Chris Cleave: Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“May I have one?” said the small voice.

“Beautifully asked,” said Mary. “And no. Not until you are eleven.”

From the muster point came the sound of a tin whistle. It could mean that heavy bombers were converging on London, or it could mean that the children had been organized into two roughly matched teams to begin a game of rounders.

Zachary poked his head up through the straw. It still amazed Mary to see his brown skin, his chestnut eyes. The first time he had smiled, the flash of his pink tongue had delighted her. She had imagined it would be — well, not brown also, but certainly as antithetical to pink as brown skin was to white. A bluish tongue, perhaps, like a skink’s. It would not have surprised her to learn that his blood came out black and his feces a pale ivory. He was the first Negro she had seen up close — if one didn’t count the posters advertising minstrelsy and coon shows — and she still struggled not to gawk.

The straw clung to his hair. “Miss?’ he said. “Why did they take the animals away?”

“Different reasons in each case,” said Mary, counting them off on her fingers. “The hippopotami because they are such frightful cowards, the wolves since one can never be entirely sure whose side they are on, and the lions because they are to be parachuted directly into Berlin Zoo to take on Herr Hitler’s big cats.”

“So the animals are at war too?”

“Well of course they are. Wouldn’t it be absurd if it were just us?”

The boy’s expression, suggesting that he had not previously taken the matter under consideration.

“What are two sevens?” asked Mary, taking advantage.

The boy began his reckoning, in the deliberate and dutiful manner of a child who intended to persevere at least until he ran out of fingers. Not for the first time that week, Mary suppressed both a smile and a delightful suspicion that teaching might not be the worst way to spend the idle hours between breakfast and society.

On Tuesday morning, after taking the register and before distributing milk in little glass bottles, Mary had written the names of her thirty-one children on brown luggage labels and looped them through the top buttonholes of their overcoats. Of course the children had exchanged labels with one another the second her back was turned. They were only human, even if they hadn’t yet made the effort to become tall.

And of course she had insisted on calling them by their exchanged names — even for boys named Elaine and girls named Peter — while maintaining an entirely straight face. It delighted her that she could make them laugh so easily. It turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.

“Is it twelve?” said Zachary.

“Is what twelve?”

“Two sevens, ” he reminded her, in the exasperated tone reserved for adults who asked questions with no thought to the expenditure of emotion that went into answering.

Mary nodded her apology. “Twelve is jolly close.”

The tin whistle, sounding again. Above the enclosures, seagulls wheeled in hope. The memory of feeding time persisted. Mary felt an ache. All the world’s timetables fluttered through blue sky now, vagrant on the winds.

“Thirteen?”

Mary smiled. “Would you like me to show you? You’re a bright boy but you’re ten years old and you are miles behind with your numbers. I don’t believe anyone can have taken the trouble to teach you.”

She knelt in the straw, took his hands — it still amazed her that they were no hotter than white hands — and showed him how to count forward seven more, starting from seven. “Do you see now? Seven, plus seven more, is fourteen. It is simply about not stopping.”

“Oh.”

The surprised and disappointed air boys had when magic yielded so bloodlessly to reason.

“So what would be three sevens, Zachary, now you have two of them already?”

He examined his outstretched fingers, then looked up at her.

“How long?” he said.

“How long what?”

“How long are they sending us away for?”

“Until London is safe again. It shouldn’t be too long.”

“I’m scared to go to the country. I wish my father could come.”

“None of the parents can come with us. Their work is vital for the war.”

“Do you believe that?”

Mary shook her head briskly. “Of course not. Most people’s work is nonsense at the best of times, don’t you think? Actuaries and loss adjusters and professors of Eggy-peggy. Most of them would be more useful reciting limericks and stuffing their socks with glitter.”

“My father plays in the minstrel show at the Lyceum. Is that useful?”

“For morale, certainly. If minstrels weren’t needed I daresay they’d have been evacuated days ago. On a gospel train, don’t you think?”

The boy refused to smile. “They won’t want me in the countryside.”

“Why on earth wouldn’t they?”

The pained expression children had, when one was irredeemably obtuse.

“Oh, I see. Well, I daresay they will just be awfully curious. I suppose you can expect to be poked and prodded a little, but once they understand that it won’t wash off I’m sure they won’t hold it against you. People are jolly fair, you know.”

The boy seemed lost in thought.

“Anyway,” said Mary, “I’m coming to wherever-it-is we’re going. I promise I shan’t leave you.”

“They’ll hate me.’

“Nonsense. Was it minstrels who invaded Poland? Was it a troupe of theater Negroes who occupied the Sudetenland?”

He gave her a patient look.

“See?” said Mary. “The countryside will prefer you to the Germans.”

“I still don’t want to go.”

“Oh, but that’s the fun of it, don’t you see? It’s a simply enormous game of go-where-you’re-jolly-well-told. Everyone who’s anyone is playing.”

She was surprised to realize that she didn’t mind it at all, being sent away. It really was a giant roulette — this was how one ought to see it. The children would get a taste of country air, and she… well, what was the countryside if not numberless Heathcliffs, loosely tethered?

Let us imagine, she thought, that this war will surprise us all. Let us suppose that the evacuation train will take us somewhere wild, far from these decorous streets where every third person has an anecdote about my mother, or votes in my father’s constituency.

She imagined herself in the country, in a pretty village of vivid young people thrown into a new pattern by the war. It would be like the turning of a kaleidoscope, only with gramophones and dancing. Just to show her friend Hilda, she would fall in love with the first man who was even slightly interesting.

She squeezed the colored boy’s hand, delighted by his smile as her bright mood made the junction. “Come on,” she said, “shall we get back to the others before they have all the fun?”

They stood up from the straw and she brushed the child down. He was a bony, startle-eyed thing — giving the impression of being thoroughly X-rayed — with an insubordinate crackle of black hair. She shook her head, laughing.

“What?”

“Zachary Lee, I honestly don’t know why we bother evacuating you. You look as if you’ve been bombed already.”

He scowled. “Well, you smoke like this.”

He gave his impression of Mary smoking like Bette Davis, as if the burning Craven “A” generated a terrific amount of lift. The cigarette, straining to rise, straightened the wrist nicely and lifted the first and second fingers into the gesture of a bored saint offering benediction.

“Yes, that’s it!” said Mary. “But do show me how you would do it.”