They think they’ve told Charlie as well — but I haven’t let them.
For five years now, Charlie has written down every little thing he can remember about his life in Leeds. George produces a bundle of notebooks, some in his own hand, some in the trembling script of the boy sleeping upstairs. You can trust what is written in the first books, George says. Later, come interpretations and imaginings — but there are seeds of truth in those memories as well, so they are not to be altogether discounted. It amounts, George says, to a record of a boy’s beginnings.
‘There was enough in it,’ George says, ‘that, a year ago, I found his mother. I’m friends with that old policeman, and he did some nosing around for me. She’s still in Leeds. She’s one of those who’ll never leave.’
Jon flicks through the pages: we went to the moor and sat in the sun; there was a garden with a tree called a monkey puzzle.
‘Jon, my mother didn’t know about Australia — but she signed the waivers, trusted the Children’s Crusade to do what was best for me. If she told me she was coming back to get me, she never told that to Judah Reed and the rest. They knew the deal from the start.’
For a second, Jon is a little boy again, looking at his own mother’s signature in Judah Reed’s hand.
In the end, it is an encouraging look from Pete that drives George on. ‘We were given to the Children’s Crusade, Jon. For better or worse. But Charlie was taken.’
‘When they knew where she lived,’ Pete interjects, ‘George helped Charlie write to her. Posted his letter in secret.’
‘But we wrote to our mothers too …’ Jon remembers.
George lifts a finger to excuse himself and returns to the farmhouse, emerging moments later with a cardboard suitcase, from which he produces an envelope. On the front, the writing is unmistakably Jon Heather’s: bigger and less precise, but still his. It is a strange comfort to think that something as simple as his handwriting might have stayed the same.
He takes it in a quivering hand and removes the paper folded inside:
I’ll be your best boy, if only you come and take me back. I’ll get you anything you want — and, mother, if I haven’t got it, why, I’ll go for and get it.
I am your son who loves you,
Jon (Heather)
Jon crams it back in the envelope, unable to read anymore.
‘They have them filed away in big boxes in the back of the Mission house,’ says George. ‘My own too. I remember,’ he blanches, embarrassed, ‘you let me write to your mother too.’
To his shame, Jon does not remember. The cabinets of your mind are like Charlie’s memobooks, he thinks: perhaps some of it is genuine, but the rest is distorted. The Jon Heather of fifteen years ago — he is only an imaginary little boy. It is no wonder you could not preserve him with strictures and rules.
‘Did his mother write back?’ he asks.
George nods. ‘She’d been writing for years, Jon. First to the Home in Chapeltown — then to the Mission out here. Charlie was supposed to be at the Home for six months. His mother was offered a job at an estate outside Edinburgh, the sort of money she couldn’t turn down, not without a penny to live on back in Leeds. So she trusted the Children’s Crusade to look after him while she was gone. Only, when she came back …’
‘The Home was empty.’
‘It took another six months, but the Crusade told her, in the end, where he was — and where he was going to stay.’
Jon feels Pete and George looking at him. ‘What now?’ he asks.
‘The Children’s Crusade used to believe in its mission,’ George begins. ‘I’ve seen all the archives, the boys abandoned and living wild in Leeds and Liverpool and London … They really did want to help. But now …’
It is as if, George says, the object and the means of the Children’s Crusade, once so deeply entwined, have become inverted without anybody noticing. Once it was to rescue these boys and send them to Australia; then, it became: we need to send boys to Australia, so we must find some boys to rescue.
‘Now they round up boys like Charlie. They spring nets and dig pits to catch them.’ He pauses. ‘Charlie’s mother is waiting for him. But I can’t send an eleven-year-old boy, no matter how far he’s come already, across the world on his own.’
Jon Heather rocks back. ‘You’re not going?’
‘You are,’ breathes George.
Thoughts stampede through Jon’s mind. ‘I don’t have the money,’ he says. ‘I almost did, but they …’
Pete steps forward, a gentle shoulder barge. ‘You’ve got more than you think, Jon Heather.’ He puts an arm around him, guides him along the fence, where the fields of Black Chaparral sleep under southern stars. ‘Five years ago, you upped and left. You wouldn’t come with us, you miserable bastard, but you did leave us something.’
‘Dog,’ mutters Jon.
‘The ute,’ Pete corrects. ‘Though Dog has his uses too.’ The ute sits in the yard, battered and rusty, but still running strong. ‘It was another year before we could buy a second ute. All that year, we rode that old thing from one end of the farm to the other, fixing fences and digging ditches and taking our eggs off to flog to whoever would have them. We couldn’t have done a thing without that ute. I reckon that’s about enough of an investment that you own a third of this place.’
Jon pushes himself away. ‘Peter, I couldn’t …’
‘It’s too late, Jon. Me and Cormac Tate already bought you out. Gave you a terrible price, so you wouldn’t feel too guilty. About the price of one flight home. We’ve bought Dog off you too, so you have a bit to tide yourself over until you find work.’
For the longest time, Jon does not breathe a word.
‘Dog isn’t worth nothing,’ he finally says.
‘Then you’ve robbed us blind.’
The three men stand at a distance to each other, but slowly, in the silence, they shuffle back together: first, Pete; then the barrel-shape of George; then Jon, scrawny and shaggy and still looking like a street urchin. Up against the fence, they make a curious portrait. An aged yellow snout appears between them, completing the vision.
‘I couldn’t go until they’ll sign me off. I’m meant to check in, every month …’
‘Well, Jon,’ George says. ‘It’s not as if you’d ever be coming back, is it?’
XVIII
A boy sails to Australia, but a man flies home.
On the tenth day of September, in the year of 1965, Jon Heather sets foot on English soil for the first time since he was a ten-year-old boy. It is a nondescript stretch of tarmac in an airport outside London, a land as alien to him as Australia, but all the same he knows, in his head, he is home. Charlie hurries into the terminal building, but Jon Heather takes every step carefully, considering each one.
Neither one of them has baggage to pick up, so they are the first through the gates and out, into England. They catch a guttering train, through underground tunnels, to King’s Cross station and spend the night on the concourse there. Beggars do not ask them for money, for they look more wretched and out of place than any.
In the morning, they board a train going north. In the carriage, they sit opposite each other. Jon has brought stones, but it is not the perfect game for a moving carriage — and, besides, both would rather gape out of the window, watching England rushing past.
When the sun is out, parts of the land can look exactly like Australia: fields of grain, tracks running off in between. It is one of the great disappointments of Jon’s life. Yet, only an hour into their journey, the land has changed. Hills have risen and forests crept down to the tracks. They rattle through towns where redbrick terraces crowd together, and factories belch out smoke.
Jon puts down Charlie’s memobooks and kneads his hands. He feels things firing inside him, each sparking the next, like a trail of dominoes toppling over. Once, his thoughts were slow and long, like a desert road; now, every thought erupts, vivid and violent — and, for a moment, he is out of his body, hurtling
down the tracks, reaching home long before the train has even pulled into the station.
They arrive in Leeds before noon. It is ridiculous that England could be so small. Once, Jon remembers, there were giants here. They had a causeway that took them over the sea, and they could cross England in three simple strides.
It is Charlie who leads Jon from the platform. He remembers this station well, for he has written of it in his memobook: at Leeds station, there is a stand to buy a newspaper and another to buy sweets. It is raining, but the rain feels different. It is cold and it does not hang in the air.
Jon recognizes nothing, but that does not shock or sadden him, for he has never seen this part of the city. The road sweeps away through an empty square, with squat towers on one side and a grand hall, with broad white steps and statues of lions, on the other. Taxicabs are lined up and their drivers, Asian men, stand idly beneath the overhang of a bus shelter.
An old man approaches. He wears a long greatcoat and wellington boots. ‘Jon Heather?’ he begins.
Jon nods, guardedly.
‘I believe we have a mutual friend, Mr Heather. George Stone.’
‘You’re Captain Matthews?’
The old man nods. ‘You’ve come a long way, boys. Let’s get out of this rain.’ He turns his eyes to the greyness creeping sullenly over the city roofs. ‘Come on, my car’s round back.’
Captain Matthews’ car is a Mini, with just enough space for Jon and Charlie to cram in the back. In scant minutes, they leave the city centre behind, cresting a motorway bridge with the city colleges hunched on either side. Leeds, Jon decides, is like England in miniature: its vastness compressed into an island of land smaller than Black Chaparral.
A sprawling heathland rises on their left, with trees that would dwarf the greatest heights of the shadow wood. They crawl through a labyrinth of narrow roads and houses without yards, and come to a stop outside a run of the terrace where the houses are newer, spread out with gardens in between. Captain Matthews parks the Mini and steps out onto the kerb. Though Jon follows, Charlie remains in the car.
Jon leans back in the window. ‘Do you remember?’ he asks.
Charlie shakes his head.
‘Charlie’s family used to live in a much older run, up by the old cricket ground,’ the captain explains. ‘They moved some years ago.’
Jon coaxes Charlie out of the car, but he will not go far. At last, Captain Matthews opens the garden gate and approaches the door.
When the door opens, Captain Matthews obscures the woman on the step — but, when he shuffles aside, they can both see her: Charlie’s mother, wrapped in a cardigan, taking the faltering steps of a baby deer. Charlie has his chin down, and she calls his name four times, her voice rising, before he dares look up.
At his side, Jon trembles just as violently. He has seen this before. Then, it was fathers coming back from war to children they had never met. Now, it is the child who must return to a parent they barely know. Something tells Jon to pick Charlie up, wrap his arms around him, cradle him until they reach the end of the street, the end of the town, the edge of the city. There might be a cave they can live in together, never speaking to another soul — a lost boy and a lost man.
But Charlie’s mother takes his hand and together they walk up the steps. At the door, Charlie strains not to go through. He cranes a look back at Jon Heather, and then he is gone.
Jon spends that night with Captain Matthews. He is recently widowed and the house betrays a man of few needs and a weight of memories. He has a son and grandchildren — and, though their photographs line the wall, there is only one of his wife: somewhere in the Victorian quarter of town, standing with her husband, only two years gone.
In the morning, Jon has little idea what he should do. While Captain Matthews fusses with breakfast, he takes out an envelope from the folds of his jacket. Peter was given one like this from Cormac Tate — but this particular envelope bears George’s writing on the front:
19 Mayville Place, Burley
Jon is careful to fold it precisely as he puts it away, as if destroying the address might eliminate the people who live there. With the letter hidden, he takes breakfast with Captain Matthews, staying long after to help the old man potter around the garden.
For some reason, he does not want to go out into the city.
The Captain would let Jon stay for as long as he wished, but on the next day he answers an advert in the local gazette and takes a bedsit off the Clarendon Road, hidden behind the University. Many students mill around here, and he likes the idea that he might have been one of them, if things had been different.
His landlord is a weasely man from outside Leeds, and he rents most of the rooms to immigrant men who work for the city. Most of them, he tells Jon, are Pakistani: he might do well to double-lock his door at night. There is a meter on the wall for electricity, and a handful of tokens stacked on the sill. Jon nods his thanks — and is, at last, left alone.
He has had his own room before, but only in prison. This cell is just as bare. He looks around, thrilling at flaking plaster walls and the cockroach in the corner. For the first time ever, he has a bookshelf on which he might line up his books — but those trinkets that he once carried around with him have long since disappeared. Once he has found work, he will take a trip into town and find a second-hand shop: he will read science fiction and then he will read classics. That, he decides, is the way things would have gone.
He takes the envelope from George and plants it on the mantelpiece above a fireplace that has long since been bricked up. When you want a life, you need to know where to start. There are three things a grown man needs: a roof over his head; a day of honest work; and a wife. One foot in front of the other; that is how you grow up.
There are adverts for work in the local gazette. Jon answers each of them, and by the end of the week he has found work unloading pallets at a warehouse along the canal. It is a long walk from where he lives, but it lets him take in the city. As a boy, he knew none of these roads — but as a man he would have known them all. He attacks the problem systematically, allowing himself an extra hour each morning so that he can follow detours and investigate dead-ends, slowly filling in the blanks of a knowledge that should have been his.
At the weekends, he drinks with the boys from work. He has little he can talk to them about — he will not tell them about Australia — but, in any case, they talk about little other than their working week. Men from one side of the world to the other, Jon learns, all hate their foremen. On this, he bitches like the best of them. He cannot hold his beer and the men mock him for it — so he takes to buying a case each Wednesday night and sinking it in his bedsit alone, certain that, before two months are out, he will have caught up with his workmates and nobody will question, ever again, that he is only just learning how to drink.
Some of the boys have girls. The girls change, week on week, and it occurs to Jon: you thought too much about Megan; if you were a real man, not that fake human being you became in Australia, you would be able to take a girl, drop a girl, and take another one without caring. You could come down to a club like this and tell your mates and they would laugh, and then it would start over again.
He has a roof over his head, he has work, and now he needs a woman.
There is a bar he has heard of, in the basement of a shopping centre, where students sometimes go to dance. He goes there each evening for a week, decides that Friday evenings are the best, and makes a point of making it a regular haunt. The third girl he talks to agrees to go to the pictures with him.
Her name is Emma, or Emily, or something like that. He makes arrangements to meet her at a bus stop close to the shopping centre on a Friday night, and presents her with a garland of flowers he has picked up from a newsagent’s further down the row. She squints at him curiously and accepts the flowers, but hardly moves when he goes to lock his arm with hers. Instead, a foot apart, they wander through the cold of the gathering night.
He ha
s discovered a picture-house, nestled in the warren of buildings underneath the parkland close to where he lives. There are three films showing. He tries to steer her towards the Western, thinking of the comics a boy named Peter once had, but she wants to go to something starring a man named Elvis Presley. He buys her pieces of hard rock candy and spends the next five minutes turning one over in his mouth, eager to spit it out.
In the cinema, the rows are filling up. Here, there are no places for the Malays and aborigines, though there are three Asian men sitting together up high. Jon is about to sit behind them, but Emma shoots him a look and wanders into the centre rows.
‘Is it for them?’ Jon asks.
Emma drops into her seat, looking up with an inscrutable gaze. ‘What?’
‘I didn’t know there were different seats for different people.’
Emma says nothing, coldly turning to her box of rock candy instead. A moment later, she offers up the box. Jon can still feel the last piece in his teeth but takes one nevertheless. It is another five minutes before he is able to speak. By now, the ice-cream seller has gone and the projector has begun to whirr.
‘You go to that place often then?’
She looks at him sideways.
‘That place I found you.’
‘I suppose,’ she shrugs. ‘I have a friend.’
‘A friend?’
‘She likes it there.’
‘Do you like it there?’
‘I suppose.’
It is still some time before the film will begin, so he fills the silence by asking her questions about her life. He has a list. He learns that she comes from a place called Guiseley, a place as foreign as any but only a few miles outside of Leeds. She is studying to be a secretary. She knows short-hand and typing and thinks her boss is contemptible. With this, at least, Jon can join in.
Little Exiles Page 37