The search to avoid attention extends to her choice of three-ring binders, book covers, barrettes, and jumpers. What she cannot afford she constructs facsimiles of—substitute cloth voodoo, clay expiatory figures. She forsakes popularity, a place in the opaque pecking order she cannot even appraise. Joy apes the Angelino offspring only to safeguard her residency permit, that fluke stay of extradition, almost certainly a mistake that will any moment be detected and rescinded.
The tapeworm knowledges she wolfs down only leave her more emaciated. Her virtuoso fiascoes of oral-report earnestness give the game away. Concealed, they fluoresce under pressure. She covers for a parent back at the rented room, a father who repeats, nightly, in sheer terror, the immigrant litany, succeed, adapt, evade. The girl’s show of cheer is so transparent that when she finally appears one day at recess in front of the teacher’s desk saying, “I hurt,” teacher herself bursts into tears. Oh God, child, I know; it kills just to look at you.
But Joy, as always, is something more literal. She points to a spot above her right ankle. Did you twist it? The girl shakes her head gravely. She is sent to the nurse, takes a spot in a line of metal chairs behind the usual strep throats and malingerers. Nurse detects evident swelling. A little discoloration, maybe. In her notes, nurse accuses the child, for obscure cross-cultural reasons, of trying to cover up a team-sport injury. As has become customary, she also misspells the child’s last name.
When the sprain fails to heal over the following week, nurse grows furious. She grills the perverse patient: What aren’t you telling me? She palpates the reticent swelling again, brusquely but by no means roughly. During this routine handling, Joy slips unconscious from accumulated torment. Passes out in preference to crying.
The sense of emergency begins to settle in. Nurse finds no phone number in the girl’s file where her parents might be reached. A father exists, apparently, but where in the hellish human miasma he might be found is anyone’s guess. A runner sent to the girl’s reported address finds the building uninhabited, uninhabitable, judging from the husk. The girl is “medically indigent,” as the catch phrase has it. Another underage Medi/cal gal.
The public institutions transfer her from one to the other, bucket brigade style. At the charity hospital, a roughriding ER paramedic applies the stopgap, probing just enough to cover his own ass before routing the girl to the pediatric attending, who is, as always, tied up. One of the service’s surgical residents performs the biopsy. Sinking the shaft, he can see nothing beyond the abnormalities of his own uncensored imagination—a Rorschach of tissue turning gradually into soft sandwich spread powdered with Parmesan. The path report comes back stamped “Insufficient Tissue Sample.” Don’t be stingy, dahlinks. Give us enough to play with, sufficient decent slides to make the necessary stains.
During this whole time, the child’s father has yet to turn up. Although voiced only a notch above inaudible, the girl clearly has enough verbal ingenuity to answer the complete history and physical. But when the work-up doubles back on the identity of parent or legal guardian, the girl only shrugs. She is protecting him, by express prior command. The admissions people have seen this before. Dad’s another illegal, or maybe a legitimate resident so bewildered by Immigration’s cross-interrogating triplicate that he goes fugitive, without the first notion of his legal standing and too frightened to find out on the fly.
But the hospital can do nothing without mature consent. The impasse is resolved only after the pediatric nurse on night duty literally stumbles over the man. Two A.M., and she has gone into the ward to refresh in relative leisure a baby-drip neglected earlier this harried evening. On her way past Joy’s bed, she trips headlong over an adult sleeping on an improvised pallet by the cot’s baseboard.
The man is wearing a cheap cotton short-sleeve and black pants so loose he has tied them up in front like a sarong. He scrambles awake. A flushed animal, he wavers, torn between surrendering and abandoning his daughter in escape. The moment’s hesitation gives the nurse time to summon a massive night-shift orderly who missed his calling as a strip club bouncer. They corner the man, who seems unable to understand their attempts at calming patter.
Soon, the entire ward wakes. Kid Circus spontaneously erupts. Doped, in traction, terminally ill, the imps remain capable of thrilling to a fracas. Sick juveniles aid and abet, to the best of their vitiated abilities, the breakdown of law and order. Staff must resort to riot suppression, the kiddie water cannons.
Questions commence with the return to normal. How did father and daughter find one another with no messages passed between them? They didn’t: the only possible answer. How could a full-grown man slip past the whole medical establishment, unobserved? He couldn’t, obviously. Yet there is his makeshift pallet, right by her bedside.
Joy, terrified, serves as interpreter for her even more frightened father. The admin nurse in charge says, “Tell him to calm down. We’re not the police. No one will hear anything about him. We just need his cooperation, nothing more.” She considers adding: Tell him you might die unless he gives us his signature.
Negotiations are awkward and drawn out. The man proclaims his innocence. He several times launches into the story of his escape from home, carefully illustrating the persecutions that macerated his family. He lays out their mine-strewn path to the sea. He recites a complex, speculative narrative about what happened to various of his fellow sailors once the craft touched land, their fates, grander or more hideous, enfranchising his.
The hospital objects at every turn: We don’t care. We don’t need to know. We just want to save your daughter. Both sides have trouble hearing the demure, soft-voiced, simultaneous translator losing strength between them.
Slowly the required papers get hashed through. A staffer reads the legalese and prepares a delicate paraphrase for the twelve-year-old. She in turn constructs a valley dialect version for her father: You agree not to ask them for lots of money if they should make a mistake and something bad happen to me. The old man then launches into an account about a man on the boat who wasn’t even a political refugee being given to a rich family up north where all he has to do is skim their pool every morning and douse it with chemicals twice a week. The girl must then translate this story to the objecting staff, silently succumbing to a shame more private and roseate than any bone disease.
The whole transaction is bathed in the surreal sepia of two in the morning. When the signing at last takes place, even that must be mediated. The man inscribes his name in the specified place, but in a Devanagari-derived script that does no one any good whatsoever. The night shift has no idea if the signature is sufficient. They know only that they need something from the fugitive before he bolts and vanishes again.
They ask him for a Roman transliteration. Joy must again supply it, reading, sounding, thinking, converting, moistening the ballpoint pensively on her tongue, writing in her bulging, balloon, block printing (she has not yet mastered cursive) WISAT STEPANEEVONG MAWKHAN. Emergency words that will remain behind, carved in this bark, when all this room’s transients have moved on, traceless, into the interior.
By what would have been elevenses in another life, the evacuation had run mad. Children thickened alleys into lanes, lanes into streets, streets into high circuses. Evacuee bands swerved across the city, schooling like shoals over lost galleons’ hulks. Squadrons swarmed the roundabouts, mobbed junctions, and lined the embankments, throttling thoroughfares in cinematic crocodile lines, past all authorities’ ability to administer.
The city was now an orderly anarchy, urgently well mannered, tamed by emergency. Theatre, Chriswick had thought, stumbling out to take his part in the overcast September light. The gross, otherworldly theatre of history’s gymkhana.
It was as if some world mother had climbed into the lantern of St. Paul’s and blown an enormous whistle three times—the signal for home before dark. Only, the motion triggered in delinquent children wasn’t homewards now, but out, flung wide, scattering all school-agers ont
o the sleepy hinterland.
Nothing in the city’s two written millennia could match this. The occasional plague, even great fires seemed slack in comparison. Chriswick and his band of assignees, paralyzed on the school steps, watched the tide of London under-twelvers recede before their eyes. Chriswick could not even manage a head count of his own. All Southwark would be emptied by nightfall.
Fifteen years in planning, and the ARP scheme’s Friday-morning live run had already pitched the nation into the chaos it meant to prevent. Air Raid Preparedness: within hours, it seemed a cruel joke. Who prepared them for the preparations? No sirens or screaming. No final showdown alarms aside from the gauntlet of Southwark mums sobbing along the escape routes. All the advance warning they had received was headmaster calling assembly and announcing, “Get a move on, lads. You girls too. We’re off, then. Do Prince Edward’s proud.” A picnic on the parade ground of apocalypse.
Chriswick’s form sent up a great cheer at headmaster’s announcement. Another lark, like the three rehearsal shams they’d had at the end of summer. Anything to escape lessons. The poor wretches hadn’t a clue in creation to what lay in wait for them. Not to say that the masters had any more notion; Chriswick himself, in The Palmer’s just a dozen months before, had drained an ale at the news of that spineless wonder waving his little scrap of paper around out on the tarmac. The whole local had sent up a pitiful, liquid huzzah of deliverance from evil.
This morning, deliverance disappeared as quickly as the state ration of Cadbury’s. Somehow, the typists had managed to produce a label for each child. More miraculously, staff succeeded in getting the right labels pinned to more or less the right human parcels. Then the haversacks, the carrier bags, the personal bundles, and of course the cardboard boxes promising protection against mass chemical death. Chriswick and the other escorting officers donned their humiliating white armbands and away they went, behind a bedsheet banner as if to the bloody Baden-Powell family reunion.
They struck off, although Chriswick hadn’t any more idea where they were headed than those idiots on the ARP subcommittee. It had taken the combined intellects of the War Office, Ministry of Health, CID, and—added in a moment of patronizing weakness—the chief inspector of schools to toss off the plan for evacuating four million tinies from the nation’s principal cities in seventy-two hours. Unfortunately, no one in the chain of command had thought to inform Prince Edward’s, Chriswick’s battalion, just how they were to join ranks with that four million.
Chriswick marshalled his contingent on the south playing fields, awaiting word. None coming, he skirted back out among the departing groups and cornered a colleague. “Hunter, where exactly are we headed?”
The swine only shrugged and replied in his best George Sanders, “Why, into the valley of Death, old man.”
Returning to his group, Chriswick surprised a dozen boys in the act of putting on their masks, making explosions, and dying noisily. The masks were silly nuisances. How any child could stand the rubbery taste was beyond Chriswick. He’d heard that some up-and-comer at the Air Ministry had put into production bright blue-and-red masks with big Mickey ears—respirators for the two-to-fives in the final struggle against the international fascist subversion of world order.
Chriswick had not asked for this. Teaching had once promised reasonable working hours and a brilliant summer vacation for life. But Chriswick had barely commenced caning his first class for butchering their recitations when the government called him up for the Territorial. And on the very day that he went in to serve notice, school sprung this on him: first shepherd several dozen of London’s destitute to imaginary safe havens in green fields far away.
He collected his young and fell in behind the moving masses. The children crocodiled, two by two, as if born to the formation. But despite their exemplary Sunday School marching, his group made no headway through the swells of schoolchild files. Another white armband motioned Chriswick toward a red double-decker at kerbside. He fed the children into the bus, recoiling from the conductor’s “You’ve got their fares, duck?” before placing it as a joke.
In rapid consultation, he and the driver settled on London Bridge Station. The ten-minute ride took three times that. The station was so overrun by evacuees that the bus could get no closer than several blocks away. Chriswick had the presence of mind to leave the children on board and run in himself, to determine the extent of the station’s insanity. He milled about in the mob for minutes before locating the makeshift routing table. A foreheadless gentleman skimmed his lists, clicking his dental plate. “That’ll be Waterloo for you, sir.”
No use even groaning. The whole country had been cut adrift on improvisation. It could have been worse, in any case. Could have been Victoria or ever-weeping Paddington. When he got back to the bus, half the tinned bully beef and potted pears had been downed, and several boys had been sick all over the tartan seats. The furious driver refused to take them any further than back to the school. “Can’t be messing about with you all day, guv. I’ve got a city to save.” Good old London Transport; failed to recognize the city even when it heaved all over its upholstery.
Back at Prince Edward’s, Chriswick’s company rejoined a dozen other rerouted groups trying to get their bearings. To make it difficult for the enemy to hit them from the air, the movements of the evacuation were being kept top secret, even from the organizers. London had become a gargantuan thimblerig, a living shell game. The logistics of shuttling each battalion to its safe destination degenerated into a nightmare Königsberg bridge problem, a problem Chriswick devoutly hoped the RAF would shortly simplify.
The children were growing restive and the morning had not yet reached its worst. No more public transportation seemed forthcoming, so there was nothing for it but to walk. A good hike would at least take something out of the more rambunctious ones. Chriswick opted for Union Street and the Cut. But the way was a disaster. Crossing Blackfriars alone required minor divine intervention.
After an hour on foot, many of the children prayed for a direct hit to put them out of their misery. Almost to the station, they ran across Jansen’s group. The sports master was turning the whole incident into a paramilitary exercise. He had his band calling out in drill time, “Are we disenchanted? Not our Prince Edward’s! Are we dispirited? Never Prince Edward’s School!” On the shout of one, the whole file made a right face. On two, the block-long, two-deep ranks dashed across the street. On three, a left turn restored them to columns. The old tune was right: Britons never never never shall be slaves.
Chriswick had been a fool for thinking things would never come to this. The Bank of England, the BBC—they’d run off to the countryside months back. The other week, he’d heard that the National Gallery was scouting about Wales for idle mine shafts in which to stash The Fighting Téméraire. Chriswick’s letter box alone should have been sufficient to convince anyone. Wednesday last he’d received a pamphlet with the racy title Masking Your Windows. And here they were, his own form, scrambling to evade the fate that until that morning had seemed confined to fairylands like China and Spain. A quarter of visible England took to the streets and turned evidence that we happy few would never outlive this day, nor come safe home.
At Waterloo, ten thousand children seethed about in the waiting chambers and spilled onto the platforms. Mad shouting, panicked tears, bowel and urinary crises laced the main hall. Children were everywhere, laden with prized possessions. They carried school-stenciled portable potties, engaged in last-ditch knucklebones or marbles, and worked out spot wartime exchange rates between Blue and Green Fairy Books. Chriswick watched as two little girls, no more than six, went about hand-in-hand with chilling composure asking anyone who would listen for help locating the foundlings’ group from Samaritan House.
His charges, barely civilised on the best of days, began making elaborate barrow-dances. It seemed best to get them to the trains and let the War Office come try to dislodge them if they were in the wrong place. Ask questions later
: the great lesson of historically awakened adulthood needed only this epochal evacuation to at last become self-evident.
The way to the platforms was a study in crowd madness. Another foreheadless fellow with clipboard snagged his group before they could board. “Bit tardy, aren’t we? You were supposed to be here hours ago.”
“Yes, well, the town’s not quite itself today.”
“Listen, you. I’m responsible for seeing fifteen thousand children onto thirty trains, each with twenty carriages unloading at over a hundred villages. Don’t come snivelling to me.”
“Oh, shove off.”
“Right. Just so long’s we understand one another. You’ll be on Platform Twelve, Carriage F.” One supposed this exchange would be remembered fondly years from now, a nation pulling together in dark times.
Passing through the throng to change platforms, Chriswick heard an announcement over the Tannoy. All men with strange accents asking for directions were to be beaten senseless. A notice board on Platform Twelve verified that the waiting train was theirs. But neither platform nor notice disclosed anything about destination.
The sight of a virgin car fresh for despoiling should have revived his group’s flagging spirit of adventure. But the children suddenly began to cry. It finally dawned on them that the clothes redeemed from the pawnshop, the ruinous knickerbocker glory of the night before, were certain indications of the end.
The train pulled out. In every third garden abutting the line, people were sinking corrugated-steel air raid shelters. Chriswick made a half-hearted effort to patrol the carriage. In front, the girls shouted endless choruses of “Ten Green Bottles” at the top of their working-class lungs. In back, the lads took turns peeing out the windows and squealing, “Watch out! You’ll get your willie cut off!” He did not bother reprimanding.
Clearing the city must have lasted several lifetimes for the children, even for those who had never been on a train in their lives. Outside Dartford, an evacuation volunteer finally came through with instructions. “You’ll be getting off at Canterbury.”
Operation Wandering Soul Page 5
