to know one another.”
