Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

  Breakfast is the same every morning: milk and oats. Sometimes there is sugar, but today is not one of those days; there will be no more sugar until the boy who wet his bed and secretly changed his sheets is discovered and punished. By the time Jon Heather arrives, most of the boys are already done eating — and, because they are not allowed to leave the hall until the second bell sounds, they are now contriving games out of bowls and spoons. They sit at long tables, skidding bowls up and down, crying out the names of famous battles of which they have heard. One boy, who has not been quick enough in wolfing down his oats, has found his bowl upended and perched on top of his head like a military cap. The oats look like brain matter seeping down his cheeks.

  ‘Just get it off your head, George, before one of them old bastards sees.’

  ‘It’s hot …’ the fat boy trembles.

  ‘More than mine was,’ says the lanky, red-haired boy beside him, shoving his bowl away. ‘Look,’ he whispers, out of the corner of his mouth, ‘you can eat up what’s left of mine if you like. Just don’t make me have to take that thing off your head for you.’

  ‘I wish you would, Peter. It’s getting in my hair.’

  The lanky redhead groans. His head drops to the table for only an instant, before he sits bolt upright, swivels and helps the younger boy lift off his new helmet. ‘I’m never going to hear the end of this from the other boys …’

  ‘It’s in my ears, isn’t it?’

  The older boy digs a finger in and produces a big clot of porridge. ‘You want me to wipe your arse as well, Georgie boy?’

  Jon Heather must walk the length of the breakfasting hall to get his porridge from the table at the front. When he gets there, all that is left are the congealed hunks at the bottom of the pan — but this is good enough; it’s a tradition for each boy to hawk up phlegm into the pot as he takes his portion, and most likely it didn’t sink this far. Besides, Jon isn’t hungry. He carries a metal bowl back to a spot at the end of the table and pretends to eat.

  Two months. He is only staying a short two months. His father has surely endured much worse, locked up in some jungle camp for years on end.

  ‘You’re new,’ a boy, tall with close hair and sad, sloping eyes, begins, flinging himself onto a stool opposite Jon.

  Jon does not know how to reply. ‘I am,’ he says — but then the second bell tolls, and he is spared the onset of another inquisition.

  During the day, there are sometimes lessons. The men in black sit them down in the chantry, which squats on the furthest side of the entrance hall, and give them instructions in morals. Mostly, this means how to be good, but sometimes how to do bad so that good might prosper. This, the men in black explain, is a difficult decision, and to shy away from it would be the Devil’s work. When there are not lessons, the boys are left to their own devices. Often, the men in black disappear into the recesses of the Home, those strange uncharted corridors in which they study and live, leaving only a single man to prowl among them, making certain that the boys have made the best of their lessons and are growing into straight, moral young men. Today it is the sun-tanned man in black. Periodically, he appears in the doorway to summon a boy and take him through long lists of questions — What is your age? How long have you been here? Are you an adventurous sort, or a studious sort? — before propelling him back to his games.

  Jon is hunched up in the corner of the assembly hall, listening to bigger boys batter a ball back and forth, when the sun-tanned man appears. He seems to be counting, with little nods of his head, eyes lingering on each boy in turn. Every so often, his face scrunches and he has to start again, as the gangs the boys have formed come apart, scatter, and then reform. In the middle of the shifting mass, Jon Heather sits with his knees tucked into his chin. Come night-time, at least there will be order; at least there will be a place allotted for each boy; at least the day will be over. Even if he has to sleep in the biting cold without his blanket again, listening to the whispers of the boys around him, watching the shadow of footfalls outside the dormitory door, it won’t matter. Every nightmare is another night gone, and every night gone is another few hours closer to the morning when his mother will return.

  The man in black’s eyes seem to have fallen on another boy, the lanky redhead from breakfast, but something compels Jon to stand up. Dodging a rampaging bigger boy, he scurries to the doorway. At first, the sun-tanned man does not even notice the boy standing at his feet. Jon reaches up to tug on a sleeve. His fingers are just dancing at the hem of the cloth when the man looks down: violent blue eyes set in a leathery mask.

  ‘I have a question,’ Jon pronounces.

  ‘A question?’ The accent is strange, English put through a mangling press and ejected the other side.

  ‘I want to call my father. He’s coming to fetch me.’

  The man in black nods, as if he has known it all along.

  ‘I didn’t know who to ask,’ Jon ventures.

  ‘I see,’ the man says, placing an odd stress on the final word. ‘And when was the last time you saw your father? Was it, perhaps, the night he brought you here?’

  ‘My mother brought me here,’ says Jon, exasperated at the man’s stupidity.

  ‘And your father?’

  Jon Heather says, ‘Well, I haven’t once seen my father.’

  The man gives a slow, thoughtful nod. He crouches, a hand on Jon’s shoulder, but even now he is some inches taller and has to look down, along the line of a broad, crooked nose. ‘Then it seems to me, you hardly have a father at all.’

  At once, the man climbs back to his feet, barks out for the red-haired boy and turns to lead him along the corridor.

  Alone in the doorway, Jon Heather watches.

  ‘If you keep letting them take it, they’ll carry on taking it,’ the boy with red hair snipes. Tearing Jon’s blanket from the hands of a bigger boy, he marches across the dormitory and flings it back onto Jon’s crib. ‘What, were you raised as a little girl or something? Just tell them no.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Yeah, merry Christmas,’ the redhead replies.

  Christmas Day has been and gone. This year, no card from his mother, no parcels wrapped in string with his sisters’ names on them. All of this he can bear — but he cannot stand the thought that, this Christmas, he kept no vigil for his father’s return.

  It is the small of the afternoon and outside fresh snow is falling. Ice is keeping them imprisoned. Jon tried to hole up in the dormitory today, but with the grounds of the Home closed, clots of bigger boys lounge around their beds, working on ever more inventive ways to stave off their boredom — and Jon knows, already, what this might mean. If you tell tales to the men in black, they give you a lecture on the spirit. If you tell tales to the soldier at the end of the hall, he bustles you to a different room and, by the time you look back, he is gone. It is better, Jon decides, to stay away. A man, he tells himself, can endure anything at all, just so long as he has his mother and father and sisters to go back to.

  He bundles up his blanket and tucks it under one arm. Then, with furtive looks over each shoulder, he bends down and produces a clothbound book that has been jammed beneath his mattress. He could read We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea a hundred times — he’ll read it a hundred more, if it makes these two months pass more quickly.

  ‘Where’re you creeping off to?’

  It is only the red-haired boy again, suddenly rearing from a bottom bunk where he has been tossing the rook from a game of chess back and forth. On his elbows, he heaves himself forward.

  ‘I’m going to find a corner,’ Jon says.

  ‘Down in the chantry?’

  Jon shrugs. The Home is still a labyrinth of tunnels and dead chambers, and he has not given a thought to where he might retreat. There are passages along which the boys know not to go, but mostly these lead only to barren rooms, boarded-up or piled high with the things past generations of boys have left behind. A brave expedition once found a box of tin soldiers here which
they brought heroically back and refused to share — but not even those brave boys have dared to sneak in and spend the night in that deep otherworld. Bravery is one thing, they countenance, but foolishness is something else. At night, those rooms are stalked by the ghosts of children who died there.

  ‘Maybe I’ll go to the dead rooms,’ Jon says, for want of something better to say.

  ‘Well,’ the red-haired boy goes on, allowing himself a smirk at this new boy’s ridiculous pluck, ‘you see George, you tell him I’m looking for him. I said I’d come looking, but I aren’t ready yet. You tell him that.’

  ‘Which one is George?’

  ‘The chubby one. Got no right carrying fat like that in a place like this.’

  The one who wore a cap of milk and oats at breakfast, Jon remembers. He sleeps in the bunk beside the red-haired boy and wakes early every morning to hang out his sheets to dry. On his first morning in the Home, Jon saw the red-haired boy shepherding him out of the dormitory and returning with crisp sheets stolen from the laundry downstairs.

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ says Jon.

  In the end, Jon does not dare follow the long passage from the entrance hall and venture into the boarded-up rooms. Instead, head down so that he does not catch the eye of a man in black scolding two boys for playing with a wooden bat, he slopes across and finds a small hollow behind the chantry, where old furniture is piled up and blankets gather dust. It is cold in here, but Jon huddles up to leaf through the pages of his storybook. So engrossed is he that he does not, at first, register the portly figure who uncurls from a nest of dustsheets.

  Suddenly, eyes are upon him. When he looks up, the chubby boy is standing in front of him, holding out a crumpled blanket as if it is both sword and shield. He is shorter than Jon remembers, with hair shorn to the scalp but now growing back in unruly clumps. His lips are red and full, and the bottom one trembles.

  ‘I just want to …’

  Jon scrambles up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he begins. ‘I didn’t know anybody came here.’

  The fat boy shrugs.

  ‘You’re George.’

  The boy squints. He seems to be testing the name out, turning it over and again on his tongue. Then, head cocked to one side, he nods.

  ‘There’s a boy up there, said he was looking for you …’

  At that, the boy seems to brighten. ‘That’s Peter,’ he says. ‘He said he’d come soon.’

  Jon shuffles against the stack of chairs, as if to let the boy past.

  ‘You don’t mind if I stay? Just a little while?’

  Jon shrugs, sinks back into his blanket.

  ‘I come here before stories sometimes.’

  Jon falls into his book, but he has barely turned a page before he hears the boy strangle a bleat. When he looks up, torn out of some countryside adventure — Jon has never seen the countryside, and marvels that people might live in villages on hills, climbing trees and boating on lakes — the boy is too slow to hide his tears. There is a lingering silence, and Jon returns to his tale: two boys are scrambling to moor a boat as fog wreathes over the Fens.

  Again, the boy chokes back a sob. This time, Jon looks up quickly. Their eyes meet. The boy strangles another sob, and then rushes to mask the fact that he has been crying. For a second, his eyes are downcast; then, by increments, he edges a look closer at Jon.

  At last, Jon understands. The boy wants his crying to be heard. ‘What’s the matter?’

  The boy shrugs oddly, his round shoulders lifting almost to his ears. ‘What’s your name?’

  Perhaps he only wants to talk — but, if that is so, Jon cannot understand why he is cowering in this cranny at all. ‘I’m Jon.’

  George gives a little nod. ‘There was a Jon when old Mister Matthews brought me here. He was one of the bigger boys. He wasn’t here for long.’

  ‘He went home?’

  George shakes his head fiercely. ‘I think the men sent him somewhere else.’

  Jon considers this silently. There might be no more than six or seven men in black roaming these halls, but somehow it feels as if they are everywhere all at once. They are quiet men who speak only rarely, unless it is to lead the boys in prayers or summon them to chores — yet when a boy has done something wrong, been tardy in making his bed or been caught whispering after lights out, they have a way about them, a gentle nod that they give. Then, a boy must go to a corner and wait to be dealt with. He might find himself running laps of the building, or locked in the laundry. The other boys say that he might find himself in one of the dead rooms with his trousers around his ankles and red welts blooming on his bare backside. One night, a boy was caught chattering after dark and taken from the dormitory, only to come back an hour later with the most terrible punishment of all. ‘They’re writing to my mother,’ he said, ‘to tell her I’m happy and don’t want to go home …’

  Surely, Jon decides, it is these men in black who are keeping him here. They have cast an enchantment on his mother, another on his sisters, and have raised up walls of ice around him.

  ‘What’s in your book?’

  Jon inches across the floor, thick with dust, and holds the cover up so that George might see.

  ‘Peter used to read stories to me when they put me here …’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘It was before the summer. There was snow in May!’

  Jon is about to start spinning the familiar story so that this fat boy might hear it as well, when somewhere a bell begins to toll.

  There comes a sudden flurry of feet. Jon crams the book under a stack of chairs. At his side, George is infected by the panic and, knees tucked into his chin, rolls up into a ball.

  The footsteps grow louder. Then, a short sharp burst: somebody calling George’s name.

  ‘George,’ the red-haired boy says, loping into the hollow with the air of an exasperated schoolteacher, ‘there you are …’

  George unfurls from his bundle, throwing a sheepish glance at Jon. ‘I’m always here, Peter.’

  The red-haired boy follows George’s eyes. ‘This one been pestering you, has he?’

  Jon shakes his head.

  ‘He’s bound to pester someone, aren’t you, George?’ says Peter.

  George eagerly agrees.

  ‘How are you doing, kid?’

  The fat boy shuffles his head from side to side.

  ‘They told him about his mother last night. He told you about his mother?’ asked Peter.

  ‘My mother’s coming back for me,’ Jon begins. He does not know why, but he proclaims it proudly, as if it is an award he has striven for and finally earned.

  ‘Yeah,’ Peter says, slapping George’s shoulder so that the little boy stumbles. ‘That’s what George here thought as well. But they called him into the office last night and told him she wasn’t ever coming back. She’s dead, George. Isn’t that right?’

  George nods glumly. It occurs to Jon that, though tears shimmer in his eyes, he is thrilled to hear it announced so plainly by Peter.

  ‘Me,’ says Peter, ‘I been here longer than George, longer than lots of these boys. My mother’s been cold in the ground for almost forever. My sister’s with the Crusade too, but they shipped her off to a girls’ home in Stockport, so it’s not like I’m ever seeing that one again.’ He exhales, as if none of it matters. ‘So the one thing you got to understand, kid, is that whatever’s coming up for you, it isn’t Sunday roasts and trips to the seaside.’

  In the hallways outside, the bells toll again.

  ‘Come on,’ says Peter, ‘you don’t want to know what happens to boys who skip their stupid vespers …’ Peter scrambles past, out into the hall.

  Momentarily, Jon and George remain, sharing shy glances. Then, Jon moves to follow.

  George reaches forward and tugs at Jon’s sleeve.

  ‘She’s really coming back, is she? Your mother?’

  Jon does not mean to say it so, but suddenly he is full of spite. He whips his arm free. ‘I’m not
an orphan,’ he says. ‘I have a mother and a father, and they’re both coming back. I don’t care what Peter thinks — two months and I’ll be gone …’

  They push across the hall. The straggling boys are hurrying now, down the stairs from the dormitories above.

  ‘That’s how it was for Peter,’ George begins, drying his eyes so vigorously that they become more swollen and red. ‘But it’s just like he always says. The childsnatcher doesn’t come in the dead of night. He doesn’t creep up those stairs and stash you in his bag.’ They follow a passage and go together through the chantry doors, where the other boys are gathering. ‘He’s just a normal man, in a smart black suit — but once he calls you by your name, you never see your family again.’

  In the doorway, Jon hesitates. The boys are gathered around, sitting in cross-legged rows, little ones and bigger boys both — and there, standing in the wings, are the men who run this Home: normal men, in smart black robes; childsnatchers, every last one.

  December is cold, but January is colder still. It snows only rarely, but when it does the city is draped in white and the frosts keep it that way, as if under a magic spell of sleep.

  It is only in those deep lulls between snowfalls that the boys are permitted into the grounds of the Home. It is Peter who is most eager to venture out. Jon himself is plagued by a relentless daydream in which the Home has been severed from the terraces beyond. In the dream, the enchanted whiteness goes on and on, and he begins to wonder how his mother — not nearly so brave as his father — might ever find the courage to cross the tundra and find him. George, too, takes some coaxing. He has not been beyond the doors of the Home in long months and stands on the threshold, squinting at the sky. Peter assures him it is not going to cave in, but it does not sway George. It is only when Peter admits defeat and bounds outside, leaving him alone, that George finds the courage to follow. Watching Peter disappear into that whiteness, it seems, is the more terrifying prospect.

  Some of the boys build forts; others attempt an igloo that promptly caves in and entombs a little one so that his fellows have to dig him out. The returned soldier leads a game of wars, in which each gang of boys must defend a corner of the grounds — but the game is deemed too invigorating by the elderly man in black, and must be stopped. Even so, the boys continue in secret. George, swaddled up so that he looks like a big ball of yarn, sits in a deep fox-hole dug into the snow, dutifully rolling balls for Peter to hurl, while Jon — a sergeant-at-arms — sneaks a little pebble into each one, to make sure it has an extra kick. In this way, they are able to hold their corner of the grounds, up near the gates by the fairytale forest, against the onslaught of a much bigger army. Peter declares it the most glorious last stand since Rorke’s Drift — but when Jon looks up to declare it better than Dunkirk, he sees that Peter is gone.