‘Let’s get you somewhere safe,’ he said, as he started the engine. ‘Get you cleaned up. What luck I was here.’
The world was spinning. There was a tartan rug, folded neatly on the back seat. Ruby laid her head on the scratchy wool. There was a distant explosion, and the car rocked, but it carried on. Soon it was threading its way through rights and lefts, and Ruby let herself give way to sleep, or at least a version of sleep, in which she dreamt she was a doll being shaken by an angry child.
She’d be late for Frankie’s party, but at least she’d get there. Her mum would take care of her, make it better.
A tear slipped down her cheek as she thought of Frankie. She’d let him down on his birthday. Not the first time she’d let him down, not by a long shot.
4
John Cook wasn’t a London man. He’d grown up in the countryside, working on his father’s farm as soon as he could shoulder a bale of hay, learning what it was to be part of the land. To know the smell of the soil, the feel of it in your hands. To know your neighbours, for better or worse. When he’d gone away to war – The Great War – it had been to defend his own version of England, a rural country with more horses than cars, where people minded their own business, where a man could make his own luck if he was willing to put in the work. London was something else entirely. The biggest city the world had ever seen. Black stone buildings and smoke further than a man could see.
Cook was familiar with the aphorism – ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ But a clever sentence wasn’t enough to turn the tide. Give him a quiet pub and the company of men who’d spent their days in the fields. You could keep the city and have done with it. It was too big. Too many buses and cars, and too many people.
But Cook had been out-manoeuvred. A train of events leading to him sitting on a double-decker bus crossing Tower Bridge, the dirty brown waters of the Thames drifting slowly out to sea.
It had started with taking in the evacuee. At first, back in ’39, he’d put his foot down and told Mum he couldn’t have a young child running around the place. A lot of dangerousmachinery on a farm. A lot of ways a child could get themselves into trouble, unless you were watching out for them, and a farmer didn’t have time to be continually looking after a child. Certainly not a farmer who’d lost most of his labourers to the war effort, one who’d put his life into the land, who felt a responsibility.
But he’d weakened. A winter of reproachful looks from Mum. Long nights of silent criticism from Uncle Nob, who’d returned from Flanders a broken man and hadn’t spoken a word since they’d dumped him at the end of the lane, dressed in an oversized de-mob suit, carrying an empty cardboard suitcase. Funny how a man who didn’t speak could make you feel his disappointment. So Cook had relented and said they could take an evacuee – if, and only if, the government saw fit to send another wave out from the cities.
May had come, and Hitler had turned his attention west, his armies rolling unchecked across Holland, Belgium, and then France, until the only thing that gave the blitzkrieg pause was the thin strip of the English Channel, and suddenly it had once again seemed prudent to send England’s future out of London, into the countryside – away from the bombers and the parachutists and the poison gas that was surely on its way. Cook hadn’t understood why the brains in Whitehall had thought sending a child out of London to the Sussex countryside –towardsthe predicted invasion route – had been a good idea, but he’d done his bit nonetheless. He’d escorted Mum to the dusty church hall, where the newly arrived children had been fought over like so many jars of chutney at a jumble sale – the pretty girls going first, the strong boys next, the weakest boys last. Cook and Mum had taken the last boy standing – a grey-faced lad who wouldn’t look Cook in the eye, who gave every impressionof being distinctly unimpressed at being sent out of London, out of harm’s way.
‘Wait ’til you see the island,’ Frankie said. ‘Have you ever been on an island?’
‘Britain’s an island,’ Cook said.
‘Doesn’t count,’ the boy said, not looking back. Cook had never seen him so animated. Mum had been right, he realised, itwasgood for the boy to come home for a day. See his family.
‘It’s only an island when they raise the bridges, of course,’ Frankie said, now turning to Cook to lecture him. Cook nodded. He couldn’t picture it. When Frankie said island, Cook imagined something out of aBoys’ Ownstory – white sand, palm trees, skull and crossbones, that kind of thing. ‘But they raise them all the time. If you’re out late you have to be careful you don’t get stuck, or when the tide’s high and they need to get the big ships in and out of the basin.’
Still, it was good to see the boy so enthusiastic. It was a side to Frankie he hadn’t seen. He listened to a continued litany of facts about the island as he sat on the bus, a shopping bag held between his knees. Food from the farm. A chicken. A couple of rabbits. A string bag filled with late tomatoes, and a punnet of blackberries Frankie had picked himself, from the patch down by the sewage works at the bottom edge of Cook’s land.
Frankie stood up and pulled the cord, sounding a bell. He was in his element.
Cook followed Frankie down the narrow spiral staircase. The bus pulled over and Frankie leapt off before it stopped, Cook juggling the shopping bag and a wrapped birthday present in the shape of a cricket bat – fooling nobody. The bus sped away as soon as he stepped off.
This was a mistake, Cook thought, not for the first time. Bringing the boy into the heart of the city. Second-guessing the intent of the evacuation. Back into the lion’s den. But what did he know? There’d been letters. To and fro. A birthday party. An excuse to bring the boy back for a day. See his family.
Cook had heard talk. A lot of the evacuees had gone back. Transplanting half a million of the country’s poorest children from city slums to country farms with little or no oversight had been an admirable idea, executed badly. Frankie had wanted to leave at first, but things had settled down eventually. A truce, of sorts. Cook understood that this day trip was, in fact, some kind of admission it was going to work, that it didn’t have to be all or nothing.
Frankie led the way down stone stairs from the bridge. They threaded their way through St Katharine’s Dock, past a giant brewery, filling the air with the smell of malt. Cook looked longingly into the pub set into the corner of the brewery – the Red Lion – but he couldn’t see past the criss-crosses of brown paper and tape across the windows, and the heavy blackout curtains hanging ready on the inside.
‘Who’s going to be there?’ Cook asked. He was seeing a different side to the boy, who usually communicated in single words, mostly of one syllable. Yes. No. Fine.
‘Mum,’ Frankie said.
Cook waited to see if there’d be any more details forthcoming. He should have known better.
‘Who else? Your dad?’
Frankie shook his head.
‘Doubt it,’ he said, his face clouding over.
‘He’ll be at work I assume,’ Cook said.
The boy shook his head again. ‘He doesn’t come around much.’
Cook didn’t push it.
