Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

I did have some friends at Muckling Abbot, though I might have given you the impression I hadn’t. And it was just now hitting me that I wouldn’t be seeing them again for years, if at all.

I found Dot and Lizzy in our dorm. They’d had the same idea as me about skipping assembly and were sitting on the beds and watching videos on their tablets.

‘Are you OK?’ asked Lizzy. ‘What did Miss Clatworthy want?’

‘She wasn’t ghastly, was she?’ asked Dot, who said things like ‘ghastly’ on account of being just as posh as Annabel and Finty, without ever being so snotty about it.

‘It was just army stuff,’ I said, looking at the floor and the ceiling and the video of patriotic cats rather than at my friends’ faces.

‘Do you at least know where you’re going yet?’ asked Dot.

‘Oh… haha, sort of…’ I said. ‘What about you?’

Lizzy snorted glumly. ‘In the government programme. Staying with some random family in Cornwall.’

‘Cornwall’s supposed to be nice!’ I said rather too brightly.

‘Still don’t know for sure,’ said Dot. ‘But I’ve got cousins in the south of France.’

‘Oh, that’s brilliant!’ I said. ‘It’s still even sunny there, isn’t it?’

‘Sometimes. Supposedly. But Alice, where are you being evacuated?’

So I told them. There was a pause and then they both started being nice about it.

‘Well, that’s… cool,’ said Lizzy. ‘You’ll probably see some really interesting stuff.’

‘And the robots,’ Dot said.

‘Yeah, the robots,’ I said. ‘But it won’t be that great being stuck on a rock with hardly any oxygen and no way home. They’re using us for an experiment, really.’ Which was true but I said it because I didn’t want it to seem like this amazing special treatment I was getting and they weren’t. But that didn’t work very well because it was amazing special treatment I was getting and they weren’t. Although I would have preferred to go to the south of France.

Dot and Lizzy said they wouldn’t tell anyone and I don’t think they did. But it didn’t really make much difference, because the next morning a lot of buses turned up at the school gates and it became rather conspicuous that I was not getting on to any of them. People started looking at me in a suspicious and accusing way and I could hardly stand it. Of course, they guessed something was up and that it must be something to do with who my mum was. And I almost felt glad Annabel Stoker and Finty Carmichael used to give me a hard time, because in the end the EEC thought my life was worth more than theirs and it wasn’t fair. And so they’d kind of been right about me all along.

Finally the last bus pulled away and everyone had gone, except for the people boarding up the windows and Mrs Skilton, who seemed to be the person who’d got stuck with me until someone from the EEC came. Mrs Skilton was my favourite dinner lady, not because she was nice but because she was gloomy and dour and silent and didn’t prance around the dining hall chirruping about how everyone who did not eat up every scrap was basically evil because think of the starving Canadians.

Mrs Skilton grunted with vague contempt – either for me or for the universe in general – and then stood there on the terrace smoking a cigarette and glowering balefully into the icy distance. Which was pretty much what I’d been doing the day before on the battlements, so I didn’t judge and wandered off on my own, and she didn’t stop me.

It was sort of interesting seeing Muckling Abbot with no one in it, although lonely too, and I went into all the places I hadn’t been allowed before. I went into the staffroom and ate some biscuits I found there. I drew a little picture of the Earth on the wall in green biro with an arrow pointing to it and next to it I wrote, ‘ALICE DARE WAS HERE.’ And I wondered if anyone would ever find it or if the school would fall down under all the snow and ice before that happened.

Then Mrs Skilton bawled that the EEC man was here and I went down to the drive and there was a jeep painted in whitish-grey camouflage and a young soldier waiting for me.

Mrs Skilton dragged on her cigarette and announced fiercely, ‘I don’t hold with messing about on other planets, ’ which rather took me aback, and then she grimaced in farewell and stomped off.

I got into the jeep and we drove away and I knew I’d never see Muckling Abbot again. And I never did.

The soldier’s name was Harris and amazingly he did not say a single thing about my mum and I quite liked him. He glanced back at Muckling Abbot’s icy towers and grinned and said, ‘Wow, my school was mainly portakabins,’ and I said my primary school in Peterborough had been much more like that too, but presumably on Mars it would be something else altogether.

‘So, you’ll be safe out of the fighting for four years,’ he said, when I’d finished explaining the new arrangements for my future.

‘Yes. Well. In theory.’ I tried not to think about all the various things that could go wrong between Lincolnshire and Mars. ‘It’s a privilege, I’m very lucky,’ I added dutifully.

‘But, in return, you have to join the army.’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though you’re twelve. ’

‘Yes.’ It sounded awfully grim put like that, for all Miss Clatworthy’s cooing about how brilliant it was. ‘They’re only going to be training us,’ I said. ‘It’s just, we’ve got to start young so we can be this new wave of special fighters or whatever. I won’t be actually up against Morrors until I’m oh, at least sixteen.’

‘Hmm,’ said Harris, and made a face as if something smelled bad.

‘Everyone’s in the army,’ I said. ‘ You ’ re in the army.’

‘I wasn’t when I was twelve. And I did have a choice.’

‘Well, that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?’ I said. Because he was grown up.

This did not cheer Harris up particularly, so I asked him what he’d been doing in the war and he sighed and said he hadn’t been doing anything for a long time because he’d been hurt by Morror shockrays over Norway and had only just got better. ‘And after all that, look what they’ve got me doing. Ferrying little kids about.’

He smiled and I got the impression he was actually pretty pleased to be ferrying kids about, compared to some of the stuff he could have been up to.

We drove through a few little villages, some of which were completely abandoned to the cold, but some still busy and pretty with their snow-covered roofs, and except for the queues outside shops everything looked as if there was no war with aliens going on at all.

‘Still, seeing Mars , though,’ mused Harris, as if he’d been carrying on a debate about it in his head. ‘That’s something. Are you excited?’

I said, ‘Yes,’ automatically because life is generally easier if you answer such questions the way the person asking them obviously wants you to, but I really hadn’t been excited until then because I’d been busy thinking about Lizzy and Dot and Miss Clatworthy and Mum and about having to be in the army myself and other such considerations. Still it was a good question because it made me wonder for the first time if I could be excited. After all, I was going to be one of the first children living on another planet; anyone ought to be at least mildly excited about that. So I cheered up a bit and made an effort to stay that way.

We drove for about three hours or so, and eventually the snow thinned out and the landscape was mostly brown and grey instead of just white, and there were hundreds and hundreds of greenhouses growing food, and it was still pretty bleak but at least it was easier to play I Spy.