Ulden station is usually a quiet and orderly place. It seldom sees more than five passengers at a time, and the station master, Mr Fell, a patient and domestic man, has both time and inclination to cherish it. The platform is clean and tidy, the name of the station is spelt out in flowers against a well-trimmed, grassy bank, and the Victorian waiting-room is lit by gas and warmed by a coal fire. Technically, the waiting-room is for the convenience of First Class passengers only, but in the winter months Mr Fell opens it to Third Class passengers as well.
Today the station is noisy, crowded and confused, and Mr Fell is suffering from an attack of asthma and gasping for breath in his office. The church bell rings out a kindly and welcoming peal – the last one for some time, since the Government is the next day to ban all bell ringing in case it assists the Germans in some way; the train which should never have stopped (as only Mr Fell knows, and he is too breathless to say), lets off steam; the Evacuation Officer reads out, undaunted, the names of children who do not exist.
Children cry, adults protest, dogs bark.
Edwin Songford, as is his custom, takes over. He silences the Evacuation Officer, the bells and the steam. He administers brandy from a hip flask (silver and leather, lined with glass) to Mr Fell, and establishes what is long since obvious, that either the train has stopped at the wrong station or contains the wrong children.
Evacuees had been expected from Hackney, in the East End. These children come from Kilburn, in West London.
Undaunted, indeed encouraged – for the reputation of the East End evacuees, who cannot tell an armchair from a WC, and who are followed everywhere by cunning, foul-mouthed, ferocious mothers, whom neither manners, lack of a bed, nor Government decree can keep away, has already spread amongst the more respectable classes of England – Edwin instructs the assembled villagers and gentry to select their own West London children according to taste. There is a rush for the strongest boys, and the most domestic looking girls.
Marjorie is left.
Grace, looking at her, sees the child most likely to depress her mother and irritate her father. She tugs Edwin’s arm.
‘Let’s have that one,’ says Grace.
‘We’ll have to,’ says Edwin. ‘It’s the only one left.’
And wham, bam, so our lives are ordered.
But perhaps, if we look deeper, people are nicer and fate is kinder than we at first assume. Perhaps Grace did not choose Marjorie from spite, but because she perceived a child who expressed outwardly what she herself felt inwardly, and she wanted to help.
And perhaps it was not cupboard love which drove Chloe to choose The Poplars as her second home, and Esther as a second mother, and Grace and Marjorie as her friends, but her recognition of their grief, and their inner homelessness. It was not that she used them, or that they used each other, but simply that they all clung together for comfort.
Well.