by A. G. Riddle
They pinned a placard with my name on it to my coat and gave me a cardboard box, which hung around my neck. A gas mask lay inside, a grim reminder that this was no field trip. Many kids took them out and put them on and played with them. I was a boy of five, and I must admit that I did too.
Older siblings held their younger brothers’ and sisters’ hands, ensuring they didn’t get separated. My only brother had died two years before from tuberculosis; I would have given anything for him to be holding my hand that morning. I put on a brave face for my mother though. She hugged me so hard I thought my chest would collapse. As the train pulled away, she waved goodbye. She was crying; in fact I didn’t see a single dry eye on that platform.
Eleven years later, C. S. Lewis wrote a novel titled The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which four siblings are evacuated from London to a stately country manor home with a dusty wardrobe that leads to another world. The evacuations weren’t nearly as romantic as Lewis’s tale, but they also weren’t as agonizing as The Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s novel about boys evacuated from London who crash land on a tropical island.
On the whole, everyone in Britain was doing the best they could, and preparing for the worst: war with Germany.
My parents had arranged for me to stay with my mother’s first cousin Edith and her husband, George. It was a few days before they could come around to collect me, and in that time, I got a glimpse of what the children without host families went through. Periodically they were brought out and made to line up while adults marched past.
“I’ll take that one,” a mother said.
“We’ll take the third from the left,” a father called out.
The first time it happened was sort of like not being picked for cricket—it wasn’t the end of the world. But these rounds of selections had a cumulative effect on the children left behind. I felt for them. Would have traded places with them. But there was nothing anyone could do. Most of those who remained were shuffled around, some assigned to the evacuation camps the government had built—in itself an act of great foresight.
Life became routine for a while. I went to school, did my chores as Edith instructed me, just as my mother insisted I should in her letters. Her notes to me arrived every few days. My father wrote less often, and shorter letters, but I was glad to hear from both of them.
In the den, Edith and I listened to the radio each night, hanging on every word of the BBC News report. George was in the Royal Air Force, and she was worried to death about him, though she tried quite hard to hide it.
In May of 1940, Germany launched its offensive to the west. They took the Low Countries first. The Netherlands and Belgium fell quickly, providing the German army a route around the Maginot Line. They broke through in the Ardennes, separating the French and British armies. I knew my father had been deployed, but I didn’t know where. I went cold when I heard that the Third Infantry had been one of the divisions evacuated at Dunkirk.
A letter arrived from my father two weeks later. I cried in my room that night—because he was alive. Somewhere deep inside, I had convinced myself that he was dead, and that I was okay with it.
Four months later, in early September, a year after I left London, the Luftwaffe began their air raids on the city. Starting on September 7th of 1940, they bombed London 56 out of the following 57 days. The attacks were relentless. And deadly. The bombings killed over forty thousand people, injured at least forty thousand more, and destroyed over a million homes. My mother was in one of those homes, and she was one of the forty thousand who lost her life.
I had been so concerned about my father’s safety that her death caught me completely by surprise. I was filled with both hatred and sadness. At only six years old, the emotions overwhelmed me. I worried for my father, and then I tried not to care. But that was a lie I told myself.
On D-Day, the Third Infantry was the first to land at Sword Beach as part of the invasion of Normandy. I feared the worst when I heard that, but a letter arrived from my father three weeks later. Those letters continued to come for six months. I was hopeful. That was my mistake. The news that he had been killed in December destroyed whatever was left of my young heart. I was officially an orphan.
George returned home the following month. He had lost a leg and the better part of an arm, and the physical wounds were only half of his struggle. I helped Edith as best I could, but like me, she was overwhelmed.
I knew what was coming next, and I didn’t blame her.
The orphanage in London was filled with other children who had lost their families in the war and had nowhere else to go. I shared a small room with three other boys. The youngest, Edgar Mayweather, was six. I was the oldest at eleven, and there were two brothers staying with us. Orville Hughes was nine, and his younger brother, Alistair, was seven.
The orphanage was in a run-down hotel on the outskirts of London; it had barely survived the bombings. Our days consisted of school and chores that were done under the threat of bodily punishment. We helped repair the old hotel, too. On the whole, things could have been a lot worse. We were fed, educated, and looked after. The hard work, at least for me, took my mind off what had happened and gave me a sense of purpose. Perhaps the only thing we didn’t have was love.
No matter how much they hid it, every kid in the orphanage was out of sorts. Growing up with tragedy changes a person, trains them to expect still more tragedy around every corner. It’s the mind’s way of protecting you; and it is a very powerful defense. At night, many children cried endlessly in the dark. Some hid under their beds. Many were spooked at every loud sound. I didn’t blame them. It was sort of like being in prison, in a way—and just like in a prison, none of us asked the other orphans questions about what they were in for. We’d seen enough of the war; no one wanted to talk about it.
We all handled it in our own way. Many of the kids fought. They’d fight you for a cross word or even the wrong look. They were mad about life and what had happened, and would take it out on anyone and anything. Though Orville was two years younger than me, he was bigger and as tough as a bucket of nails. I never saw him start a fight, but he ended more than his share. His fists and elbows saved me many broken bones and black eyes. He guarded his younger brother Alistair like the queen’s jewels. Me and Edgar too. Alistair was pretty tough himself, but less eager to fight; he was quiet, always had his nose in a book.
Turnover was high; kids were always being brought in or taken out. We knew some were moved to other orphanages as they opened. Most, however, were placed with families. I got another taste of what I’d seen during the evacuations: parents coming through, inspecting the kids, making their decisions—and then leaving the rest of us to wash up, comb our hair, and put on our best set of clothes for the next audition. Rejection eats at a person like a worm winding its way through an apple: sooner or later it reaches the core, and you become completely rotten.
I never got there, but I saw a lot of kids who did.
After my parents died, I told myself I didn’t care what happened to me. But I did. I didn’t want to grow up in an orphanage, with friends who came and went like ships in the night. I wanted a mother and a father and a home that only we lived in. I wasn’t the only one.
One Sunday afternoon, a group called the Christian Brothers visited the orphanage. They described a better life: work outside in the fields, families ready to take us, a wonderful school in an exciting place called Australia. It sounded a lot better than this place, but I was skeptical. It sounded too good to me. But not to many of the others. Hands went up around the room. And as they did, the kids were called forward. One of those hands was Alistair Hughes. Orville reached for him to put it down, but it was too late; they were already ushering him into the crowd to leave. Orville joined them without a word. He nodded to me as he left.
I learned later that all was not as the Christian Brothers had promised. The program was actually the continuation of similar initiatives in the seventeenth century, when child
ren were shipped to the Virginia colony as migrant labor. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nearly 150,000 children were sent to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Rhodesia. They worked in harsh conditions, but the work was only part of their suffering. From the 1940s until 1967, about 10,000 children were shipped to Western Australia to work in the fields and live in orphanages. Physical and sexual abuse was rampant and only discovered in later years. In 2009, Australia’s prime minister formally apologized to those children who had suffered under the program, for what he called “the absolute tragedy of childhoods lost.”
I, too, was watching my childhood slip away. I had started to grow pessimistic that I would ever find a home when a woman named Sarah Moore began volunteering at the orphanage. She was kind and very smart. She reminded me of my mother. She taught me French, which I picked up quickly, to her delight. Her husband was more stoic, but I thought he liked me too.
One Sunday, the woman in charge of our ward told me to make ready to leave. I was scared to death as I stuffed my meager belongings in the sack they’d given me.
I was overjoyed when Sarah and her husband Robert came into the room and told me I was coming to live with them. Against my will, I cried, but that was okay with them. They simply hugged me and loaded my things into their shiny car and drove away.
I took their last name, but kept my original family surname as my middle name. In school the next year, I couldn’t have been more proud when I signed my first paper: William Kensington Moore.
Peyton stood and moved to the corkboard, scanning it again. Her eyes locked on a worn picture pinned near the floor. She pulled it from the board and studied it. Three children stood there: on the left was a girl, perhaps three years old; in the middle stood a girl of perhaps seven; and on the right was a boy of eleven, with only one arm.
“I know who wrote this,” she said.
Desmond moved to her side and gazed at the picture. “You do?”
She pointed at the youngest girl in the picture. “That’s me. Madison’s in the middle; Andrew on the right. William Kensington Moore is my father.”
Chapter 79
Desmond tried to process Peyton’s words.
“I thought you said your father was dead?”
“I thought he was,” she replied. “Maybe he is. We don’t know when this letter was written.”
She returned to the couch, sat down beside Desmond, and pulled the thick quilt back over her. Outside the stone cottage, the sunrise broke through the fog. She wondered how long Avery would be asleep, how long they had before they’d need to make a decision. And what they’d find in the rest of the pages.
What I remember about the first years after the war was that Britain was broke. We’d won the Second World War, but it had come at a fantastic cost—most of all in lives, but also in pounds and pence. America suddenly and unexpectedly ended the Lend-Lease program that had likely saved us. The Treasury was near bankruptcy. So began the Age of Austerity; it seemed we’d survived the Nazis only to starve to death. And we weren’t the only ones. The entire world was freezing, starving, and still reeling from the greatest conflict in human history. In Britain, rationing and conscription continued. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the worst in recorded history. Coal and railway systems failed, factories closed, and people were very, very cold.
Things turned a little each year. The Americans loaned us 3.75 billion dollars at a low interest rate in July of 1946. The Marshall Plan launched in 1948, further bolstering our financial situation.
Everyone felt that the next war was right around the corner. I did too. It was hard not to. But the world was doing everything it could to stop it—and to get ready. The United Nations was formed in 1945, NATO in ’49. Britain began giving its colonies independence: Jordan in ’46, India and Pakistan in ’47, Israel, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka in ’48. Even more nations gained independence from the UK during the fifties and sixties: Sudan, Ghana, Malaysia, Nigeria, Kuwait, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Jamaica, Uganda, and Kenya.
The country was back on its feet by 1950, but all eyes were now on the Soviet Union and the expanding Cold War. The UK joined the US in the Korean War that year, fighting the Chinese and the Soviet Union in what we all believed was a dress rehearsal for the next global war. It ended in a stalemate, and the country was split in two.
The US and Russia began mass-producing nuclear weapons, amassing thousands—enough to alter the Earth permanently, making it uninhabitable. Other nations developed their own nuclear weapons: the UK, France, Israel, India, China, and Pakistan.
Despite the whole world going crazy, life settled down for me at home. My teenage years were a sharp contrast to the turbulent first twelve years of my life. Mother and Father, as I had come to refer to Sarah and Robert, were loving to me, fair but firm, and never were there two parents who cared for a child more. They didn’t dote on me, but they gave me every scrap of spare time and energy they had. Mother was adamant about my keeping up with chores and my schoolwork. Father always had a project he wanted us to do—usually science-related. I knew early on that he imagined me following in his footsteps. To him, science was the noblest endeavor, and physics towered above all other sciences.
But like every child becoming an adult, I learned the limits of my abilities. Where science and math were concerned, those boundaries didn’t extend nearly far enough. I would never be a great scientist, or even a bad one. My mind just wasn’t wired that way. I did excel at languages, however. Perhaps it was a gift from my biological mother. Picking up a foreign tongue was a piece of cake for me. And I loved history—military history in particular. I read everything I could about the Third Infantry, the division in which my biological father had served and died. I devoured histories of Germany and the British Empire.
University came and went, and my only notable accomplishments occurred in the boxing ring. I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. Like so many others with the same problem, I joined the army. It seemed a noble pursuit and a good place to get my bearings and maybe see a little of the world.
It was the right decision. In the army I learned leadership and how to manage people. University had stuffed my head full of facts and knowledge and had taught me how to think and solve problems. But I had only ever managed myself. The army was a boon to me in that respect. It also gave me perhaps the greatest gift of my entire life: it revealed who I was. It tested me in ways school never had. And I found I was at my best during a crisis. In clutch situations, when I had to make fast decisions, I never faltered. And I lived for those moments, just as I had looked forward to the boxing ring. But more so—for in real life, there was no referee to pull you apart, no bell to ring.
To this day I believe a person’s ideal first job is the one that reveals the most about them. Knowing who I was helped me avoid a lot of dead ends in life. A lot of opportunities look good, but I’ve found that sometimes success and happiness are about knowing when to say no.
I avoided routine. I liked moving around, doing something different every day. Maybe it was because of how I grew up during the war, being shuffled around, but it became my way of life. I moved from post to post, always the first to volunteer for a transfer. I never wanted my feet to go to sleep.
Just before my first tour of duty ended, a man came to see me. He asked if I was interested in a new type of opportunity, a way to serve Her Majesty’s government in a far greater capacity than I currently was. They had me with the patriotic pitch. The job interview was a complex, bizarre process that would fill a book. I imagine it was a little different for each of us who joined in those days. They vetted me, tested me some more, then began my real training. A year later, in 1959, I became an employee of the Gibraltar Trading Company.
On the surface, I was an antiques dealer. My job entailed a lot of travel, exchanging large sums of money with foreigners and foreign governments, recovering relics lost in the war. But in truth, I was an agent for Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, as it was predo
minantly known then. I had never been so filled with purpose. Or happier.
My mother had been worried about me when I joined the army. My position with Gibraltar Trading soothed her nerves considerably. My father’s reaction was quite unexpected: a mixture of amusement and appreciation. He seemed to know exactly what I was up to. And our relationship actually improved. We began to have long conversations—philosophical in nature. I discovered a whole new side of him. In short, he opened up to me, taking an interest in me as he never had before—or at least, not since before university, when it became clear that I was never going to be a scientist. I knew that had disappointed him, though he never voiced it and never showed it. Like all parents, he just wanted me to value the things he valued. In some way, he wanted me to carry on his work.
When I visited home from my trips, I brought small trinkets, which my mother displayed in the parlor and my father placed on shelves in his study. He asked me about the trips with an amused look on his face, as if he knew what had truly taken place.
On Easter weekend in 1965, I learned just how much he knew.
I sat in his study, completely unprepared for what he was about to tell me.
“I’d like you to come with me to Hong Kong next week.”
“Can’t. I have a meeting with a new client in Warsaw.”
He stood, walked to a shelf to the left of his desk, and moved a few items out of the way. He pushed the shelf’s back panel; it clicked and sprang open, revealing a small safe, which he opened. He drew out a picture and handed it to me.
“Twenty years ago, I helped create that device.”
