by Pet Jeffery
The concourse of the huge and smoky London railway terminus seethed with children, very few of them accompanied by adults. Almost all of the youngsters were significantly smaller than me. Curiously, there was nearby, an exception in terms of both her age and whether she had come to the station without an escort. She was a girl of about my age, fourteen or fifteen years old, who was shepherded by a middle-aged woman, evidently her mother.
"I don't want to go, Ma!" the girl protested.
"Why, you young limb of Hitler!"
I judged that, not long before, the girl's mother would have said 'young limb of Satan', with the same meaning.
"I don't care about Hitler," her daughter responded unwisely. "I just want to..."
During the summer, not caring about Hitler had been an option, but it was no longer so. The now infuriated mother made the point without uttering another word. She snarled at a group of evacuees who occupied a bench. Her ferocious display scattered the children. Now that there was more than enough space, she seated herself, dragging her daughter over her knee as she did so. A moment later, she flipped up her daughter's skirt before landing a dozen or so sharp slaps on the seat of the girl's exposed knickers. The spanking provoked a series of anguished howls, possibly as much of mortification as of pain.
When the woman looked up from her daughter's bottom, her eye met mine.
"What are you staring at, Missy?" she challenged me. "This ain't no public entertainment. I suppose you don't care about Hitler, neither."
I interpreted this as a threat to spank me.
"Not at all, Ma'am," I replied politely. "I care very much about our enemies."
"Well, mind you do, Missy. And, while you're at it, stare at your own business, not mine."
I shifted as quickly as I could, pushing my way through the crowd of children. As I did so, I trembled. Like the rest of the nation, I had much cause to be nervous. We were at war, and who knew what the outcome would be? I'd heard my father predict that the Germans would drop canisters of poison gas. That was why I carried my gas mask in a cardboard case swinging from a string slung over my shoulder. Papa also believed that our enemy's bombs would flatten London. That prospect was the reason that I, and the children thronging the station, were being evacuated from the city. But what of Mama and Papa, remaining in town to work for the BBC at Alexandra Palace? They would be on top of the hill, close to the bellies of German bombers. The transmission mast rendered the place unmistakable, and surely a prime target. Would I ever see my parents again?
With so much anxiety for my family, I had scarcely begun to worry for myself. I was on my way to a place of safety. But to what manner of refuge? The sight of the woman spanking a girl of about my age had alerted me to the jeopardy in which I might find myself. Hitherto, I had seen exasperated mothers smack misbehaving small children, but never before the chastisement of an adolescent. Might someone choose to treat me in such a way? My fears on that score would surely have been less had an adult ever taken me over her knee; there is terror in the unknown.
Rather than leave childrearing to chance, as I suppose most parents do, Mama and Papa had absorbed the work of a theorist who deplored corporal punishment. I had attended schools which described themselves as progressive, and in which no child was ever spanked.
Now, I awaited an unknown fate. My father had been working that morning; Mother took me to Crouch Hill station. Whilst we waited on the pavement outside, a woman wearing a WRVS armband looped a string with a luggage label about my neck. Mama took my identity card and ration book from my suitcase; the woman glanced at them and scribbled on my tag. My feeling was of becoming more a piece of luggage than a person. Who cared if someone walloped the bottom of a bag?
Mama returned my documents to my case, and we waited until a decrepit old bus arrived. Children clattered aboard. Mama and I hugged, and then I followed the other evacuees into the elderly vehicle. I had been more concerned with the jolts than with our route. Several times we stopped; more children boarded. After what seemed an age, we halted at a mainline terminus. Another woman with a WRVS armband urged us on to the concourse. At least some of the station nameboards had been removed or obliterated, and I had no clear idea of where we were. I wondered whether the lack of information would confuse German invaders as much as it did me: probably not, I suspected.
Beyond the ticket barriers, smudges of smoke rose from waiting locomotives. A steam whistle screeched. Then the tannoy coughed into life.
"Evacuees with surnames beginning A and B: Platform Thirteen," it announced.
Since I'm Anna Bond, that included me. I hastened forward. Nobody had sought to mislead invaders by obliterating platform numbers; it seemed an odd, perhaps careless, omission. Large white boards were marked with black numerals. A railwayman at the ticket barrier scratched his head as I passed, possibly unsure of his duty. Part way down the platform, yet another WRVS woman arrested my progress, glanced at my tag and thrust me into a compartment. Inside, children stared at me with incurious eyes. I seated myself next to a girl of roughly my own age. Her hair was arranged in untidy plaits and there was a dirty smudge on her nose.
"I'm Anna," I informed her.
"I'm Maisie," she replied. "Charmed, I'm sure."
I wondered whether this was sincere, sarcastic or merely a polite formula on which her mother insisted. We lapsed into silence.
Outside our compartment, the loud slamming of carriage doors and the wailing of distressed children overlay the usual hubbub of a large railway station. A whistle shrilled. At the front of the train, the locomotive coughed, our carriage shuddered and the wheels squeaked. The platform slipped past the window; the space was now empty but for the WRVS ladies and a couple of stray railwaymen. We rattled through a canyon of smoke-blackened brick.
"I wonder when we'll see our families again," I said.
"Mum says it'll soon blow over," Maisie replied.
"Do you believe her, Maisie?"
"She's my mum, Anna, but..."
Doubt clouded her eyes. I think that we both knew that we wouldn't soon return to London. My glance turned to the window and the now too-familiar X of tape, designed to prevent a bomb blast from filling the interior with jagged glass daggers; the sight reminded me of a teacher's mark against an arithmetic blunder. Perhaps I'd hoped to see a recognisable landmark beyond the taped X, but the view was both unfamiliar and unlovely. After seventeen minutes, by my watch, we entered the suburbs: the backs of semidetached houses with lawns that sloped down toward the railway track.
"You've got a watch," Maisie said, having evidently seen me consult my timepiece.
"It was a present from Mama and Papa, for my fourteenth birthday, a couple of months ago."
"I'm fourteen, too, and still at school. The same must go for you."
"Yes, it does. I'm working for the School Certificate. But how do you know?"
"They don't evacuate the workers, Anna. Aunt Flo told me that Bryant and May's were taking on girls, and wanted me to apply. 'It's just made for you,' she said, 'Bryant and Maisie's.' But Mum said 'no'. She wants me to pass exams, get an office job, and maybe marry the boss' son for a cushy life."
"If you had a job in the match factory, they'd have kept you in London?" I asked.
"Of course. The soldiers are going to need matches to light their cigs. And light the fuse of a bomb under Hitler's arse, I shouldn't wonder, if you'll pardon my French."
"Allumer une bombe sous le cul de Hitler," I translated. "If you'll pardon my French."
Maisie laughed, and I sensed we were friends.
An unkempt boy, who looked to be about ten or eleven years old, reached into the pocket of what may have been his father's cast-off jacket. He removed a packet of five Player's Weights, extracted a cigarette from the cream coloured box, placed it between his lips and struck a match.
"You shouldn't be smoking," Maisie reproved him.
"Mind your own business," he responded. He glanced meaningfully at the window; there was no sign to prohibit smoking. "This isn't a non-smoker."
"The kids today," Maisie said to me, "need a good deal more whacking than they get."
"Have you ever been whacked?" I asked.
"Of course, when I deserved it. And it kept me from going the way of some kids." She glared at the boy.
By now, we had left London far behind. The view beyond the window was of farmers' fields: some green in which cattle grazed, others dun coloured with what was probably wheat stubble. An aeroplane emerged from the cloudbanks; I hoped that it was one of ours. I glanced down at my dress: white with a small, rather busy, floral print.
A small girl removed a thick sandwich from her luggage; moments later, she had smeared scarlet jam over her face. Both Maisie's mother and mine had provided us with packed lunches, but we decided not to eat them yet. Who knew how far from London a place of safety might be? As morning became afternoon, and perhaps turned into evening, we might be sorry to have eaten too early.
At almost two o'clock, by my watch, we reached a small town, and halted at the station. Women's voices shouted and doors slammed. I would have liked to lean out of the window to see what was happening, but the pane refused to budge, no matter how hard Maisie, the children, and I tugged on the strap. Perhaps the X-shaped tape not only guarded against flying glass shards, but it also served to jam the window. A boy attempted to open the door, but the door catch proved as obstinate as the window strap.
"If I could open the window," he said, "I could reach down and turn the door handle from outside."
"If we could open the window," Maisie responded, "we could lean out of it to see what's going on, and wouldn't need to open the door."
Not only couldn't I see what was happening on the platform, but I failed to catch the station name. There would have been some comfort in knowing where we were more precisely than the already familiar official phrase 'somewhere in England'. I wondered whether the station name boards had been removed to confuse potential German parachutists, but perhaps the compartment window had merely failed to align with a board.
The noise subsided, apart from some further door slamming, and then the train squealed back into life. We were on our way again. The platform, and then the small town, slid past the window. Five minutes later, we rattled our way through farmland once more.
At half past two, I opened my packed lunch, and Maisie followed my example.
"Would you like to swap one of your sandwiches for one of mine?" Maisie asked.
"You may not like mine," I replied, "they're Marmite."
"I might as well try them, if you don't mind. There's a war on, and we're going to have to get used to a lot of new things."
I wondered at this. It was obviously true, but to what new things would I have to grow accustomed? The spanking I'd witnessed at the London terminus returned to mind, and Maisie's attitude to whacking.
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