Sunday morning looks like it’s been washed out and hung up to dry after the storm. The streets are littered with broken branches, twigs and pinecones. You can see where the sea broke over the breakwaters and washed down Oyster Road. I bike through puddles all the way to Chaz’s shop to pick up the Sunday papers. The sky’s an amazing blue, but it’s absolutely freezing. I can’t help worrying how Mohammed is after such a terrible night. But I have to do my paper route first.
Anyway Kim is coming over soon. What will she say when I tell her?
When I arrive at the shop Chaz is still sorting out the orders so I glance at the headlines. There’s all the usual stuff about drugs and wars, but one of the cheaper papers has this huge headline:
STOP ASYLUM MADNESS
It gives me a jolt and I start reading, almost expecting to see mine and Samir’s names printed all over the page, accusing us of hiding someone. I scan down the page.
Bogus immigrants are ripping us off!
“These asylum seekers get everything for free. I’m bringing my kids up on the poverty line and we don’t get nothing,” says Carol Jones of Southsea, Hants.
Well, that’s rubbish for a start, Mr. Spicer showed us the figures, we only get 2.7 percent of all those millions of people who have to run away. And I’ve seen where Samir lives. It’s tiny.
What are you supposed to do if your family are arrested and tortured? If Samir had stayed in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was in charge, he would have been murdered too.
I feel myself getting so angry at the headlines I have to run instead of walk my paper route, pulling the cart at breakneck speed to cool down. Quiet little Hayling where I’ve lived all my life with Mum and Dad and then Grandpa, going to school with Kim and playing on the beach, suddenly feels so strange, with hidden corners and people arriving in terrible trouble. How do I know what the Islanders would think about hiding Mohammed?
“Still in training, Alix?” It’s Bert’s divorced son, leaning over the garden gate waiting for his paper. He’s almost as bald as his dad and he looks as if he’s wearing the same scruffy jacket. I skid to a halt and, pulling his paper out of my cart, I can’t help wondering if he does everything the same as his dad. That would be a bit lame, wouldn’t it? At least his dad is still around.
The huge Sunday papers feel heavier than ever and I have to make sure I leave them on a dry spot on people’s doorsteps, otherwise they ring Chaz up and complain like mad, and with things the way they are at home, I need this job more than ever.
I think about Grandpa and what he would say about those headlines in the paper. He definitely wouldn’t agree. Grandpa believed in justice and standing up for what’s right. He wouldn’t have let Mohammed die on the beach. He would have rescued him and kept him safe until he could get help for him.
I know this for sure because when Grandpa was a teenager like me he went on a real-life war adventure to Dunkirk. The British army was stranded there; hundreds of thousands of men on the beaches being bombed to bits. So his dad and his uncle, Wilf, went with all the other little ships to bring the soldiers home.
“There was five boats went from Hayling,” Grandpa told me. “They all got letters from the navy telling them to come to Ramsgate and bring food for three days.” He showed me his dad’s letter, addressed to JP Knight, Grandpa’s father. Him and his brother, Wilf, were boatbuilders, working at the local yard. “The navy knew who to ask,” said Grandpa.
His dad and Uncle Wilf needed Grandpa to go with them to help crew. Grandpa had been out in all weathers on the boats since he was little. They knew they could rely on him.
I suppose Grandpa could have said no, like when I didn’t want to help Samir with Mohammed. He was only fourteen, like me, well, I’m nearly fifteen.
Of course his mum was against it, said he was too young to get killed at sea. But Grandpa wouldn’t listen. “I didn’t wait to be asked twice,” he said. “Fourteen is the right age to be if you’re needed, Alix, and you’re strong enough.”
It was May 27, 1940, when they sailed out of the Solent in their little boat, the Saxonia. “It were almost twenty-four hours to Ramsgate, even leaving with the tide,” said Grandpa. “We didn’t get there until dawn the next day.”
They had to sign on with the navy for a week. They pretended Grandpa was seventeen and they even got paid. “Five shillings,” said Grandpa with a grin. “That’s about fifty pence today.”
The Saxonia was one of the smallest boats, only thirty feet long. “So they towed us with some others,” said Grandpa, “to save on fuel. A right proper sight we was, all them fishing boats and paddleboats and barges from up the Thames. There were even a ferry from Hayling, the Southsea Belle. All chugging across the Channel to Dunkirk.”
They knew they were near France when they saw huge plumes of black smoke on the horizon. “I didn’t really understand about going into a war,” said Grandpa. “It were like an adventure for a boy like me.”
But then they got within range of the batteries firing from the coast. There were huge explosions in the water all around their boat. “A pleasure steamer near us copped it, and sank immediately. Our boat nearly capsized in the wash,” Grandpa said. “We heard after that forty people on board had been killed.”
It must have been terrifying. And I’m scared now, Grandpa, I almost say out loud as I put Mrs. Saddler’s newspaper carefully on her Welcome doormat. I’m scared she’s going to open the door and ask me what I was doing on the beach yesterday and then going into the Nature Reserve, because you’re not supposed to go through the fence. I can hear Jeremy yapping away so I scoot off quickly before she opens the door.
It feels weird sneaking about behind the neighbors’ backs. At least Grandpa had his dad to tell him what to do as they steered the boat toward the beaches. My dad’s so useless.
“When we got close to the shore,” Grandpa said, “we could see it was literally crawling with men. And there were long lines of them standing in the water up to their waists waiting to get away. They’d been there all day, freezing cold, and they was being bombed and shot at all the time.”
It made me shiver just to listen to him. I could never be so brave, could I?
“There was bodies floating in the water too. I’d never seen a dead man before,” said Grandpa, and he’d suck on his pipe and stare at the living room wall.
“One man was so weak he couldn’t get in the boat, so I jumped in the water to help push him in. I was in it up to my neck. By golly, it were cold!”
But not as cold as the sea around Hayling in winter.
They got twenty men on board and then Uncle Wilf and Grandpa literally had to shove two others back in the water because the boat was overloaded. “It were terrible to hear them crying out to us,” said Grandpa.
Once they were full they had to sail off to one of the big destroyers waiting a mile out at sea. The water was teeming with all the little ships ferrying the men to safety. “We worked solid for two days, hardly stopping for a bite or a bit of shut-eye,” said Grandpa. “A lot of the men had dogs with them. We ended up with a little golden-haired spaniel. The soldier with her died of wounds before we got him back to Dover.”
Mum would shake her head and bang the iron down hard on Grandpa’s shirt whenever we got to that part of the story, and I’d stroke Trudy’s soft spaniel ears and wonder how she would have coped in the bombing.
“We called her Maisie,” Grandpa would say with a smile. “She lived for eight years. Plucky little thing she were.”
After two days ferrying to and fro, the gearbox on the Saxonia went and Grandpa, his dad and Uncle Wilf decided to call it a day.
They turned around and headed for home, Spitfires and German Stukas slugging it out over their heads. It must have been so scary and amazing too.
“Uncle Wilf reckoned we saved two hundred fifty-three men all told,” said Grandpa.
Now as I finish my route and head back to the shop I think, It’s my turn now. No need to be asked twice, like Grandpa said.
But I’m terrified and I’m only saving one poor bloke. Grandpa saved hundreds.