Simon Tolkien - No Man’s Land

Adam blamed his father for his mother’s death and for abandoning him in the workhouse. He was angry with his father, angrier than he had ever been with anyone in his whole life, and yet he longed for his father to return and take him away as he’d promised. But he heard nothing. It was as if he had been forgotten, walled up and left to rot like the Frenchman in the iron mask in the story that his mother had read to him the year before from a book that she’d bought second-hand from the barrow man.

In the workhouse only the birds were free, able to escape. Adam looked up through the skylights in the workroom and saw them circling overhead and remembered an autumn evening years and years before when his mother had come and woken him. He was sleepy and she had carried him down the stairs and out of the door and pointed up into the misty sky where he could make out the shapes of hundreds of low-flying swallows, calling to one another as they flew over.

‘Where are they going?’ he’d asked.

‘To Africa where it’s warm. They’ll be back in the spring. Aren’t they wonderful, Adam?’ she’d said – and he thought for a moment that he could hear her voice in his head like a distant echo. The vividness of the unexpected memory jolted him – it seemed significant, as if his mother was communicating with him in some invisible way. Suddenly the hope that had been draining out of him ever since her death returned. And when Daniel arrived at the workhouse the next day with two third-class railway tickets in his hand, it was almost as if Adam was expecting him.

The destination was somewhere Adam had never heard of – a place called Scarsdale.

‘Where is it?’ he asked as they came out through the workhouse door into the early-morning sunshine.

‘In the north,’ said Daniel.

Adam saw his father was smiling, as though he didn’t have a care in the world, and it made him angry. ‘How far in the north?’ he asked.

‘A long way.’

‘Well, I hope it’s as far away as Australia,’ said Adam fiercely. ‘Because I never want to see this place again and I never want to remember that you put me here.’

‘I had no choice,’ said Daniel, biting his lip.

‘There’s always a choice,’ said Adam.

Daniel didn’t answer. He’d seen inside the workhouse and he felt ashamed of having left his son in such a place, and he also sensed obscurely that he didn’t have the same authority over him that he’d had before. The last weeks had changed Adam: he was no longer a boy even if he was not yet a man. Daniel had mixed feelings about the transformation: he mourned the past but he was also glad, knowing that Adam would need all the inner strength and independence he could muster to survive in the place where they were going.

They reached the end of the street and turned the corner and Adam didn’t once look back.

The train left in the evening and Adam and his father waited on the platform under the huge vaulted roof of the station as the day turned to dusk and everything around them dissolved into a blue and grey mist of vapour and smoke, pierced here and there by the pallid glow of the tall arc lights. Across from where they were sitting, they could see the rich coming and going through the door of the first-class restaurant: tall men in frock coats with hats and gloves escorting ladies in narrow-waisted hobble skirts who minced slowly along, their heads almost invisible under elaborate feathered hats. They reminded Adam of the flamingoes that he had seen at the zoo years before, inhabitants of an unknowable world operating on principles entirely outside his understanding.

As the departure time approached the platform filled up and Adam felt his heart beating hard. He knew Euston from days spent in the shadow of the great arch, earning coppers loading and unloading luggage for cabbies at the roadside, but he had never been on a train. He had never been outside London.

He heard the locomotive before he saw it – the scream of its whistle, the screech of engaging brakes, the hiss of steam; and then emerging out of the great pall of smoke came the black-and-red engine, a breathing, snorting mammoth of incredible power. And suddenly there was a frenzy of activity: carriage doors opening and disgorging passengers all the way down the line; porters and guards shouting, holding back the pressing crowd.

‘Come on,’ said Daniel, picking up his bag, and Adam almost lost his father in a sea of shabby jackets and cloth caps but caught sight of him at the last moment waving from the running board. He pushed forward and felt his father’s hand on his, pulling him up into the train.

Inside the compartment they found seats, perched on the ends of two wooden benches, facing each other in the flickering gaslight. Doors slammed and the shouts of the people outside were stilled by the guard’s whistle as the train spluttered back into life and began to pull away from the platform, picking up speed as it headed north, running smoothly along steel viaducts built high above the poor streets where Adam had grown up.

He closed his eyes and thought again of his mother: the leaving of London felt like a betrayal, as if he was leaving her behind too, somewhere back there in the smoky darkness, deliberately severing his last connection with her forever. He knew he was being irrational – that she was gone already – but that didn’t help with the raw tearing emptiness he felt inside whenever he forgot she was dead and then suddenly remembered. He hated that he couldn’t think of her without pain. It made him angry, and he realized that he was angry with her too – because she was supposed to explain these things to him and now she couldn’t.

He shook his head hard as if to expel his thoughts and opened his eyes. His father was looking at him intently, as if he was trying to read his mind.

‘I’m sorry, Adam. I know this is hard.’ Daniel spoke slowly, leaning forward towards his son. ‘It’s hard for me too. But we’ve got no choice. London will chew us up and spit us out if we stay; it’s a cruel town and it’s hurt us enough already.’

Adam nodded, not knowing how to respond. They’d hardly talked all day – the death of Adam’s mother and the weeks in the workhouse had set Adam against his father, and he had repeatedly rebuffed Daniel’s attempts at conversation. But, in spite of himself, he had begun to sense a change in his father. Daniel seemed more thoughtful, less driven. Adam had seen how he had said nothing when they had sat watching the rich men and women coming and going at the station dressed in all their finery. In the past he wouldn’t have been able to resist a political commentary accompanied by plentiful statistics about the unfair distribution of wealth in society, but today he had seemed hardly to notice. Adam wondered what the change meant for the future.

‘What’s this place where we’re going?’ he asked, looking out into the night. Surrounded by strangers in the spartan compartment, rushing forward on the express train towards a new unknown world, he felt apprehensive and hoped for reassurance.

‘Scarsdale? It’s a small coal-mining town not far from the sea. The north is full of places just like it. Everyone works at the mine, on the surface or down below. And it’s hard work, harder than you can imagine, which makes the people hard—’ Daniel stopped in mid-sentence, smiling at his inarticulacy. ‘But not mean, not cruel – miners stick together; by and large they’re good people.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve worked with them. Not in Scarsdale but further south – in Nottinghamshire where I grew up.’

‘You were a miner?’ Adam asked, sounding surprised. He couldn’t imagine his father as anything other than a builder. That’s what he’d been all Adam’s life.