Little Exiles

The older man moves forward with a cane in one hand, the other walking behind. Jon cannot be certain, but then the face appears in profile: it is the sun-tanned man. He reaches out to bring the old man a seat, passing the fireguard as he does so. Jon stifles a splutter; he has dislodged soot, and it billows around him.

‘It will be the last season you see me,’ the old man begins.

‘Father …’

The old man raises a hand only halfway. ‘I will not last another winter. An old man knows when his time has come.’ He pauses. ‘I am proud,’ he whispers, ‘to have seen it this far.’

They talk of all manner of things: the wars that have risen and fallen; the desperate families who have slipped through the cracks between the new world and the old. The old man remembers how it was the last time there was war, the great plagues that came afterwards like some punishment from on high. And now, he says, that hour has come again. A war might have ended, but the world has to limp lamely on. Across the country, the Homes of the Children’s Crusade swell – and throughout Britain’s once great Empire, the fields cry out for new hands.

‘Father,’ the sun-tanned man begins, glaring through the window at the endless white. ‘What will happen once you are gone?’

‘Why, the world will carry on turning.’

Something howls in the chimney, and instinctively Jon squirms. As he shifts, soot billows out of some depression and blots out everything else. His body convulses. He kicks out to brace himself against cold stone, but he cannot quite conquer the cough in his chest. When he splutters, his whole body pitches. The fireguard rattles in the hearth.

The voices stop. Jon gulps for air and slowly calms down – but there is no other nook in which to hide. He listens for the footfalls, sees the legs as they approach the fine mesh. He shrinks as the guard is lifted. The sun-tanned man crouches – and suddenly they are face to face.

‘Come out here, little thing.’

The man reaches out his hand. For a second, he holds the pose. Then, as if unable to refuse, Jon folds his own hand inside the massive palm.

In the shadow of the great tapestry, the sun-tanned man hauls Jon to his feet.

‘Is he one of them?’ he asks, dangling Jon by the arm so that the older man might see.

The elderly man nods.

‘Very well,’ says the sun-tanned man, and barrels Jon out of the room.

Behind Jon, a door slams. He reels against the wall and turns back just in time to hear a key turning in the lock. It is one of the cells he passed on his way to the library hall. There is little here but a bedstead with blankets folded underneath – and, high above, a single window glaring down. The branches of a skeletal willow tap at the glass.

He tries to sit, but he cannot stay still. He feels the urge to bury himself beneath one of the blankets, but he dares not unfold it. Instead, he parades the walls like a dog in its kennel.

There is scratching in the lock again, and the door judders open. The sun-tanned man does not say a word until the door is firmly closed behind him.

‘Jon,’ he begins. ‘You are fortunate it is me. Some of my brothers take less kindly to little boys busying themselves in places they should not go.’

In response, there is only Jon’s silence.

‘This,’ the man in black begins, reaching into his robe and producing a piece of folded paper. ‘Is this what you came for?’

Jon totters forward and takes hold of the letter. Once it is in his hands, he snatches it close to his chest and holds it there.

‘You may read it, Jon,’ the man says softly. ‘She told you not to – but what she says hardly means a thing anymore.’

Jon does not move. He knows what the man wants, knows that he desperately wants it too – but he will not tear open the letter while he is being watched. He holds the man’s glare until he can bear it no more.

Once he is alone, he crawls onto the naked bed. He turns the letter in his hands. It is almost time to read it – but he will savour it first.

Hours pass. He dreams of what he might find within: his mother’s sorrow at having to leave him behind, the dreams she has of the day he and his sisters will be reunited and the old house restored.

Darkness comes. It will be lights out in the dormitories above, but tonight there is moon enough to illuminate the cell.

He sits down and unfolds the paper.

It is not a letter, as he had thought. Instead, it is a form, typewritten with only two words inked in, and two more scrawled at its bottom: his name and his mother’s, the last time he will ever see her hand.

I, being the father, mother, guardian, person having the actual custody of the child named JON HEATHER hereby declare that I authorize the Society known as the Children’s Crusade and its Officers to exercise all the functions of guard ians, including the power to house, home, command and castigate, and have carried out such medical and surgical treatment as may be considered necessary for the child’s welfare; including, thereafter, the right to license guardianship of the child to a third party proven in its dedication to the moral upbringing of young women and men.

There are words here that Jon does not understand, but he reads them over and over, as if by doing so he might drum their meaning into his head. He dwells even longer over her name scribbled below. It seems that by declaring her name she has performed some magic of her own; she is no longer his mother. He puts the paper down, retreats to the opposite corner of the room, goes back to it an hour later – but it always means the same thing.

His mother is never coming back; he is a son of the Children’s Crusade now.

The sun-tanned man’s name is Judah Reed. He brings Jon milk and bread for supper, and they sit in the silence of the chantry as Jon eats. On the side of the plate is a single apple, waxy and old but still sweet.

‘You have been selected,’ Judah Reed begins, ‘for a great adventure.’ He sets down a book and turns to the first page: black and white photographs inked in with bright colours, a group of young boys beaming out from the veranda of some wooden structure.

‘These boys,’ he begins, turning the book so that Jon can see the happy faces, ‘are the boys who once slept in the very same beds as you and your friends. Like you, they had no mothers, no fathers, no place to call their own.’

Jon bristles at the assertion, but his mother’s signature is scored onto the backs of his eyes.

‘They came to the Children’s Crusade desperate and destitute, but they left it with hope in their hearts.’

Judah Reed turns the page. There, two boys sit in the back of a wagon drawn by horses, grinning wildly as they careen through fields tall with grain. Behind them, herds of strange creatures gather on the prairie.

‘Where are they?’ Jon breathes.

‘They’re safe,’ Judah Reed continues, ‘and together, and loved. They work hard, but they have full plates every night – and, one day, every last one of these boys will own his own farm and have a family all of his own.’

Jon fixes him with wide, open eyes.

‘Have you heard of a land called Australia?’

In all the books Jon has seen, Australia is endless desert and kangaroos, convicts and cavemen. Of all the four corners of the world, it is the only place he has never imagined his father.

‘Those boys are in Australia …’

Jon reaches out and turns the page. A postcard of some sprawling red continent, surrounded by azure waters, is clipped into place. Judah Reed offers it to Jon. In the corner of the picture, a small grey bear holds up a placard that cries out a welcome. A little Union Jack ripples in the corner.

‘That’s where you’ve come from, isn’t it?’ Jon says, eyes darting. ‘You came to take us away …’

The man’s fingers dance on Jon’s shoulder. ‘You must understand, Jon, that this is what your mother wanted for you. Little boys grow up into wild, troubled men on these streets – men who lurk in the factories by day and torment the taprooms at night. There could be no other future for a boy like yourself, if you were to remain.’ For a fleeting second, Jon thinks he looks sad. ‘It does not have to be that way, Jon. There is a better life waiting for you. Your mother gifted you to the Children’s Crusade so that you might have just such a chance.’

The other boys, he goes on, have already been instructed. While Jon was locked away, they gathered in the chantry and heard the tale told. England groans with its dead – but its Empire is desperate for good souls to come and till its land, fish its lakes, conquer its wastelands. Australia is the Eden to which the orphaned boys of war are being summoned. It is not always that little boys, so full of malice and sin, are permitted back into the Garden. This is a chance, he explains, for Jon to begin again.

‘You don’t understand,’ Jon trembles. ‘I’m not supposed to be here.’

Judah Reed stands. ‘If you had not been locked away, Jon Heather, for trespassing against the very same men whose only purpose is to rescue you, you might have learnt about the noble traditions of the Children’s Crusade. How, many centuries ago, it was children who were called to do the Lord’s work in the Holy Lands. And how their time has come again – how children, brave and unsullied, are to crusade to the other end of the earth, where the Empire will surely die without us …’

Jon does not care about the British Empire; he cares only about his empire – his mother, his sisters, red bricks and grey slates and the terrace rolling on and on. ‘But I want to stay,’ he ventures.

‘You will find that the new world welcomes you,’ says Judah Reed, striding to the chantry doors and stepping beyond. ‘I’m afraid, Jon Heather, that the old world doesn’t want you anymore.’

‘Jon!’ George tumbles out of bed as Jon steals back into the dormitory. ‘Jon, where have you been?’

It is dark in the dormitory, but moonlight glides across the room as, somewhere above, snow clouds shift and come apart.

‘Get back into bed, George.’ Peter swings out of his bunk, biting back at some snipe from one of the bigger boys lounging above. He goes to George’s side and, an arm around his shoulder, ushers him back to his cot.

‘But I just want to …’

‘Jon doesn’t want to hear it,’ Peter whispers. ‘Not now.’

As Peter is tucking the sheets in around George, batting back his every question, Jon trudges the length of the dormitory and finds his own crib. It is just as he had expected: the blankets are gone and only the pillow remains.

‘Jon, what did they say?’

Peter lopes out of the shadows, rests his foot on the base of Jon’s bed. Sitting at its head, Jon realizes he is still kneading the postcard. It is creased now, and the ink has smeared his fingers.

He offers it up. When Peter takes it, he cannot make it out – but, nevertheless, he seems to know.

‘They took us in the chantry and sat us down. They say it’s a paradise, waiting for boys like us, fresh fruit for breakfast and crystal lakes full of fish – that we’ll all grow up to have big ranches and families and everything boys could ever want.’ He pauses. ‘Jon, there’s something else, isn’t there? What did Judah Reed say?’

From down the row, someone barks at them to shut up. Peter lets loose with a volley of his own, and the silence resumes.

‘He said we were being rescued,’ Jon begins. ‘But – but I don’t need to be rescued, Peter.’

Peter relaxes, sits beside Jon.

‘I know what you’re going to say, Peter. But I saw her letter. He made me read it. And …’ He takes the pillow into his lap and beats it. ‘There’s still my father. It will all be OK when my father finally comes home. But if I’m not here, he’ll never find me. I’m not like you, Peter. I’m not like George. I’ve got …’ He trembles before saying it, but he says it all the same. ‘… people who love me.’

Peter stands. ‘There’s every one of us in here just like you,’ he says. ‘Every one of us had a mother and a father who didn’t come back.’ He turns, kicks along the row to find his bunk. ‘We’re the same in this hole,’ he mutters, ‘and we’ll be the same on the other side of the world.’

Peter slopes back into the shadows, but Jon is not ready to let him go. Leaping up, he screws up the postcard and hurls it after the retreating silhouette. ‘You want to go!’ he thunders. ‘You’re happy to be going!’

The silhouette hunches its shoulders and turns around.

‘Peter?’ comes a voice.

‘You go to sleep, George,’ Peter whispers. He stalks back up to Jon, lands a heavy hand on his shoulder. ‘You upset him over this, and I’ll throw you overboard the first chance I get. I’m not happy, Jon, and I’m not sad. This place or some other place – it just doesn’t matter to me anymore.’ There is fight left in Jon, but suddenly he softens; his shoulders sink and he tries to squirm back. ‘There isn’t any escaping from it. We were marked for it the second we came through those doors.’

Jon curls up on his bare mattress and reaches into the slats for his beloved book. It is too dark to make out any of the words, but it doesn’t matter – he knows it by heart. In the story, a gang of friends drift out to sea aboard the old Goblin and land, at last, on some foreign shore. There, among the alien faces, is the one they clamour for: their errant father, who takes them safely back home. Jon flicks quickly to those pages – as if, even in this darkness, he might breathe it in.

Something shudders at the end of his bed, and he reaches out to see a blanket suddenly lying there. On the other side of the dormitory, Peter slumps onto his bed and pulls an overcoat around him with a grunt.

‘Thank you,’ Jon whispers – but there is no reply.

Jon does not sleep that night. He lies awake, listening to the fitful snores of the other boys. In the small hours, he suddenly remembers the great brick arch through which he first entered the home, the stone inscription that was hanging overhead. At last, he understands what it means.

It is as the boys of the Home have always understood: the childsnatcher does not come in the dead of the night. He does not creep upon the stairs. He does not lurk beneath the bed, clutching a sack in which to stash all the little boys he carries away. He comes, instead, in a smart black suit, with a briefcase at his side and papers in his pocket. He crouches down and calls you by your name – and, once you take his hand in your own, you will never see England again.

III

They set out from a dock in Liverpool. It is as far from home as Jon has ever been, but now even this foreign city dwindles on the horizon, lost in mist from the sea.

They call it the HMS Othello. It has ploughed through countless wars, but now it is bound to a different journey. Below deck, the boys sleep three to a cabin. After the dormitory, it is a luxury to which none of the boys are accustomed.

After lights out on the first night, there comes a gentle rat-a-tat at the cabin door. Peter swings out of bed and whips the portal open. Still clinging to the cardboard suitcase they have each been issued with, there stands George.

‘Can I sleep in here, Peter?’

There are three bunks in the cabin, Jon curled up in one, no doubt pretending to sleep; some other boy in the other. Peter shakes him until he stirs. ‘Hop it, Harry,’ he says. ‘We need the bed.’

Muttering some incomprehensible complaint, the boy trudges out of the room.

As he goes, George creeps through the door and finds the bunk warm and inviting. ‘Thanks Peter.’

‘Don’t thank me,’ Peter says. ‘Just go to sleep.’

There is only a moment’s silence. Between them, Jon hears George begin to speak. Then, thinking better of it, he holds his tongue. Two more times he tries to be still, but it will not last long.

‘What is it, George?’

‘I didn’t like the way the ship was moving. It feels like we could tip right over.’

Jon hears Peter’s sharp intake of breath, decides Peter is about to admonish George, and scrambles upright in bed. ‘I don’t like it either …’

‘You can hardly walk,’ George goes on. ‘One minute you’re in the middle of the hall, the next you’re up against the wall. Nothing looks right.’

Peter rolls over, drawing the bedsheets over his head.

‘It’s only Judah Reed can walk without stumbling,’ George says. ‘Why can Judah Reed walk like that, Peter?’

There comes another rat-a-tat at the door. George instinctively shrinks into his covers, while Jon dives back into bed. Only when he hears Peter pulling the door back does he open an eye to watch.

There are two boys standing in the doorway. The smaller, Harry, is still trailing his blanket; a taller boy looms above.

‘We don’t want this one in our bunk, Peter. Some of us want to sleep. There’s enough little ones down the way, without throwing this one in with us.’

Peter throws a look back at George, now nothing but a bundle beneath the bedclothes.

‘If we let you sleep in here, you’ll sleep on the floor?’

Harry nods, eager as a dog waiting for its bone.

‘You can take a pillow,’ Peter adds. ‘But it’ll take Judah Reed to stop me pounding on you if you piss everywhere tonight.’

Peter slumps back into his bunk, rucking up his blankets to make up for his missing pillow, and snuffs the light. Moments later, George bleats out. At first, Peter thinks he is being a scaredy-cat yet again – but, when he tugs at the cord, he sees George sitting up in bed with wide, apologetic eyes.

‘It’s no good, Peter,’ he says. ‘Just the mention of it makes me want to …’

‘What the hell,’ Peter mutters. ‘I wasn’t going to sleep tonight anyway …’

Jon follows them out of the cabin, leaving the fourth boy to crawl, eagerly, into one of their beds. The corridor outside is narrow, lit by buzzing electric lanterns. The ship is a labyrinth, but Peter seems to know his way better than most. Jon and George trail after him like rats behind some piper.

They are not the only boys on board. There are others, boys in prim school uniforms – and, so the whisperers would have it, girls in smart pinafore dresses too. Nor are Judah Reed and the other men in black the only adults travelling south. Jon has already seen a group of swarthy men, speaking in some guttural language of their own.

Peter leads George up a small flight of wooden stairs, and fumbles with a clasp to kick open the portal above. When the doors fly open, sea spray whips at George’s face.

‘Isn’t there another way, Peter?’

‘I don’t know, George …’

‘I don’t think I can go overboard, Peter.’

They venture up. There are still adults milling about the deck, keeping windward of the great hall that sits there.

Jon closes the trapdoor and, hand in hand, they scuttle towards the great hall. Creeping downwind of it, they search for the way in. The boys have never seen luxury like this: waiters are pushing trolleys, men with skin as dark as those who came to live in Leeds, while a chandelier dangles above. At last, they find an unlocked door and push inside. From here, Peter remembers the route. He leaves George at the toilet doors, and tells him to hurry.

‘He’ll only be at pissing again by the time we get back,’ Peter whispers. ‘That boy could not drink a drop for three days and still find water to piss.’

When George reappears, he is shaking. As they go back on the deck, the ship rises up on a deep wave and then rolls. Hanging lanterns throw light onto George’s face, and Jon sees that he has been sick.

‘Wipe it off,’ says Peter, slapping him on the back. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

‘I’m feeling it too,’ says Jon.

‘Yeah, well, don’t you two go turning it into a competition …’

Peter pauses. He has been denying it to himself, but even he can feel a sickly stirring in the pit of his stomach. He looks up. The half-moon, beached there in white cloud, is the only thing that doesn’t seem to be trembling in the whole wide world. ‘You see that?’ he says, putting an arm around George’s shoulder. ‘Even the moon’s closer than Leeds is now. At least we can still see the moon.’

‘It’s the same moon, though, isn’t it, Peter?’ George marvels, as if he has uncovered some unfathomable secret. ‘And the stars – they’re the same stars?’

Peter turns and strides towards the edge of the ship. The starlight sparkles in the water, so that it seems there are silvery orbs bobbing just beneath the surface.

‘I wouldn’t swear on it,’ he says.

The seas are rough that night. In his bunk, Jon cannot sleep. When he scrunches up his eyes, he can almost pretend that the cabin is not rolling with the waves – but then the lump starts forming in the back of his throat, and then he has to curl up like a baby to stop himself from throwing up. In the bed beside him, George has retched himself into uneasy unconsciousness while, beyond that, Peter gives a fitful snore.

Some time in the smallest hours, there comes a lull, as if the sea has flattened out to allow him some rest – but, cruelly, Jon is no longer tired. Careful not to tread on the younger boy Harry, he stands up and creeps to the door. As he steps out, the corridor pitches and lanterns throw long, dancing shadows on the wall.

The belly of the boat moans, long and mournful, but when the sound dies down, he can hear something else: another whimpering, not of the boat, but of a boy. Steadying himself with a palm against each wall, he shuffles along the corridor, until he finds a cabin door left ajar. With each wave, the door opens inches and then closes again, allowing Jon to peep within. In one bed, a bigger boy has his head buried under a pillow while, on another, a much younger boy, perhaps only four years old, has his sheets pulled up around him.

Jon curls his fingers around the edge of the door, stopping it from swinging, and suddenly the boy’s eyes shoot at him.

‘What happened?’ Jon whispers.

The little one will not answer, but suddenly the bigger boy rears from his pillow and lets loose an exasperated groan. ‘Get it to shut up, would you? It’s keeping me up with its wailing …’

‘Is he hurt?’

‘Judah Reed came round,’ the bigger boy says. ‘Told him his mother’s kicked it.’

Jon opens his mouth but does not have any words.

‘Don’t know why he’s making such a fuss. He got a piece of cooking chocolate out of it. More than I got when they broke it to me. I got a pat on the head.’

The little boy lets out another cry but, when Jon goes to him, he only buries himself in his sheets.

Sitting on the end of his bed, Jon hears footsteps outside, and looks up to see Judah Reed himself standing in the open door.

‘I believe this is not your cabin,’ he says. The ship suddenly lifts, but in the passageway Judah Reed does not even stagger. ‘Well?’

Jon nods, swings down, and makes to leave. In the doorway, he has to squeeze past Judah Reed himself. He smells of honey and charcoal soap.

‘What happened to his mother?’ Jon asks, remembering his own, the way she held his hands as she passed him the letter and took off up the road.

Judah Reed’s blue eyes look immeasurably sad. ‘I believe she was … consumptive,’ he says, and steers Jon on his way.

In the morning, the waters have changed, reflecting the pale blue vaults overhead. Around them, the ocean glitters. There are landmasses on the horizon, hulks of earth gliding in and out of view. As Peter leads George and Jon onto the highest deck, they dare not look out at the vast oceans that stretch into the west, gathering instead at the port side of the ship and pointing out proud headlands and outcrops of rock.

Jon tells them about the boy from last night. He was not, it seems, the only one. Last night, Judah Reed stalked the passageways below deck, leading boys off to some office deep in the belly of the boat, palming a hunk of chocolate or toffee into their hands and telling them: your mother is dead; your father is gone; you’re our little one now, and we won’t do you wrong. It was, one of Peter’s friends tells them, like a nursery rhyme, one they then had to repeat: my mother is dead; my father is gone; I’m your little one now, and you won’t do me wrong.