After these outbursts she might sometimes collapse into tears or, more often, simply look as though she were breathing fire. And after them Sid might draw Ronnie aside and, as if to secure some understanding and solidarity with his son before he departed again, say philosophical things such as ‘Spanish blood, Ronnie’ or even ‘Spanish passion’, and generally imply that Ronnie should not make the same mistakes in life as he had.
Ronnie would come to miss his father, rarely seen as he was, and would try to soothe the pain of it through his own philosophical reflection that surely he could only miss his father in the same way that he missed the parrot: as one might miss an apparition and not a permanent fixture, as one might miss something that might not have been there in the first place. But then wasn’t that true of everything?
And he missed the parrot.
• • •
One day in 1939 Agnes took the eight-year-old Ronnie to a railway station, knowing that she must part with him in a serious way, but not knowing that, except for one more snatched visit, she would never see her husband again. Nor, though in a different sense, would she ever see again, since he would have changed, the son she was now relinquishing.
He was still, when all was said, her good little boy, her only child, her pride and joy, and she said to him more than once again now, ‘Be a good boy, Ronnie.’ Though she knew this was not like taking him to school. His education, his future, was now entirely unknowable. But so was everyone’s.
She had invested—and for Agnes such a thing was not a trivial purchase—in a new white cotton handkerchief which she’d tucked into her sleeve. Word had got around among the mothers that it might be a good item to bring, since it would assist in the act of waving and make them more visible to their departing children. Its other, more obvious purpose was not emphasised.
She hadn’t had to do this thing, it was not compulsory, but a great national plan was afoot to remove children to places of safety, and what mother wouldn’t want to do the safest thing for her child?
The moment came when the women had to remain behind the barrier, so they could only wave, while the children were herded and counted on the platform before being assigned their places on the train. They all wore labels and had gas masks in cardboard boxes round their necks, so that even before they departed they were already lost and indistinguishable in their general similarity and milling. Agnes could no longer pick out her son’s head. At the same time the children could no longer pick out their own mothers among the press at the barrier. The flurry of handkerchiefs, like a frantic flock of white birds, only made it more difficult, as did—working in both directions—the blurring caused by tears. Some mothers didn’t know which use to put their handkerchiefs to.
But Agnes, even though she could not discern Ronnie any more, kept waving while trying not to weep—even when the children were all packed onto the train and could not be seen anyway, even when the train clanked out of the station and disappeared.
When she could wave no more she returned across London (Paddington itself was quite a journey) to the sudden marooning emptiness of the house in Bethnal Green. How she missed her Ronnie. She hadn’t had to part with him, yet she had. It was the best thing. This is what motherhood could sometimes mean: acts of dutiful resignation. She dried her tears. Her misery hardened, as it so often had before, into a sense of her own long-suffering fortitude.
Why should she weep if her Ronnie was safe? Now it would be her lot—and she didn’t know the half of it yet—to endure air raids. She would have to scurry to shelters where she would cower with equally terrified neighbours while bombs fell, any one of which might reduce this home of hers to nothing or, if she was so unlucky, even obliterate herself (sometimes she might even wish one would). But at least her Ronnie, though far from her, would be well out of it.
She dried her eyes on the now-grubby handkerchief and made a vow: that she would not use it again, but nor would she wash it or fold it away. She would merely keep it as it was, with all this day’s anguish still in it, until the war was over, like some charm. But she had no more use for tears.
Meanwhile Sid—and how like him—would be even further away and even more well out of it. Out there on the blue ocean. Safe as houses.
• • •
Ronnie, on his packed train, wept and snivelled a good deal. It was hard not to when so many around him were doing the same. It was now clear to all of them that this dreaded event was not a hoax or mere threat, but a cruel fact. Perhaps their lamenting was mixed with a surge of infant outrage. How could their mothers have possibly done this to them?
Perhaps at the same time the mothers had been visited by some chilling premonition of the hellish stage in its history the world was now reaching, such that their handkerchief-waving might have served another half-conscious function: an act of propitiatory surrender. Please can we have our children back? But it was too late.
Perhaps the children also had been touched by truths far beyond their actual situation. In any case, the more they were separated from their mothers by the clacking train, the more they wept for these women who had done this monstrous thing to them, the more they conjured
