Читать книгу Little Exiles - Robert Dinsdale, Robert Dinsdale - Страница 8

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.

In a launch at the stern of the ship, they find lifeboats, each stacked on top of the other. Finding a way into the first is simple enough – all they have to do is crawl under a lip of wood and work their way beneath a stretch of tarpaulin – but it does not feel the same as Jon thought it would. Sitting in the prow of the boat, with an oar latched either side, it does not feel like escape. He hears George approaching, crawling on hands and knees, and Peter following after, straining to contort his bigger body through the gap. He only has to look at George’s face, breaking into a beam, to understand: like everything else that they share, this is just make-believe. He could spin a story of stealing this lifeboat and rowing back to England to find his sisters and wait again for his father, but that is all it would be – a fairy story to delight the fat boy.

‘What is it, Jon?’

George is trying to pluck one of the oars from its clasps.

‘Do you think Judah Reed’s finished telling boys their mothers have died?’ he asks, looking over George’s head to where Peter crouches.

‘I don’t know …’

‘Only, why did he tell them when they got on board? Why not back in the Home, like he did for George?’

Suddenly, George remembers. His hands stop prying at the oar, and he shoves them in his pockets. ‘I didn’t even get a hunk of chocolate.’

‘He’d have come for me last night, wouldn’t he, Peter?’ Jon’s voice rises helplessly. ‘If she really was …’

He does not have to finish the words. Peter nods, but it does not convince.

‘What happened to your mother, Peter?’

Now even Peter has his hands shoved in his pockets. ‘You don’t want to hear that silly old story,’ he says, shuffling from foot to foot. ‘Does he, George? He doesn’t want to hear that dreary old thing.’

‘I like your stories, Peter.’

Now they look expectantly at Peter, as if waiting for a bedtime tale.

‘My sister, Rebekkah, she reckoned it was a broken heart. On account of the fact my father didn’t come back. Dead in India, they said, but he wasn’t even fighting. He was on a motorbike and it flipped. He used to ride one even before the war, and my mother always hated it. She said I went on it once, but I don’t remember. Then there’s a letter in the post and it says he was killed in action, but it wasn’t really action and it wasn’t really killed. It was just an accident, and my mother wasn’t the same after that.’

‘So she kicked the bucket!’ chirps George.

Peter doesn’t mind; he simply nods. ‘Sometimes that’s all it is, I suppose. There one day, gone the next. So Rebekkah and me, we tried to muddle through, but there was a neighbour who kept coming round with bits from her rations, and eventually she cottoned on. Rebekkah begged and begged, but it didn’t work. They sent a man with a briefcase, and then we had to put some things in a bag. I thought we were going to be together, but they sent Rebekkah to a place for girls, somewhere called Stockport.’ Peter pauses. He is hanging his head, so that Jon can barely make out his face. ‘So then that’s it. Children’s Crusade and …’

‘How long?’ whispers Jon.

Peter shrugs, but it is a pretend shrug, as if there is something he wants to hide. ‘I can’t remember. Four years, I suppose … five months. A few days.’ He hesitates. ‘Nine days. You want the minutes and hours as well?’

There is a gentle pattering on the tarpaulin, rain beginning to fall across the ocean. Soon, outside, Jon hears the scampering of feet as people head for shelter.

‘Peter,’ says George. ‘I feel sick again.’

‘The ship’s hardly moving, George.’

‘It’s not the ship. It’s my insides. They’re turning somersaults.’

When they emerge, the decks are almost empty, every man, boy and girl heading for their cabins. The rain now comes in sporadic bursts. Jon looks up. He wonders: was it a storm like this that waylaid my father? Is that why they really put me to sea? Or is it something worse?

‘What if my mother didn’t come for me because …’ His voice trails off – for, along the length of the ship, towards the prow, he has seen the spindly black figure of Judah Reed, crouching above a collection of little ones.

Jon reaches out, as if to take Peter’s hand. He does not know he is doing it until it is too late. Peter shakes him off, gives him a furrowed look.

‘Come on,’ says Jon.

If Judah Reed cannot catch him, he cannot tell him his mother has died. If it is true, Jon does not want to know. Quickly, he takes off, lifting the door back into the bowels of the boat.

Peter and George hurry after.

‘Where are we going?’ George puffs.

Jon Heather thinks: somewhere they can’t find me.

Soon, in the depths of the ship, they are hopelessly lost. Peter demands that they stop as he paces a passageway, trying to get his bearings. Jon swears that he could find the way back to deck simply by listening to the creaking of the ship, but the doubt in his voice is all too plain, and suddenly George starts to blubber. A sharp slap on the back quells him, but after that he waddles nervously in Peter’s wake, complaining of being hungry and thirsty and afraid of the dark.

‘Can you be shipwrecked if the ship isn’t wrecked, Peter? What if we get shipwrecked down here?’

‘It’s not shipwrecked if the ship isn’t wrecked, George.’

‘We could still starve. It’s worse than a desert island, Peter. We couldn’t even find a coconut to drink.’

At last, a staircase presents itself, and they emerge into a new passageway, where bright lights shine and a thick red carpet covers the wooden boards. There is a new smell here, of collecting dust and paraffin lamps, and the air feels dry. Jon follows the smell to the end of the passage, and pushes at the doors there, so that they open just a crack. Pressing his eye to the hole, he takes a deep breath and looks over his shoulder.

‘What is it, Jon?’

Jon turns and pushes the doors apart. In the room beyond, the walls are lined with books. Tables are heaped high with newspapers bound in string. A dozen lamps line the walls, and big pipes run between the bookcases, radiating heat.

‘You’ll have read all these books, will you?’ asks Peter, punching Jon on the shoulder.

Jon peers right and left. Surely there is no man alive who might have read every one of these books. They stretch from ceiling to floor, long shelves protruding from every wall to form alcoves in which a boy might hide away. Some of them are bound in leather with embossed titles: The Natural Laws of Navigation, Colonies of the Cape, and many more. Others are ragged storybooks with crumpled or missing covers.

Peter starts ferreting in a box, while George waits dumbly at the door.

‘Here,’ Peter says, tossing him a comic with the silhouette of an American detective on front. ‘You liked this one when we were at the Home.’

‘Are you going to read it to me, Peter?’

‘Later. You look at the pictures for now.’

Beaming, Jon disappears into the shelves. The books are older here, with names he recognizes but cannot pronounce. There is a little reading area, where two ornate chairs face each other across a low table. Stretched out between them, there sits an enormous clothbound book. On the front, in golden letters, are the words An Atlas of the World.

Jon pores through the pictures. There are always maps of villages and dales in the storybooks he loves to read, but never before has he seen a map so vast. He sees oceans with names he has never heard, the shores of the Americas and Africa, the endless expanses of white at the fringes of the world. He traces the names of countries with the tip of his forefinger, but no matter how hard he searches he cannot find England. His eyes are drawn inexorably down, and he sees the scorched yellow mass that is Australia, sitting so lonely and remote.

He wraps his arms around the book and staggers to the entrance of the library. Peter is sitting cross-legged on the ground, surrounded by comics.

‘I’ve never seen these ones,’ Peter says, holding one up with a flourish. ‘Dustbowl comics. They’ve come all the way from America, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m keeping these.’

‘You can’t keep them!’ George gasps.

‘Some other boy’ll just keep them if we don’t, George. Don’t be such a stickler.’ Peter looks up. ‘What’ve you got there, Jon boy?’

Jon flops down beside them. ‘It’s an atlas. Maps of the world …’

‘They had a big thing like that at the first Home I was in. Showed everywhere that was British, with little Union Jacks all over.’

‘Peter,’ Jon wavers. ‘I don’t know where we are.’

‘Well, we’ll soon fix that.’ Peter snatches the book and tears it open. ‘How dumb can you be, Jon Heather? A few days out of England, and you’re lost already!’

Peter peers down at the great map of the world in the centre of the book. His finger hangs delicately over Africa, then circles its way through the Middle East.

‘There we are, Jon Heather. England!’

Jon cranes to look down Peter’s finger. ‘It’s tiny,’ he says, eyes flitting back to the sprawling mass of Australia.

George, too, crawls over to Peter’s side, and peers at the world in his lap. ‘Will we be together,’ he says, ‘on the other side? Everyone from the Home, back in the same place?’

When Peter looks up, Jon catches the look of unease in his eyes.

‘What do you care?’ he grins, fighting down whatever he has felt. ‘You hate all those boys. They’re rotten to you.’

George whispers, ‘But I still want them to be there …’

Peter considers it. ‘Yeah,’ he scoffs, snapping the map shut, ‘we’ll be together, all right. All us boys of the Children’s Crusade. It’s going to be a grand adventure.’

Jon Heather spends long hours trying to judge by his atlas which shores they are passing, imagining in which of these strange lands his father might be lost. When the rains come, he hides again in the lifeboat, still clinging to his maps. Oftentimes, George crawls in after him, to listen to stories, or puzzle over why Peter always wants to sit with the girls from the girls’ home, or else to just sit in silence, watching Jon read.

Today, however, Jon has been alone, with only his thoughts and maps to keep him company. When the rain has passed over, he wriggles back onto deck. There might be land on the horizon, or it might only be a trick of the light. He holds tight to the atlas and scuttles back below deck.

In the cabin, Peter is reading one of the dustbowl comics for the hundredth time. On the front, two horsemen stand in front of a rampaging wall of dust in which the title, Black Chaparral, is picked out in dirt. In the bunk beside him, George is twisted in the blankets, naked to the waist. His skin is red, as if some unseen birthmark has spilled over and spread.

Jon stops. ‘George, what …’ His voice trails off, unable to find the words to describe this horror.

Over the top of his comic-book, Peter glares. Only a second later, Jon knows why – for, suddenly, George’s eyes scrunch tight, his lips part, and his face is flushed with waves of slobbery tears.

‘Jon Heather, for someone who doesn’t stop thinking, you don’t ever think!’ He flings the comic down, rolls out of bed, and goes to give George a sharp slap on the back. ‘What did I say, George?’

‘There, there …’ George replies, between mouthfuls of air.

‘Not that part,’ Peter interjects. ‘What did I say’s wrong?’

George looks up at Jon, with eyes ruddy and red. ‘It’s only a heat rash.’

‘A heat rash?’ Jon gasps. ‘Peter, you can’t possibly … Georgie boy, get out of bed.’

The fat boy’s eyes flicker. It is as if he’s been told to leap off a cliff, and is finding the idea strangely tempting. ‘Peter says I should have my rest.’

‘Come on!’

First, George must wait for Peter’s permission. Peter, eyes drifting back to his comic, slumps back into his sheets, refusing to even look up – so, taking his cue, Jon marches over and takes a pudgy hand in his own. The redness is here too, staining the backs of his fingers in wild, webbed patterns.

It takes a few tugs to get George out of bed, but when he understands that Peter isn’t going to rebuke him, he duly follows Jon out of the cabin. Turning away from the stairs that would take them to deck, they follow a labyrinth of passages.

‘It has to be somewhere,’ Jon says.

‘What does?’

‘He’ll have a cabin, just like ours. Just like those dead halls in the Home …’

At last, Jon knows he is near. The cries of the children are faded now, and in a doorway left ajar he sees a desk, a pot of pencils, a little calfskin Bible. At the end of the passage, a door is propped open and there, at a chair inside, sits Judah Reed.

Jon does not dare cross the threshold, so instead he reaches out with his free hand and knocks, softly, at the door. When Judah Reed does not turn around, he knocks again. He means it only to be a little louder, but judges it badly; now, he is hammering at the door. The sound startles George, whose hand tenses in his own.

Still, Judah Reed does not turn around. Instead, he lifts a hand, one finger stiff to indicate they must be patient, and concludes whatever he is writing. Then, at last, he looks over his shoulder.

‘Mr Reed,’ Jon says. ‘I need your help.’

‘Very well,’ says Judah Reed.

Jon moves to take George into the room, but quickly Judah Reed stands and strides towards them.

‘How can I help, Jon?’

Bemused, Jon shuffles back, so that George is in full view. When even this does not do the trick, he steps behind and pokes George in the small of the back, driving him forward like a particularly truculent ass.

Judah Reed looks George up and down. ‘Put him to bed,’ he says, and promptly turns back to his study.

‘But …’ Jon bolts forward, making George clatter against the wall. ‘Isn’t there medicine? What about a doctor?’

Judah Reed’s lips begin to curl. ‘I can’t take that to the ship’s doctor. Be sensible.’

‘He’s …’

‘Causing a bother?’

For the first time, Judah Reed crouches down. Now he looks George in the face, his golden jowls pock-marked, his blue eyes cold. He lifts a brown hand and, turning it over, presses it against George’s brow. George shudders, wants to reel back. He felt that hand once before. The man had stroked his head, just as he was telling him the news: she’s dead, little one. I’m afraid your mother loved you very much, but now that’s gone.

‘He’s burning, isn’t he?’

‘Bring him back if he starts raving. We can’t have another mess like last time.’ Turning to go back into the cabin, he looks over his shoulder. ‘I mean raving. Speaking in tongues. Thrashing around. Until then, young man, you’ll have to belt up. Your mother and father aren’t here now, so you have to be a big boy.’

‘My mother’s dead!’ George suddenly pipes up. ‘You told me so yourself!’

‘You see,’ Judah Reed says, ‘you’re not really so sick after all.’

When they get back to their cabin, Peter is still sprawling on his bed. He has been lingering over the last page of his comic – though, Jon notes, he’s now holding the thing upside down, as if he has had to quickly snatch it up and pretend he’s been reading it all along.

‘Well?’ says Peter.

Jon doesn’t utter a word, just ushers George back into bed.

‘Told you so,’ Peter goes on, snapping the comic shut. ‘Never take a poorly kid to one of those men in black, Jon. They’d just as soon put you to sleep like any old street dog.’

Swaddled up in his sheets, George gives a startled look and buries his head under his pillow.

Now there is nothing but long days of empty ocean, a week when the wind fails to fly, another when no boy can sleep for the lurching of the ship and the nightmares it creates – of boys tossed overboard, starving to death in the bellies of whales.

Soon, the boys begin to linger below deck throughout the long days, for in the open they must gaze into the endless blue, unable now to distinguish between backwards and forwards, the old world and the new. It is worse, they say, than the endless days locked in the Home. At least, then, there were walls through which they wanted to break. Out here, there is only the ocean, stretching in all directions, absolute and indefinite. Once upon a time, they sat in the chantry and learnt that they were being sent to Australia, for sunshine, oranges, milk and honey – but nobody told them how far they would travel. Nobody dared to tell them that the world was so vast.

Peter crashes into the cabin, breathless but beaming.

‘You two best gather your things up,’ he begins.

‘What is it, Peter?’

‘It’s land, George.’

They scramble onto deck. The word has spread quickly, and from every portal the passengers pour. They squabble their way to the highest sun-deck, but even there they have to fight to reach the balustrade.

Out there, the endless azure expanse is broken by a thin red line.

‘I don’t like it, Peter.’

‘Tough, little friend. This is it. We got there in the end.’

They linger on the sun-deck throughout the day – and, although the red line hardly thickens, by dawn the next morning they can clearly see different contours in the land. The next morning, the sun rises somewhere beyond the continent, spilling vivid colours: bloody reds and yellows, vermilion light bleeding into the ocean.

Fists rain at the cabin door. When Judah Reed barges in, only Jon is there; Peter and George have long since been awake, watching the terrible continent growing in size.

‘Come now,’ Judah Reed intones. ‘We’re going ashore before dusk. You’re to dress smartly. Nobody will let the new world down like they did the old.’

Judah Reed disappears. Moments later, Jon can hear his fists raining at other cabin doors along the corridor.

He pulls his cardboard suitcase out from underneath his bunk. In the suitcase there is a smart set of clothes, short trousers and a shirt, a necktie – so that every boy might look diligent as he enters the new world. There is even a pair of black shoes.

As Jon wriggles into these unusual garments, he pauses. He struggles with the necktie, though Peter has repeatedly shown him how, and finishes by cramming it into his pocket. Then, feet uncomfortable in new shoes, he finds his copy of We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, wraps it in a bundle of his old clothes and forces it into the empty suitcase. As he leaves the cabin, he catches his reflection in a looking glass. His brown hair is longer than he has seen it before. Even his own mother would barely recognize him.

Out on the main deck, the parties are gathering. Jon can see the first boats rowing out. They fill the water between the Othello and the port. Against the redness, there sits a low, sprawling township, whitewashed walls sitting around a single stone tower.

A bigger boy paws his way through the crowd and claps an oversized hand onto Peter’s shoulder. ‘Judah Reed’s looking for you,’ he says.

At Peter’s feet, George looks up like a startled rabbit.

Peter grapples through a group of schoolgirls to look down on the fore-deck below. Down there, Judah Reed stands before the elder boys of the Children’s Crusade. Behind him, a contraption winches another boat level with the deck, and a seaman barks out orders.

Peter shrugs, hoists George to his feet. ‘Time’s up, little fellow. We’re shipping out.’

George is reluctantly rising when the bigger boy doffs him on the shoulder and presses him back down. ‘Not you,’ he says. ‘It’s only bigger boys in the first run.’

Peter looks back over the rail. As if drawn to him, Judah Reed looks up and makes a single commanding wave.

Peter turns to Jon. ‘How old are you?’ he asks.

‘I’m ten,’ Jon begins.

Peter kicks George until he gets his attention. ‘You heard that, George? You tell them you’re ten too.’

Peter begins to stride away, but Jon hurries after. ‘Peter,’ he says. ‘You’re going to be there, aren’t you? When we get to the harbour …’

Peter shakes Jon away. ‘How in hell do you think I’d know?’ he snaps. ‘You make sure he tells them he’s ten, Jon Heather. And you look after the sorry little bastard if they’re about to split us up. Promise it, Jon.’

Jon nods. ‘OK,’ he says, ‘I promise.’

From the balcony, Jon watches the bigger boys being shepherded onto the boat. Slowly, they are winched out of sight. Moments later, the boats emerge from the shadow of the Othello. From on high, Jon fancies he can see Peter sitting in the prow of the boat, heroic as some proud Viking figurehead.

He does not notice at first, but suddenly George is standing beside him, his arms wrapped around two cardboard suitcases. ‘Peter left his behind,’ he whispers, clinging tightly to the second case.

They set it down and open it up. Inside, there are no old clothes, no trinkets carried over from the old world. There is only a single sheet of paper, torn raggedly out of some book. It is a page from one of the atlases, the empty continent with every city and river marked upon it. In the west, somewhere south of a little town named Dongara, Peter has scrawled a giant cross – but this is no treasure map for pirates.

‘We’ll give it to him on shore, won’t we, Jon?’

Jon folds up the paper and stashes it in the pocket of his stiff jacket. ‘I think he meant it for us, Georgie boy. So we can find our way back.’

A call goes up from the fore-deck, Judah Reed hollering out for the other boys of the Children’s Crusade.

‘All the way back, Jon?’

Jon nods. ‘All the way home, George.’ He looks at the sky. ‘One day …’