Out of the Blackout (2 page)

None of which solved the problem of who Simon was, or how he had come to be there in Yeasdon. After some frustrating days of telephoning in the intervals he had from teaching (for twenty-one extra pupils caused great disruption in a village school, particularly sharp, mischievous, cunning town children), Mr Thurston took to writing letters.

But if telephoning into a London blitzed into near-chaos was difficult, writing was hardly more satisfactory. Sometimes he got a reply, sometimes he did not. He established that there had been one other train for evacuees leaving Paddington at around the same time as the one for Yeasdon, but when, after innumerable frustrations and misconnections, he talked with the teacher who had gone with that train, now evacuated to rural Oxfordshire, she told him there had been no child missing from her group, and nobody by the name of Simon Thorn was known to her. When, eventually, he wrote again to Hackney to ask them to check up on the boy called Terence Stope, he had a letter back to say that Terence, with his mother, had been killed in a raid two weeks after Simon Thorn had arrived in Yeasdon.

People began to talk. Some of the foster parents asked their billeted kids if they knew who Simon Thorn was. Oh yes, they all knew who he was: he went to school with them in Yeasdon. Yes, but had they known him
before
they were evacuated? None of them had ever seen him before that momentous journey from Paddington Station. Then one of the foster mothers had a bright idea. The Hackney boy who was now mixing fairly happily with, and lording it over, her own children had been one of the last to be collected from the group. His name was Simon. And on the station platform, just beside the waiting-room outside which they had all been assembled, was a thorn bush. What if . . . ?

The mother kept this idea to herself for several days, but when no solution was in sight to the mystery of who was Simon Thorn, she mentioned it to Mrs Sellerman.

Obviously they had to talk to Simon himself.

But here they came up against the barrier of Dot Cutheridge, who was a formidable countrywoman, and very protective.

‘It'll all sort itself out,' she said, comfortably. ‘He's got a good
mother, that anyone can see from the state of his clothes. She'll make sure she finds out where he is. It's some official up there who's got himself into a right ol' tangle. What do you want to go worriting the poor child for?'

But when she said this, Mrs Cutheridge was not revealing all she thought on the subject. For she had wondered—over and over, if the truth be known—whether Simon's mother might not have been killed in an air raid after Simon had left for the station, or on any one of those terrible nights of early May. And wondering did lead to hoping, sinful though she knew this to be. Still, in the long run, even Dot Cutheridge had to back down, and concede that some sort of unofficial investigation would have to take place.

‘But I'm not having you bully the child,' she said, and she sat in on all the questioning.

Simon's possessions, Mrs Sellerman found, were unexceptionable but sparse. A change of outer clothing and a spare vest and underpants. A pair of pyjamas. No spare socks or tie. A flannel, but no soap, or toothpaste, or towel. A Teddy-bear, and a large model of the Royal Scot locomotive. Several model cars. There was a little drawing pad, but no name on it, or school. It had pictures of houses, large flowers with an immense sun behind them, and some matchstick people. On one page there was the beginning of a story: ‘There was once a boy cald James who went to the moon.' The story petered out after two or three sentences. Mrs Sellerman said to the Rev. Wise, who was helping her with the investigation, that there were very few clothes to an awful lot of children's things, almost as though he'd packed himself. Because the toys must have taken up most of the space in the tiny suitcase.

‘It doesn't quite fit with the care she's taken of his clothes,' she said. ‘And then not to send his ration book!'

‘But then, Londoners,' said Mr Wise.

When Simon was asked, he said he lived in Sparrow Street. He didn't know where Sparrow Street was, but that was where he lived. Or if not
in
Sparrow Street, just off Sparrow Street. He lived with his Mummy. What was his Mummy called? Why, Mummy of course. And there were others in the house—Grandma, and Auntie and, oh, others. Nothing in the way of names could be got out of him at all. They asked him what
Sparrow Street was like, and he said it had houses down both sides. Was there anything notable nearby? Anywhere he liked to go? Oh yes, there was a sweetshop, but he didn't remember what street that was in. Did he go to school? Yes, he went to school. Where was the school? Just down the road. What was the name of the school? Simon said that at home they just called it school.

The investigation committee went off to make what they could of this information. Dot Cutheridge imagined them scanning street maps of London for Sparrow Street, and that indeed was what they did. They found only one, and the Rev. Wise, on one of his rare wartime visits to his club in London, actually made his way there. It was in the Alexandra Palace area, and it contained a gas works and three houses, one of them bombed and empty. Neither of the other two housed anyone by the name of Thorn, nor did anyone in the two streets leading off from it know anyone of that name. Sparrow Street was a washout.

Mrs Cutheridge had rather thought it would be. She was getting a very good idea of how Simon's mind worked, and even during the questioning she had remembered how earlier that morning her Tom had been telling Simon the names of the birds in the back garden.

Mrs Cutheridge, in fact, was beginning in her level-headed, commonsensical way to be confident. Simon was a lovely child, she knew that, and loving too. Nothing could be warmer or nicer than his gratitude for all she did for him, for the wonderful farmhouse food she cooked, for the clothes she managed to buy, or procure the material to make. Soon—and this was even better—gratitude was replaced by a simple acceptance: he took it as a matter of course that she and Tom were his protectors and providers. And though Tom said often enough: ‘We mustn't build up our hopes,' everybody knew he had built them up long ago. As he often used to say at work: ‘We've become a family.'

Not that everything was sunlight. There had been one drawback to Dot's happiness in those first few weeks, one troubling incident, one fright. This, of course, she had told no one, and neither had Tom. The first nights after he had arrived, Simon had slept well—almost too well. The sleep of exhaustion, Dot had called it; she had been a nursery maid up at Sir Henry's, and
she knew exhausted children when she saw them. ‘All them raids, night after night,' she said, ‘tiring him out. Poor little soul.'

But as Simon settled down, she made sure he paced himself better: active enough, but not too active. Then his nights were sometimes more restless. Downstairs, listening to a wireless turned very low, Dot heard him cry out—a whimper, like a dreaming puppy's. She soon realized that his sleep was filled with dreams, not all of them pleasant. In some of them, to judge by his movements and his exclamations, he seemed positively afraid. And then in one of them he cried out—as he was to cry out perhaps once every two or three months for the first year or more after his coming to Yeasdon. The first time she heard it, Dot Cutheridge was standing at the stairhead, listening by the open door, and Tom was shifting uneasily from foot to foot at the bottom of the stairs. The boy had cried out earlier, and now the words that came from him were far from clear—were stifled, it seemed, by terror. But Dot over the early weeks had got used to Simon's speech—some childish habits, some Londonisms. She swore she understood him now, as he cried out in his sleep, and Tom believed her:

‘Don't!' the boy called Simon had shouted. ‘Don't do that! Stop it—please stop it! Don't hit her! Don't kill her!
DON'T!'

S
imon Thorn never set foot in London again until the Autumn of nineteen-fifty-six.

By then he was known to everyone as Simon Cutheridge. For a time his friends at school and people in the village had called him Thorn or Cutheridge indiscriminately; gradually, as he became so evidently a part of the family, they all settled down to the latter. But the Cutheridges did not, in those early years, make any attempt to adopt him legally, thinking that to do so would be to tempt fortune, to invite inquiries, perhaps to incur publicity that would bring down Nemesis upon them. In spite of their fears, there was never a challenge, in all the years of Simon's boyhood. When he was eighteen, a small notice was put in the local paper making his assumption of their name legal.

For a reason less logical, more superstitious, Dot and Tom Cutheridge would never take him to London. For most of the inhabitants of Yeasdon and the surrounding villages a trip to London was an occasional treat. What danger the Cutheridges could have anticipated from the programme of these coach trips—the Ideal Home Exhibition, a visit to St Paul's Cathedral, seats for
The Winslow Boy
or the revival of
An Inspector Calls
—can hardly be imagined by anyone for whom the Metropolis does not, of itself, spell danger. And Tom Cutheridge was now head stockman to Sir Henry, who was a good boss. But the Cutheridges never did go on any of these excursions, nor did Simon ever ask to go. Instead, in their little pre-war Austin Seven, they went to Bristol, to Bath or to Exeter.

Simon had been accounted bright from the beginning, and before long he was accredited with something more tangible than brightness. ‘The boy's got a brain,' said Mr Thurston, who, for all his prosiness, was an excellent headmaster. He added: ‘And he's got the character to use it sensibly.' Mr Thurston never had any doubt that Simon would pass the eleven-plus, and he did it effortlessly. Eight years later it was one of the proudest moments of the headmaster's retirement, only a few months before he died, when he heard that one of ‘his' children had won a scholarship to Oxford.

A slight lung defect made the medics declare Simon Grade 3 for National Service, and he was never called up. He went up to Wadham in the autumn of 1956 to study Zoology.

Those who went up to university in 1956 were predestined to be political. In later life Simon Cutheridge quite often did not bother to vote at all, or voted Liberal, but at Oxford he was catapulted into commitment. Not many weeks after he had gone up, while he was still settling in, getting used to having a scout, wondering whether to lose his West Country accent or not, the British, French and Israeli governments invaded Suez. For months Jimmy Porter had been bellowing from the stage of the Royal Court that there were no brave causes to die for any more. Here, suddenly was one. Within days the Russians had moved their tanks into Budapest, and the passionate fury of the undergraduates boiled over. Simon shouted, waved banners, fought in the streets. He stood on platforms haranguing crowds of townspeople and undergraduates through megaphones; he
had water poured over him from the windows of St John's. He sat in a little room in the Union watching Hugh Gaitskell's broadcast, and he came close to crying. ‘What can we do?' he said to himself, over and over again.

‘What can we do?' he asked of a friend, as they left the Union building and he flung a scarf around his throat to keep out the dank November night air.

‘We're going to Westminster to lobby our MPs,' said his friend. ‘A whole gang of us. Why don't you come?'

‘Count me in,' said Simon.

Cocooned in that gang—banner-brandishing, bescarfed fellow students—Simon was carried through Paddington Station almost without his noticing it. They all charged down into the Underground, and within the hour they were with hundreds more, demonstrating outside the Houses of Parliament. Stolid policemen, part of a good, dying tradition, placed themselves immovably between surge and countersurge of protest and support. Simon and several of the others got into the Palace to lobby their MPs. The member for Simon's constituency was an inarticulate Tory backwoods baronet, who could nevertheless summon up some sort of vocabulary when his passions were roused. He told Simon to his face that he was a conchie, a traitor, and the scum of the earth. Simon was delighted—exhilarated with his success. He repeated the words over and over, to anyone who would listen, and felt cheated when he came across someone whose MP had told him he should be horsewhipped.

The action shifted, as the action always does on these occasions. Before long they were up in Trafalgar Square, and in the thick of demonstrations and counterdemonstrations. A Labour shadow spokesman was speaking from the rostrum, and Simon roared in his support—though the mild-mannered politician seemed more bewildered than gratified by the passion and the fury he aroused. Simon was on the edge of the crowd, and here scuffles and open brawls developed. Mosley's men were enjoying a resurgence, and there were members of the League of Empire Loyalists with loud-hailers. Simon got into a scuffle with a Mosleyite with a National Service haircut and army-style shirt. They were separated by their friends, but not before Simon had managed to get in two or three winding punches. The fight elated him, releasing all the pent-up aggressions that banner-waving
and slogan-shouting had merely stimulated. The meeting was now breaking up, and somehow he got separated from his friends. But there was a group from London University congregated around the Edith Cavell statue, and somehow he joined up with them, and they all went to a narrow, dark little pub up St Martin's Lane, where Simon downed three beers. Then they went to another in Cambridge Circus, where he downed two more.

It was when he left there that he was rolled. Walking blearily in the direction, he hoped, of the Leicester Square tube station, he passed into an arcade and ran straight into four or five of the Mosleyites he had tangled with earlier. They were quicker, and soberer, than he was. He felt the kick in his groin, and lunged out confusedly; then he felt fists in his eye, blows to the head, and then very little for the rest of the two or three minutes they used to do him over. When he came to, five minutes later, he was set up like a Guy Fawkes dummy against the doorway of a second-hand bookseller's. His nose was bleeding, his shirt and jacket were torn, and his wallet was gone.