Little Exiles

by Robert Dinsdale

  They walk together out of the assembly hall. Sundays are supposed to be spare days, no work and no worry, but it doesn’t feel that way to Jon. Boys are gathering with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Some of them, it seems, have already found a way to cause mischief, and a strident cottage mother is hauling them by their ears to a waiting man in black, a creature much older than Judah Reed, with hands wrinkled like oversized gloves and a deep stoop that makes him look like a tortoise.

  Ernest comes close, breathing out words Jon cannot hear.

  ‘What?’ asks Jon, tilting his ear.

  ‘I saw a road,’ whispers Ernest. ‘When he got hold of me to march me back, I looked up …’ He pauses. This, it seems, is much more magical than a world without fences. ‘It had a bank on both sides and … there it was. Like a river without any rain.’ His face dares a smile. ‘Tyre marks in the dust. There was a glass bottle on the edge, like someone just threw it there.’

  ‘There’s somebody out there …’

  ‘I saw it. They can’t stop me having seen it.’

  Jon Heather stops. He looks at his hands, no longer bloody, except where the blood has worked into the crevices around his nails. ‘Where?’

  ‘Into the sun,’ says Ernest. ‘We should have been running into the sun.’

  That night, sleep will not come. Jon imagines his letter, winging its way to England. Over glittering oceans it goes, through tropical monsoons, around the cape of India, taking up with a flock of migrating birds who will keep it company all the way back to English shores. It is night when it arrives in the old town, but it roosts with those same birds in the gutters of one of the old terraces, diving down to find his mother as soon as morning comes.

  She will hold that letter dear to her. Jon knows it. Perhaps she will write a letter of her own — but it will only be her emissary. She will be following soon after.

  If he wasn’t so certain of the fact, perhaps he might be dreaming differently tonight. He pictures coming through the scrub again, the lone wallaby skittering out of his path, and seeing nothing but the bush rolling on. The world had never seemed so huge as it did then. His mind’s eye rolls on, and he sees Ernest, dangling from the arm of a man in black, the pair of them silhouettes against the dying light. Beyond them, Jon can see nothing but the undulating red plain — but Ernest can see more.

  Somewhere, out there, there is a road.

  He closes his eyes, ignores George’s pleas for a story, and pictures it snaking back to the sea. A road can lead you anywhere. A road can even lead you back home.

  ‘Jon Heather, you lazy sack! We’re going to be in trouble!’

  Jon wakes, to feel fingers grappling with his foot, trying to haul him out of bed. There is a moment in which he might be anywhere in the world, but then he remembers. Fear grips him and he rolls over — and it is only then that he realizes it is George, not some haughty cottage mother, urging him to rise.

  ‘You were talking in your sleep,’ George says, indignant.

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You must have heard something.’

  ‘We’re going to be late!’

  Jon blinks the sleep out of his eyes, bewildered that he might have slept so soundly, and looks around the dormitory. All of the other boys are gone.

  ‘You shouldn’t have waited for me, George. Now you’ll be for it too …’

  ‘I can’t go out on my own, Jon Heather, you know I can’t.’

  They are fortunate, this morning, that their cottage mother is not feeling particularly vicious. When they emerge, blinking into the sun, she is drinking tea from a dainty cup, and simply waves them on with a withering gaze. All the same, Jon knows, she won’t forget it. They’ll have to be doubly careful for the next few days.

  In the breakfast hall, Judah Reed is taking a register. He does not have a roll call of names, so instead barks out ages, and every boy of that age must then go to a certain corner of the room. Then he begins to count.

  ‘Remember,’ George whispers. ‘I’m ten too.’

  ‘Is there,’ Judah Reed proclaims, ‘a boy named Peter here?’

  George’s eyes light up. His head swivels, like an owl’s, to find Jon’s.

  Across the room, nobody raises their hand.

  ‘Does he mean our Peter?’

  Judah Reed must hear, for his gaze falls on George and hovers like a hawk.

  ‘Shut up, George.’

  ‘David?’ Judah Reed calls.

  This time, a little one raises his hand, but Judah Reed quickly dismisses him as too young.

  ‘Must have gone to the stations,’ Jon hears Judah Reed mutter. ‘Do we have the right number?’ The cottage mother beside him nods. ‘Very well.’

  Once the head-count is complete, Judah Reed rings a hand bell and breakfast begins. Jon watches as he shares whispered words with two other men in black, and a particularly serpentine cottage mother. They sit together at the head of the hall, and two girls from somewhere else in the Mission bring them a tin tray piled high with bacon, eggs, and a jug filled with orange juice.

  ‘I was number one,’ says George, considering the bowl of dry hash he has collected.

  ‘Don’t you think …’ Jon’s thoughts are too fast for his words to keep up. ‘There isn’t even a list.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘The boy in the dairy, he reckoned Judah Reed doesn’t even know his name …’

  ‘I don’t think he knows mine.’

  Jon Heather thinks: better keep it that way, George.

  ‘Eat up,’ he says, remembering, dimly, that first morning in the Home, the fat boy with porridge pumping out of his ears.

  George pokes some of the food into his gullet, but the taste is horrific; it must be the scrapings from the bottom of a pot. After a few attempts, he perfects a way of poking it to the back of his throat, so that he barely tastes a thing, but by that point the hand bell is clanging.

  ‘Dairy for me today,’ says George. ‘I’m going to sneak a suck of milk.’

  Jon should have thought of that. ‘Tell Tommy I said …’ Jon falters. ‘Hey, George,’ he says, as they traipse after the other boys into the morning light. ‘You do what Tommy tells you, OK?’

  ‘You don’t need to badger me, Jon Heather. You’re not Peter, you know.’

  After they have parted ways, Jon joins a rag of other boys outside the sandstone huts. There are boys of all ages here, only the very youngest spared and sent off for village muster, and Jon finds a spot to stand among them, not too close to the front and not too close to the back.

  ‘What is it today?’ asks a little one next to him.

  Jon Heather only shrugs.

  They seem to stand there, in a useless clot, for an age. The coolness of morning evaporates, to be replaced with a dull, insistent heat. Finally, Judah Reed and another man in black appear from the dormitory shacks. They have, Jon knows, been carrying out inspections, making mental notes of which boys have failed to make their beds, or which boys have sneaked banned treats and trinkets under their mattresses. Once, a boy was found to have been saving chunks from his evening stew to have as a midnight supper. He had to make a trip to Judah Reed’s office and wasn’t allowed dinner for five nights straight, in order to teach him a lesson.

  Judah Reed approaches and the boys part to let him through. Without looking back, he makes a simple gesture and, snatching a shovel from its prop against the wall, begins to march. As one, the boys follow. Jon tries to catch the eyes of a bigger boy beside him, giving him a questioning look — does anybody know where we’re going? — but nobody cares to reply.

  They walk the length of the sandstone huts, navigating around the bedwetters’ dorm and the deep latrines at its rear, until they come to the very edge of the Mission, as far from the dairy as a boy could get. The scrub grows unruly here, with walls of thorn so thick a boy could not even creep through on hands and knees.

  Judah Reed stops and turns on the spot. On his right, an
other man in black slowly comes to a halt. Judah Reed thrusts the shovel, hard, into the ground. The blade slices into the crust, and then the shovel just stands there, vibrating.

  He looks up, at the gathered boys. ‘A proud day,’ he begins. ‘The start of something new. When the Children’s Crusade first came to this blasted land, there was nothing. No buildings. No roads. No …’

  Fences, thinks Jon Heather. He catches himself dreaming, and reins his focus back to Judah Reed.

  ‘It is time,’ Judah Reed goes on, ‘to make something new, to rebuild the land, just as you are rebuilding yourselves.’ He pauses, lifts an arm. ‘You have seen, of course, the sandstone homes in the heart of our Mission.’

  The bravest boys look over their shoulders, back the way they have come. Jon Heather does not.

  ‘Well,’ smiles Judah Reed, ‘they did not grow, like scrub trees, straight out of the rock. They were planned and crafted and built by …’ He lifts his hands and turns out his palms, as if to prove he is not carrying anything. ‘We can do the same here.’ His eyes fall upon a little one, six years old, sitting cross-legged at the front of the throng. ‘Perhaps you might like to make the first cut?’

  Jon Heather cannot see the expression on the boy’s face but, from the way he sinks back into the boys around him, he can picture it well enough. Even so, as Judah Reed extends his hand and steps forward, the boy gets to his bare feet. Judah Reed puts an enormous hand in the small of his back and steers him forward.

  They reach the shovel, and the boy is instructed to lift it from its rest. The tool is almost as tall as him, and when he tries to draw it free, like Excalibur from its stone, he fails. Judah Reed whispers a word in his ear and the boy tries again. He rocks back until the shovel comes loose — and then, dangling all of his weight from the handle, he staggers back, the blade spraying clots of hard dust as it works itself free.

  ‘You will always remember this day,’ Judah Reed smiles.

  The boy lifts the shovel and clangs it down. When it hardly breaks the surface he has to try again — and then again after that, and again, each time a wave shooting up the handle and jarring along his arms.

  ‘Stand on it!’ a boy cries out.

  Judah Reed’s eyes lift. ‘Yes,’ he says, his gaze drifting back to the little one. ‘Stand on it. Give it some fire.’

  The boy pushes the shovel as deeply as he can and then leaps on the blade. His weight hardly makes a difference, but he rocks from side to side, working the blade deeper into the crust. When, at last, it is embedded, he must haul back, chipping out clods until a tiny hole has been excavated.

  The boy steps back, dripping with sweat, holding his left arm with his right.

  ‘The first cut!’ Judah Reed beams. ‘Now,’ he says, his hand dancing on the little one’s head. ‘Do it again.’

  After that, they must all join in. Once Judah Reed is satisfied that work is underway, he convenes with the other man in black and sweeps off, deeper into the Mission, to look over some other rag of boys. Soon, the man in black is delivered a jug of fresh water by one of the Mission girls, and a bowl of oranges to peck at during the day. There is a trough of water in which the boys are permitted to dunk their heads, but soon it is thick with sand and not fit for drinking.

  There are picks and shovels, and some boys are set to digging a big square, deep as a little one’s head, into which foundations will be laid. Others are given scythes and books of matches, and duly dispatched into the scrub. It is their job to clear the land of trees and thorn so that more digging might follow. Jon Heather, meanwhile, joins a group of boys collecting up the excavated dirt and shovelling it into wheelbarrows that might then be ferried into another corner of the scrub. Some little ones are tasked with sifting stone from sand, and in the afternoon they will mix it with choking concrete powder from a mountain of big sacks. From these, Jon learns, blocks will be made.

  Not an hour has gone by when he comes out of the scrub with an empty wheelbarrow and stops to catch his breath. Sweat and sand have dribbled into his eyes and he scrunches them tight to blink it away. When he opens them again, a bigger boy is looming near.

  ‘Keep an eye out,’ he says, pushing past Jon and tipping his chin towards a canvas chair set in the shade.

  There, the man in black sits, fingers picking at the peel of an orange as his gaze settles on Jon.

  ‘Thank you,’ whispers Jon.

  Ignoring the rumbling of his tummy, he heaves the barrow back to the excavations. Through the midday heat haze, he peers into the heart of the Mission. There, Judah Reed is standing by the sandstone shacks, drinking from a canteen — but it is not this that catches Jon’s eye. He focuses instead on the walls behind him, the line of the stones, the pitch of the roof, the way the whole thing must have grown up, piece by piece, coated in the sweat of little hands.

  George plods along the length of the sandstone shacks, reaching the edge of the untilled field long after the little ones there have started village muster. On the other side of the field, there sits a big spidery wood, but he cannot look at it for long. There was a different kind of wood surrounding the Home back in Leeds, but both make him feel the same way. His skin crawls. Anything can come out of woodland, and this Australia land has already thrown up too many monsters to want to contemplate any more. And so, with his head tucked down and his hands shoved in the waistband of his short trousers, he barrels up to the dairy steps.

  Inside, there is a mean old man, whose face is dominated by three moustaches — one on top of his lip, and the others growing wild where his eyebrows ought to be — but the man doesn’t even notice as George clambers up the steps. Sitting on a pail, with his fingers tickling the underside of some scraggly goats, there sits a bigger boy. He is thin and wiry, with a chin like one of the heroes out of Peter’s comic books, and when George approaches, he turns around with a broad beam.

  ‘Jack the lad!’ he exclaims. ‘You’re late!’

  George turns an awkward little dance, looking behind him.

  ‘I’m not Jack,’ he says.

  ‘Of course you’re not,’ the bigger boy beams. ‘It’s a name I call lads. Well, go on, pull up a pail! I’ll show you how to get started. It’s a big day, little thing. We can churn up some butter and then … I’m going to show you how to make a string of sausages!’

  A string of sausages does not sound bad, not after the muck George ate this morning.

  ‘Can I have some milk?’

  The bigger boy flicks a look over his shoulder, to where the mean old man is playing with the billy goats in their stalls. ‘Got to be some perks of working in this dairy, don’t there?’ he grins. ‘Just wait until old man McAllister is out the way …’

  This bigger boy does not seem as beastly as the rest — but with bigger boys, just like men in black, you never can tell. George won’t admit it to anybody else, but there was a time, long ago, when he was even frightened of Peter.

  ‘My name’s George.’

  ‘Tommy,’ the bigger boy says, offering up a creamy hand. ‘Now, let’s get going …’

  George’s first attempts to get milk out of the goat result in the goat screaming and kicking out. In the end, the bigger boy has to put his hands over George’s own and show him how to knead and nip gently, so that a squirt comes out and makes a rattle at the bottom of the pail. After a few minutes working like this, George can go it alone. The milk has a funny smell, but that does nothing to dampen his enthusiasm. As he watches the bucket fill, he begins to smile. This, he admits, is actually fun.

  George fills two buckets in the time it takes Tommy Crowe to fill the remaining ten, a procession of goats moving past them and then out into the scrub to graze. Once they are done, George helps Tommy carry the buckets to an outhouse a little deeper into the Mission. Here, some girls take the buckets with shy smiles, and George has to wait outside while Tommy is chattering within. He hears precious little of what they are saying, but it seems to George that it is Tommy Crowe doing all of the talkin
g, the girls just punctuating his stories with occasional bursts of laughter.

  George is peeking around the corner, into the outhouse, when Tommy Crowe says his goodbyes and turns on the spot.

  ‘Come on, little thing. We’ve got to get back to work before one of those men in black starts sniffing round …’

  George stares wide-eyed at the girls pouring their milk into churning pots and does not turn to follow.

  ‘I thought we got to churn up butter,’ he says, wishing he was one of those girls.

  ‘We could have helped if we’d been faster with the milking. We’ll have to buck up next time …’

  George knows what that bigger boy means; it was George being the slowcoach, not Tommy. With his hands clenched in tiny fists, he plods back to the dairy.

  Just outside, that old man McAllister has separated one billy goat from the rest, leading him out of his stall and tethering him to a stake.

  ‘This one?’ says Tommy, approaching the unsuspecting billy.

  Old McAllister hovers above, excavating his ear with a dirty finger. ‘He’ll be stringier than the last, but it’s best he goes now. Most of it’s for salting, so make sure the others know.’

  George can barely interpret this strange conversation, so sits on the edge of a stone trough and watches. When McAllister catches him slumping down, his eyes flare. Tommy Crowe gives George a secret nod; he can, at least, interpret this and quickly gets up. Without knowing it, he has got his short trousers wet, and looks down to see that the water in the trough is a funny shade of pink, with deep black and red silt sitting at its bottom.

  ‘Come on,’ says Tommy, after McAllister has trudged away. ‘I’ll show you how it’s done.’

  It does not dawn on George what Tommy Crowe means, even when they have rolled the goat over. George’s job is to hold him like that while Tommy Crowe disappears inside. Alone with the animal, George pets its head softly and tickles under its chin. The goat doesn’t seem to mind, so George pets it again. He wonders if it might let him give its tummy a quick pat, but as he is separating the legs to sneak his hand in, Tommy reappears, carrying with him a rack of knives and two lengths of rope.