Out of the Blackout

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

W
hen the train containing the children pulled into Yeasdon Station it was nearly four hours late. Several among the little knot of people waiting to meet them had become restive: one man said—almost hopefully, it seemed—that it didn't look as if they were
going
to come at all; and one woman said that her George would be wanting his tea. These eruptions of shuffling and discontent were given short shrift by Mrs Sellerman.

‘Your George can get his own tea for once,' she said. ‘After all, there
is
a war on.'

Mrs Sellerman saw it as her duty to keep up the spirits of the waiting foster families, and she kept up a constant stream of bright commentary and admonition: it would be so bewildering for the poor little things she said, shunted off to a strange place, away from their homes and their mothers, many of them in the country for the first time in their lives, very probably. It was up to them, she proclaimed, to make them feel
safe
and
welcome.
It was the least they could do.

Takes too much on herself, does Nan Sellerman, was the unspoken thought in many a waiting breast. For though she was a kindly woman, and a capable one, this first taste of responsibility had rather gone to Mrs Sellerman's head, and had certainly made her more than a little sententious. But the thought remained unspoken, for this was 1941, and her place in the upper ranks of the village hierarchy protected Mrs Sellerman from outright criticism.

So everyone was still there when the train drew in. The children leapt and ran and rolled off it, shouting and laughing and displaying very few signs of disorientation. Mrs Sellerman, aided by Mr Thurston the headmaster and Mr Wise the vicar, quickly got them together into a little group—twenty or more, there were—outside the waiting-room, and prepared to allot them to their new homes and their temporary guardians. Mr Thurston insisted on making a little speech of welcome (he was all too fond of little speeches, which usually, like Topsy, growed), and while he was talking about ‘these difficult times' and ‘all doing their bit,' Mrs Sellerman surveyed the children.
A few were quite respectably dressed and still fairly neat, but most of them were in the range from the untidy to the frankly deplorable.

‘I know they've had a long journey,' said Mrs Sellerman under her breath to the vicar, ‘but you'd think some of the mothers could have made a bit more effort. In times like these . . .'

Mr Wise saw no oddity in regarding tidy children as part of the war effort. He murmured: ‘Remember, they will not be at all the sort of children we are used to here. Slum children, you know . . .'

For Mr Wise, and for most of the people of Yeasdon, all children from big cities who did not come from impeccably middleclass backgrounds were ‘slum children.'

At that point a boy in the group, a heavy-limbed lout of fully nine years, rather proved his point by shouting:

‘Stow it, mister. We're 'ungry.'

Mr Thurston brought his remarks speedily to an end, and took from Nan Sellerman the list of names.

‘Ah yes, now. Who's first? Sally Bates—you're to go with Mr and Mrs Carter. Mary Nicholls—you'll be living with Miss Petheridge. Are you there, Miss Petheridge? Good—this little girl is Mary. Yes, do take her along now. Terence Stope—oh no, Terence isn't coming, after all. William Smithson . . .'

And so it went on. One by one the children, sobered a little as they were separated from the rest, trotted off with their foster parents, to be caught up in linguistic entanglements as cockney met West Country, to be bewildered by the smells and spaciousness of the countryside, cheered by the unaccustomed lavishness of country fare, and in some cases to be terrified by the first bath of their young lives. Mostly they were tough kids, and cheerful, and while they commented rather disdainfully on everything that was different from home, they seemed ready enough to adapt.

‘ 'Ere, they say there's not even a
cinema
here,' said one, as he was taken off by a local farmer.

‘Still, at least there won't be any air raids,' said another.

‘Worse luck!' shouted the heavy-limbed boy, still uncollected from the group. ‘Zoo-oo-oom! Kerr-rash!'

In the space of twenty minutes Mr Thurston came to the last name on his list, and Ellen Tucker was taken off by a nervous
retired couple who had put away all their ornaments in a high cupboard preparatory to her arrival. Rural peace began to descend on Yeasdon Station.

‘Well, that seems to be that,' said Mr Thurston, removing his spectacles. ‘And I think we can congratulate ourselves—'

‘Er—Mr Thurston—' said Mrs Sellerman. He looked in her direction, and she gestured towards a small boy, still standing near the door of the waiting-room, a diminutive case clasped in his hand.

‘Oh dear!' said Mr Thurston, fussily donning his spectacles again. ‘Have I missed one? One, two, three . . . No, I've been through them all. Ah—I have it: you must be Terence Stope. I heard your mummy wouldn't part with you, but she's decided to send you after all, has she? Very sensible of her.'

The boy looked up at him thoughtfully.

‘No,' he said.

‘Not Terence? Or Terry? Do they call you Terry?'

‘No,' said the little boy. ‘I'm Simon. Simon . . . Thorn.'

He was a pensive, reserved child, perhaps five or six years old. He was neater than the average child in the group: his clothes were far from new, but that was not unusual in that year of grace 1941, and Simon's were clean and pressed and newly darned. He wore grey short trousers, grey socks, and a fawn pullover with a little blue band knitted into the V-neck. Home-knitted, Nan Sellerman's appraising eye told her, not bought. He was less skinny than many of the others, and certainly suffered from none of the diseases of malnutrition or poor heredity that one or two of them had been burdened with.

‘Simon Thorn . . . Simon Thorn,' said Mr Thurston with concern, and he consulted his list yet again. ‘No, you're definitely not on the list. Goodness me—how can that have happened? Did they send you when Terence Stope dropped out, I wonder?
Most
inconsiderate not to have informed me—but then, these last few nights in London have been so dreadful . . . Well, what's to be done? Tomorrow I shall have to telephone to Hackney. But in the meanwhile . . . ?'

‘If I may make a suggestion, Mr Thurston,' put in Mrs Sellerman, tentatively. Mr Thurston was a perfectly good-natured man, but the village was somewhat in awe of him, as they were of all teachers. ‘Mr and Mrs Cutheridge were awfully disappointed
when they heard that Terence Stope wasn't coming. He'd been assigned to them, you know. They're childless—a really nice, responsible couple . . .'

She turned to the vicar in search of confirmation.

‘They're Methodists,' Mr Wise murmured, ‘but as far as I know, yes . . .'

‘Ah!' said Mr Thurston. ‘Well, that would seem to be the solution. Until we can sort things out, find out the position . . .' He turned to the little boy. ‘You are
sure
you're not Terence Stope, aren't you?'

‘I'm Simon Thorn,' said the boy, now with more confidence.

‘Yes, well, we'll see to it that you're all right. I suppose this Mr Cutheridge is not on the telephone?'

‘Oh, I wouldn't think so, Mr Thurston. He's stockman to Sir Henry.'

‘Ah—no, of course. Now I wonder who could take him along.'

‘I'll go with him,' said Mrs Sellerman. ‘It's not above a mile.'

And so the little difficulty was sorted out, for that night at least. Simon Thorn and Mrs Sellerman trudged through the darkening village, the little boy walking determinedly, and looking around eagerly as if to impress this first, dim view of Yeasdon on his memory. ‘Is this all the houses there are?' he asked at one point. Before long they came to a substantial cottage just beyond the outskirts of the village, a cottage tied to Sir Henry Beesley's estate. Mrs Cutheridge was surprised to open the door to Nan Sellerman and a little boy, after her disappointment of the day before, but the matter was soon explained. Dot Cutheridge displayed openly a quiet satisfaction which concealed a deep inner delight. Simon was hustled into the warm, close atmosphere of the cottage, was sat up at the table by Tom Cutheridge (who was big and homely and smelt of barns), and was given a great plate of Lancashire hot-pot (Mrs Cutheridge, that evening, had only ham and bread and butter). Then he was given a bath by the fire in a little tin tub, and was soon put lovingly to bed. He was clearly exhausted. He fell asleep almost at once. Dot Cutheridge knew, because she listened at the door.

Mr Thurston and the evacuees' committee had plenty on their plates next morning, so that Simon, so quiet and well settled, was the least of their problems. One boy had already run away (it was one of the ones who had been given their first bath),
but some of the others had made themselves all too thoroughly at home. So it was not until midday that Mr Thurston found time to telephone through to Hackney. It was then that he became aware—for in the sudden uprush of activity caused by the evacuees' arrival he had missed both the nine o'clock news and the early morning news that day—that during the evening and night of May 10th London had been bombed as savagely as at any time during the war to date.

Eventually he got through to the school the children had attended. They had sent no extra boy to replace Terence Stope. Then he rang through to the Town Hall. They were running an emergency service only, due to bombing the night before, and his call was interrupted by another air-raid siren. When finally, in the late afternoon, he spoke to the overworked official responsible for the party, he was unable to explain the surplus boy. There had originally been twenty-two children on the list. The refusal of Terence Stope's mother to part with him left twenty-one. His place had not been filled by any other child. Of the twenty-one, eighteen had come from the Bradlaugh Street Primary School, three from the Jubilee Green Primary School. The children had been put into their carriages on the special train by a teacher from Bradlaugh Street. Naturally there would have been a few children she had never seen before.

‘Will you check your records, then, to see if you have anywhere a boy called Simon Thorn?' asked Mr Thurston, mystified, but not at this stage worried.

‘Records!' said the official. ‘We'll do what we can, of course. It's chaos here, as you can imagine—offices being bombed, things being shifted God knows where. There's plenty of records have gone up in flames, though none of the education ones, so far as I know.'

But when the man at Hackney Town Hall rang back the next day, he had found no trace at all of a Simon Thorn.

Meanwhile Simon himself had settled in nicely. Mrs Cutheridge pronounced him ‘a love of a child', and glowed in his company. She had discovered that he had no ration book with him, and had already commenced battle with officialdom to get him one. Tom Cutheridge said he was ‘that sharp', and had already shown him round Sir Henry's estate, and given him a ride on one of the old shire horses. At school Simon was
pronounced ‘a good little reader' and ‘quite forward for his age'—which no one quite knew, but which he said was five.