CHAPTER 9
September 1939
Outside the Oxford train station, the cadre of exiled children walked in yet another line, this time past taxis and flashing red lights, over zebra crosswalks, and down a very long street. Along the way, the city’s grand steeples came into view. Its buildings were made of bulky stone, the fences of wrought iron. Streets curved around the high wooden gates of Oxford’s many colleges. The river of children flowed past cafés humming with business while students in black robes rushed past them before pausing with pity to stare.
The beauty of the city rose tall and mighty with pinnacles and towers, with arched and vectored windows carved into stone. A hopeful lightness grew in Hazel’s chest. They weren’t headed to the terrible part of a fairy tale with hags, witches, and dragons. She might, after all, have climbed onto the right train, the one with the good fortune. The townspeople crowding these sidewalks waved flags, cheering the children, as if they’d done something special, as if they were the ones to finally win the war.
“Welcome to Oxford!” a boy called out. Hazel stopped to look at him. He was possibly her age, taller, though, with a mop of curls that looked as if they could never be brushed out. He wore a faded gray wool jacket and a flat cap of black. He waved wildly at all the passing children.
Hazel hiked her knapsack higher on her shoulders and snap—the strap broke and her bag tumbled to the cobblestone street. Other children coming fast behind her stepped on her bag as her belongings scattered: her black sneakers and white cotton underthings, her yellow flowered dress and wood toothbrush. Feet trampled over all of it as she cried out, scrambling to recover her meager belongings among squashed cigarette cases, wrinkled toffee papers, and greasy newspapers once holding chips.
Sweeping it all into her hands, she attempted to shove the pile into her canvas bag. Then hands were there, everywhere, and all around her. She cried out and shoved someone away—no one would take the few things that belonged to her! Rough and soft hands grasped her knapsack. Flora gripped Hazel’s dress hem so as not to get caught in the tidal rush.
Hazel pushed hard at a body leaning over her, his hand picking up her hairbrush. She looked up to see the boy who’d hollered welcome. Hazel’s shove sent him to his bum. But he laughed, a full sound.
“I’m just trying to help. Here!” He gave her the brush, then a white shirt with a Peter Pan collar—her favorite, muddied by footprints.
With the crowd moving around them, Hazel jammed her things into the knapsack. It had been so neatly packed and was now a mess. Deep sobs she’d managed to suppress all day threatened. The boy stood and held out the knapsack to Hazel.
She got to her feet and took it from him. “Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome.”
Flora pulled at Hazel’s hand, pointing to their class moving away.
Hazel cast a last glance at the boy and ran toward the back of their group, pushing and shoving until they reached Miss Plink. Within minutes, they arrived at the town hall where families would choose which children they wanted to take home, like puppies for the kids or cows for their farm.
“He’ll do,” said a man’s deep voice.
Hazel held to Flora as tightly as her strength allowed while she watched the man in mud-flecked pants point at an older boy who wore overalls and a defiant grimace. Hazel undid her coat and wrapped one side around Flora so everyone would know they were one unit. Indivisible.
A woman, her gray hair wild and wiry, her clothes hanging about her like a potato sack with faded flowers, came to stand in front of Hazel and Flora. She stared at Flora with an intensity that made Hazel pull her coat closer around her sister. “What a lovely child!” Her voice was syrupy and slurred, a sickening sound.
“They are sisters,” said the man with the notebook and the uniform. “They go together.”
The woman looked down at Hazel, her eyes beady and dark like one of the crows perched on their backyard wall at home that dove for shiny things. Hazel wasn’t shiny, she knew that. But Flora was as glittery as a six-pence, as a diamond—a treasure. Her blond hair and button nose and wide eyes drew in everyone. Hazel didn’t measure up.
The hag—the word that bubbled into Hazel’s mind—turned away and hobbled down the row until she reached a girl with auburn hair so bright it looked on fire, falling over her shoulders in braids. Her face down, her dress crumpled in her little fists.
“You!” squawked the woman.
The girl’s tear-streaked face looked up.
“What’s your name, child?”
“Kelty Monroe.”
“I choose you.”
“No!” the girl cried out as the hag raised her hand for an officer.
“I’ll take this one,” the woman told the officer, wagging her finger Kelty’s way.
Hazel looked away, a bird of fear swooping and diving in her chest.
The room was full of children, some from her class and school, and just as many who Hazel didn’t recognize. They sat on benches crowded into the room while locals strolled through and selected children to billet at their home. A table ran across the far wall, with covered dishes of food for those not chosen by dinnertime. Some farmers first picked out the boys in their gray serge shorts or tweed pants. Childless families wanted cute girls in frilly lace dresses who looked like Shirley Temple or who were young enough to treat like dollies.
But who wanted a fourteen-year-old girl and her sister?
Hazel couldn’t tell if her stomach pangs were hunger or fear. What if no one chose them and she and Flora were left sitting on these hard benches while all the others went home with kind families to sit down at warm meals?
On the wall hung a poster, its top left corner undone and flapping. It featured a picture of a woman walking through rubble in a bombed-out city, smoke pouring from damaged buildings’ windows, a horrible scene. The bedraggled woman carried a baby while two dirt-smudged children clung to her coat as she trudged through this wasteland. On a beautiful blue background dissonant to the photo were the words THIS COULD BE YOU! CARING FOR EVACUEES IS A NATIONAL SERVICE. And just below, it read in smaller letters ISSUED BY THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH.
So, she and Flora had an official name: They were evacuees.
A woman in a blue dirndl skirt flaring out, smiling stiff and awkward like it was hard work, handed an enamel cup of milk to both girls and one chocolate biscuit each. They drank and ate eagerly. All the windows in this stuffy room with its low-slung beams were closed. Fresh autumn air was locked outside by thick doors that kept opening and shutting as adults arrived and left with children.
The smell of sweat and damp wool filled the air, and Flora said, “Take me to our land.”
“Not now,” Hazel whispered.
“Then tell another story, one where Mum takes us home.”
“She’s at home,” Hazel said, unable to make the leap into frivolous fantasy when reality loomed too ominously before them. Adults passed them in a line, sizing them up like tomatoes in the market.
“Make Mum be here,” Flora said. “Bring her here to get us.”
But Hazel couldn’t find the beginning of such a story. Her shoulders slumped as a pretty woman in a bright blue dress walked toward them in the line. Chestnut hair fell to her shoulders past her lace collar, and she wore a jaunty red hat cocked to one side. Her green eyes scrutinized the benches as if she were looking for her own child.
“Choose us,” Hazel whispered.
Flora looked up from Hazel’s shoulder and sat straight, Hazel’s coat dropping open. The woman smiled at them as she moved past. Then, next to the woman, Hazel spotted the boy who’d helped her in the street. He was with the beautiful woman. When he looked at Hazel, his face broke into a smile.
“You!” he said.
“Yes, me,” Hazel said in return.
“I’m Harry.” He stopped in front of Hazel and—even though there was no wind, not even the slightest breeze in that staid room—his hair seemed to move. “What’s your name?”
His mum, or whom Hazel assumed was his mum in the blue dress, had moved down the benches, smiling and nodding to hopeful children who either clung to each other or their dolls, blankets, and teddy bears.
Hazel lifted her chin, not wanting to show her fear. “I am Hazel Mersey Linden.”
“Mum!” Harry called, all the while his gaze remaining on Hazel.
“Yes, darling?” She turned, now about six children down the bench.
“Come here, please?” he asked.
She was quickly at his side, her red lipstick so bright that Hazel could have read her words as easily as hearing them.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I want you to meet Hazel.”
The lady with the lipstick and the red hat and the flowery dress glanced at Hazel, then at Flora. She smiled so kindly that Hazel’s hopes rose. She looked like the sort of lady who would be friends with their mum, the sort who laughed and made things in the stove that smelled like home, the kind of person who might read them books and draw pictures on blank sheets of paper with colored pencils.
“Hello, Hazel.” She looked back to Harry. “We need to choose a boy, son. Someone to help us. We can’t take home two girls.” Her voice was not cruel when she said it, not like the mean-faced hag with the wiry hair. She was kind even in her denial of his request.
Hazel’s heart fell. She squeezed Flora so tightly that her sister yelped.
“Mum,” Harry said in a playful voice as if they were outside in a game, “we don’t need more boys. We have me.”
She laughed and it sounded just as Hazel would have imagined: spritely and full of fun. The woman paused a few heartbeats, but that time felt as long and winding as the train ride here—the place Hazel’s parents had fallen in love, the place where Hazel and Flora were to live until Britain stopped the cruel man named Hitler and they could safely go home.
“Girls,” she said with a smile and a tilt of the head. “Where are you from?”
Flora answered before Hazel could open her mouth. “London, ma’am, Bloomsbury.”
“Well, I certainly do love Bloomsbury.” She turned to the boy. “Harry, that’s where Virginia Woolf was part of the Bloomsbury Group.”
Harry looked at Hazel. “Mum’s quite enamored of the Bloomsbury Group. Mum’s very Bohemian, secretly wishes she had been part of them—instead, she’s stuck being my mum.”
“Oh stop, you!” She gently kissed his cheek, and he didn’t pull away. This amazed Hazel: a boy who did not pull away from his mum’s affections in public, a boy who used words like enamored and Bohemian.
“And your parents?” the woman asked.
“Mum is working for the British Service, and Papa is already…” Hazel still couldn’t say a word that held such finality: dead.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman said, reading between the trembling lines in Hazel’s voice. “As for the billet, I only have one extra bed,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Flora popped off the bench, clinging to her bear with all her might, her fists tight around its hind legs. “We can share,” she said, voice trembling.
Hazel nodded. “It would be no trouble at all.”
The woman crouched down to look Flora in the eye. “Well, if it suits you, then of course you shall come home with us.”
Hazel felt her mouth drop open with surprise and relief.
Flora looked at Harry’s mum. “And Hazel can tell you stories. She tells the best stories!”
“That sounds wonderful,” said the lady. “My name is Bridgette Aberdeen.”
“I’m Hazel Mersey Linden.”
“I’m Flora Lea Linden.”
Their introductions overlapped.
“Lovely to meet you both.”
Hazel saw Flora through Mrs. Aberdeen’s eyes: an adorable child with an air of naivete and kindness. Flora was the best of them, not just of the Linden family but of all the children who’d arrived by train that day.
Bridgette Aberdeen stood and adjusted her hat. She raised her hand to the officer at the end of the bench. “These two children will be coming home with us.”