Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

  Epigraph

  It is proposed that the Commonwealth seek out in Britain, by whatever means necessary, at least 17,000 children a year suitable and available for immediate migration to Australia.

  Arthur Calwell,

  Australian Minister for Immigration, 1949

  Contents

  Cover

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE: THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  BOOK TWO: THE STOLEN GENERATION

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  BOOK THREE: THE THREE CHILDSNATCHERS

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  BOOK ONE

  THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE

  I

  The boy standing vigil at the end of the lane, a Christmas lantern in his hand, still believes his father is coming home. Christmas, he has been taught, is a time of family, when errant sisters might come back to the fold, when black-sheep brothers might go carolling with the mothers they say they despise. He is eight years old, proud to be nearly nine, and he still recalls last Christmas, how he stood at the end of the lane, tracking every approaching motor car until the snow drifts climbed above his boots. It had taken his mother to prise him away. She had hoisted him up and hauled him back to the terrace, where his sisters were ready to welcome him with hot mulled wine — which was terrible to taste, but at least made him feel warm and fuzzy inside. He had gone to bed that night in squalls of tears, but risen the next morning to presents under the tree — a book he had pined for, The Secret of Grey Walls, a cap gun he had been told, time and again, not to expect — and it was not until the evening that he realized he had not thought of his vigil all through the day. This year, he has resolved, he will not be so cowardly. He has his cap gun tucked into his belt, he has brought mulled wine in a flask, and he has wrapped up warm. Christmas is a time of family and a time of miracles. The logic will not be denied.

  It is 1948 and, though he has never once seen his father, he knows that he is coming home.

  He was born in the middle month of winter in the year of 1940. He has twin sisters older than him by eleven years, and they are the ones who attended his birth, straining with his mother in the backroom of the terrace where they live. Of his earliest years, he remembers little. His mother kneads dough in a bakery before dawn and cleans houses in the afternoon, and it is his sisters he remembers making him breakfast and dressing him every morning. He grows up, quickly, between one end of the street and another. A shop mistress smiles when he enters her shop, secretly palming barley sugars into his hands. A neighbour invites him to play with her daughter in a backyard on the other side of the road. So lost is he in this world of women that it is not until he sees two brothers tumbling over one another further down the terrace that he discovers it is cowboys and Indians he longs to be playing, not with dolls’ houses and ponies chipped out of wood.

  At night, there are sirens. If the sirens sing before dusk, they hurry together to a shelter buried in the grounds of a house at the end of the terrace. Outside, the world quakes. Through a speak-hole sliding back and forth, the boy can see cascading oranges and reds, great reefs of smoke. He hears whispers of factories on fire and great barrage balloons strung through the skies.

  If the sirens do not sing until after dark, they remain in their house, crammed into a cubbyhole beneath the stairs. Sometimes the building shakes. At first, the boy does not understand the fear — but, in the tomb under the stairs, terror is a disease that spreads quickly. One night, crammed into that cubbyhole, his mother begins to sob. The boy believes he can hear his own name in the tears: Jon, Jon, Jon, the word swallowed by the song of the siren.

  He is five years old when he begins to ask about his father. It is 1946 and there are suddenly strange men in the streets, great companies of them descending on the taprooms and alehouses. Jon watches them from his window at the top of the terrace. He notices, for the first time, that his mother stands alone at the end of their lane each evening, watching these strange intruders march back from the ruins of warehouses and factories they are rebuilding. He wonders if she too is bewildered at the invasion of their city, but his sisters smile oddly when he dares to ask the question. They tell him she is waiting. Nothing more, and nothing less. She is waiting for their father to return.

  They bring out photographs. A man with wild black hair glowering into the camera. A man with two young girls, one sitting on either knee. His name, they tell him, is Jonah, though he too is always known as Jon. It thrills the little boy to think that he, one day, might be like the man in the pictures.

  At the back end of summer, a man in uniform arrives at the house next door, and the little girl with whom Jon is sometimes invited to play is introduced, for the first time, to her father. Jon watches as the man pauses, the little girl framed in the doorway, and crouches to urge her forward. At first she freezes, her mother looming behind. Then the man vaults the brick wall, scooping up the child and embracing her mother in one swift movement. In some of the other doorways along the redbrick row, other women have appeared to witness the reunion. One of them, Jon notes, begins to applaud.

  There are stories to be learned. His father was a hero fighting a crusade on the other side of the world. His father was in the jungle teaching the natives to fly Spitfires. There are other stories as well — his father once worked at a lathe; his father was arrested in a backroom brawl — but these are not the tales with which the boy obsesses. Though the boy has never once met the man, he wants to grow up and be just like him, out in the world on grand adventures, with friends and family at home thrilling for news of his exploits.

  He begs his mother every evening to tell some other tale of his father’s derring-do. Sometimes he is swooped away by his sisters — but, sometimes, he is wily enough to trap his mother in the question. One night, after his sisters have put him to bed, his mother returns from an evening sweeping some factory floor. He waits for her to climb, wearily, to her bed — and then he pounces. He tells her he has had a nightmare, that he dreamed of his father lost, somewhere at sea, fending off sharks with the butt of a broken oar.

  It is nonsense, she tells him. His father cannot swim; he would never have got himself into such trouble in the first place.

  The boy does not notice, at first, when the stories stop being told. He supposes it may have been earlier than he first thought, for he was surely telling himself the stories as well, lining up his lead soldiers and imagining them his father’s company, or building matchstick planes and putting his father in the cockpit. In his games, his father makes his way home from the jungles on the other side of the world, but is forever sidetracked by helpless villagers, or orphaned children searching for someone to protect them. Each time he goes to sleep he constructs a new fantasy, some other adventure his father cannot resist as, kingdom by kingdom, he picks his way back to English shores.

  In a journal he writes stories about his father. At first, they are only short passages, idle thoughts: his father parachuting from a plane; his father in a coracle, tumbling helplessly over a wild waterfall. He is beginning to compose a longer story — his father crossing Siberia by sled with Nazis on his trail — when his mother discovers him at work, hidden under the bedcovers. He does not understand why she starts crying. She takes the journal away and forbids him
from writing such stories ever again.

  He is not permitted, any longer, to mention his father.

  The winter of 1949 lingers long into the following year, but lasts longer still for Jon’s mother. She is at home more and more often, lying in bed until hours after dawn, so that soon it is Jon’s sisters who cook breakfast and scrub his laundry and take the ration books out to gather the week’s groceries. On Christmas Day, she does not get out of bed at all. They open presents gathered around her bed, and bring a small tree into the room that Jon has decorated with stray strands of tinsel. Early in the New Year, he finds one of his sisters sobbing quietly to the other in the scullery. He listens at the door, but they are well versed in his ways and shoo him away.

  Three nights later, Jon piles his few belongings — clothes and bedspread and a bundle of treasured books — into a suitcase and follows his sisters to a neighbour’s house. He spends the night on the floor of the living room, where the deep rug before the fire is a more comfortable bed than he has ever known. He wonders, absently, why their mother has not joined them in the adventure, but is promised he will see her again soon.

  Three nights later, his mother arrives on the doorstep and takes dinner with them: a broth made of onions, thickened with potato. She has brought hard bread from her bakery, but its appearance on the table causes deep and troubled sighs. His mother has stolen it, Jon understands — but a little theft does not damage its taste.

  She comes intermittently after that. One Sunday, she strolls with him along the canal. Another time, she and his sisters go for a long walk — and only his sisters return. Easter comes, and she brings him a new book, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string. He has been waiting for Mystery at Witchend longer than he remembers, and is so eager to sink into its pages that he does not realize, until it is already dark, that his mother stayed only a few minutes that day.

  By the break of December in the year of 1950, he has not seen his mother in four long months. Christmas approaches quickly, and he is determined it will not be like the last. He makes plans to go to the old spot, to keep his customary vigil — but, just as he is preparing to leave, a familiar voice rises in the hallway below. Thundering down the stairs, he sees his mother standing in the door.

  He does not run to her, though he knows it is what she expects. At the command of his sister, an adult now, he approaches gingerly.

  His mother crouches and tells him that she loves him. He accepts the words, because he has always accepted them, has never for a second doubted she does not think of him as often as he thinks of her. She tells him to put his best coat on, to polish up his boots and gather together the books she knows he loves. At last, the boy understands: Christmas is a time of family and a time of miracles.

  They are going back home.

  Through the redbricks, piled high in frost and ice, he trails after his mother. They wander the old street, but they do not go back to the old house. They march on, instead, into thorough fares Jon has never known, strange, foreign streets where black men stand out in the snow. They come to a broad thoroughfare from where he can see the lands beyond the edge of the city. There has been snow on the dales for many days now, and they loom luminescent in the night. A silvery moon hangs above, shipwrecked in banks of white cloud.

  Between two houses, their windows boarded up, a lane drops onto a street below. Thorn trees grow wild along the verge and, to Jon, it appears like the entrance to some fairytale forest.

  His mother stops and crouches down so that his face is only inches from hers. Her eyes are shimmering. She produces an envelope and presses it into his hands. Do not read it, she implores. A smile flourishes and dies on her face. She knows how Jon loves to read — but the letter is not for him. He is only to pass it on.

  She turns him to the alley flanked with trees. At its end, lights are burning in the windows of a sprawling redbrick pile. It will not be forever, she tells him. But there is no place for Jon with his sisters any longer. They have carried him where she alone could not, and they can take him no further. Yet, his mother will be well soon. She will have money, she will have a home, she may even have a man of her own. She brushes the hair out of his eyes, and turns him on the spot to usher him on his way. She will come for him before the new year is two months old — but, for now, he must float on alone.

  Jon stands alone as his mother returns to the terrace. At moments his feet compel him to follow, but he is strong enough — defiant as he knows his father must have been — to remain rooted to the spot. Only when she is gone from sight, wreathed in a sudden flurry of snowflakes, does he fail. He fumbles after her for one step, and then another — and then he stops. It is not what she wants. It is not what his father would have wanted.

  He turns to the trail, tucking the letter into his coat. He can see, now, that the redbrick pile is not one building but three, two houses hunching on the shoulders of a hall with a spire like a church. He walks, slowly, between two pillars of red brick. Then, down the ledges he goes, head held high so that none of the midnight creatures watching him from the trees might see that he is afraid.

  In front of the tall spire there lies an open yard, where a motor car sits on blocks of stone and a single bicycle is propped against the wall. Washing lines criss-cross above him, beaded with snow. He advances slowly. The building looms, a fairytale castle made out of bricks and mortar.

  Above the door, the legend reads, in cursive script, Chapeltown Boy’s Home of the Children’s Crusade. Beneath that, a shield is mounted on a tall cross, and emblazoned with words Jon has to squint to make out.

  We fight for the paupers and not for the princes.

  We fight for the orphaned, the lost and the lonely, the forgotten children of famine and war, the desperate ones who deserve a new world.

  Jon barely has time to finish the final words when the doors on the other side of the yard open. Beyond them, he sees children — short and tall, young and younger still, more children than he has seen in his life — and, above them, wrapped in long robes, a man in black.

  The man gestures to him. ‘Jon Heather,’ he intones, his voice old and feathery. ‘We are so very glad that you have found us.’

  II

  ‘That little one’s still in bed,’ a voice, full of mirth, whispers.

  ‘Might be he froze in the night.’

  The first voice pauses, as if weighing the idea up. ‘He’d have a better chance of not freezing if you gave him back his blanket.’

  Once the voices have faded, Jon Heather opens his eyes. In truth, he has been awake since long before the morning bell, just the same as every last one of the mornings he has been here. At night, long after lights out, he forces himself to stay awake for as long as he is able, just so that they might not take his sheets, but even so, he wakes every morning to discover that his sleepiness has betrayed him, that he’s been sucked under, that now he’s shivering on a bare mattress with only the ceiling tiles to shelter him.

  Once he is certain the dormitory is empty, he squirms back into yesterday’s clothes — they are two sizes too big, hand-me-downs he was given once he had worn out the clothes in which his mother sent him — and ventures out of the room. If you are careful, you can walk the length of the landing without your head once peeping above the banister rail. It is a long passage, and overlooks a broad hall below. Along the row, there are other dormitories and, at the end, the cell where the returned soldier who leads them in games sleeps. Jon Heather steals past each doorway, mindful of other stragglers, like him, trying to avoid the stampede.

  At the top of the stair, he stops. Here, the stairs cut a switchback to the entrance hall below. Standing at the top, he gets a strange sense of things out of proportion, of the downstairs world drawing him in. He pauses, fingering the banister for balance. Through a gap between the rails, he can see the big double doors through which he first came, holding up his mother’s letter like a petition. He has stood here every morning, waiting for her face to appear at the glass, or e
lse for his sisters to come, raining their fists at the door and demanding his return. So far: stillness and silence, more terrifying than any of the dreams that have started to taunt him.

  The hall below is stark, with a counter at the front like an old hotel. At the doors stand two of the men in black, conversing in low whispers. The elder is the man who first welcomed Jon to the Home. Wizened like some fairytale grandfather, he wears little hair upon his head. Beside him, another man listens attentively. Somehow, his skin is tanned by the sun, a stark contrast to the pallid men who shuffle around this place.

  Jon wants to wait until they have passed before descending the stairs, but presently the elder man turns, sunken eyes falling on him.

  ‘The bell,’ he says, ‘was more than fifteen minutes ago.’

  Jon, wordless, shrinks back, even though he is a whole staircase away from the man.

  ‘Breakfast. No exceptions.’

  The men in black leave the hall along one of the passages leading deeper into the building. These are hallways along which the boys are forbidden to go, and all the more mysterious for that. At the bottom of the stair, Jon listens to their footfalls fade, and wonders how far the sprawling building goes.

  Now, however, he is alone.

  He can hear the dull chatter of boys in the breakfasting hall, which joins the entrance hall behind the counter, but something pulls him away, draws him towards the big double doors. The glass windows on either side are opaque, barnacled in ice, so that the world beyond is obscured. He stands, tracing the pattern of an icy crystal with his index finger, before his eyes fall upon the door handle. Then, suddenly, his hands are around it. At first, that is enough — just to hold on to the promise of going back out. Yet, when he finds the courage to turn the handle, he finds it jammed, locked, wood and steel and glass all conspiring against him.

  Jon Heather pads into the middle of the entrance hall and turns a pointless pirouette.