A month later, Robert and his wife, Sarah, moved to London. The city had one of the largest concentrations of universities in the world, and he was offered several positions—all arranged by Citium members. He took a job at King’s College, and published a paper from time to time—but his real work was done in secret. The protocols were largely copied from the Manhattan Project: independent teams working on components of a larger device. What that larger device was, he didn’t know, only that it would save humanity from itself, from the deadly device he’d helped to create during the war. Working on the Looking Glass was the solution to the depression he’d experienced after the atomic bombs had been dropped. He believed he was creating the antidote to the poison he’d injected into the world.
That gave him hope.
His wife also found solace in her work: volunteering at one of the city’s many orphanages. For years, she and Robert had tried to have a child, but without success. It was hard on her; being a mother was something she wanted more than anything.
One Saturday, she asked him to come with her to the orphanage. The facility was a converted hotel, and though it was a bit run-down, it was clean. He visited with several of the children, read stories, and gave out small toys and books his wife had brought with them that day. She asked him to join her again the following Saturday, and the next. Soon it became their ritual. He knew she was working up to something, and he knew what it was. And he knew what he would say.
She asked him on a Sunday afternoon, without preamble, as if she were confirming a decision they had already made. “I think we should adopt him.”
“Yes, certainly,” he replied, not even glancing up from the paper.
I was the boy they adopted, and to understand what that meant to me, you have to know what happened during the war.
Chapter 78
On the day Germany invaded Poland, they evacuated the children from London. There had been rumors of mass evacuations for months.
That night my parents fought about it. I didn’t understand it at the time. Later, I learned the truth: my father had insisted my mother leave London too. She was an assistant professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and spoke and taught courses in three foreign languages: Japanese, Arabic, and German. My mother’s school was set to move to Christ Church in Cambridge—all of London’s colleges and universities were being evacuated—but she wanted to stay and assist in the war effort. And she wasn’t taking no for an answer.
My father was no pushover. He was a captain in the British Third Infantry, currently under the command of Bernard Montgomery. But he folded that night.
The next morning, she walked me to the train station. The line of children seemed endless. I would later learn that the mass evacuations were called Operation Pied Piper, and that over 3.5 million people were displaced. In the first three days of September, over 1.5 million people were moved, including over 800,000 school age children, over 500,000 mothers and young children, 13,000 pregnant mothers, and 70,000 disabled people. Another 100,000 teachers and support personnel were moved. The effort was massive; it seemed the entire city of London was focused on it.
They pinned a placard with my name on it to my coat and gave me a cardboard box, which hung around my neck. A gas mask lay inside, a grim reminder that this was no field trip. Many kids took them out and put them on and played with them. I was a boy of five, and I must admit that I did too.
Older siblings held their younger brothers’ and sisters’ hands, ensuring they didn’t get separated. My only brother had died two years before from tuberculosis; I would have given anything for him to be holding my hand that morning. I put on a brave face for my mother though. She hugged me so hard I thought my chest would collapse. As the train pulled away, she waved goodbye. She was crying; in fact I didn’t see a single dry eye on that platform.
Eleven years later, C. S. Lewis wrote a novel titled The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which four siblings are evacuated from London to a stately country manor home with a dusty wardrobe that leads to another world. The evacuations weren’t nearly as romantic as Lewis’s tale, but they also weren’t as agonizing as The Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s novel about boys evacuated from London who crash land on a tropical island.
On the whole, everyone in Britain was doing the best they could, and preparing for the worst: war with Germany.
My parents had arranged for me to stay with my mother’s first cousin Edith and her husband, George. It was a few days before they could come around to collect me, and in that time, I got a glimpse of what the children without host families went through. Periodically they were brought out and made to line up while adults marched past.
“I’ll take that one,” a mother said.
“We’ll take the third from the left,” a father called out.
The first time it happened was sort of like not being picked for cricket—it wasn’t the end of the world. But these rounds of selections had a cumulative effect on the children left behind. I felt for them. Would have traded places with them. But there was nothing anyone could do. Most of those who remained were shuffled around, some assigned to the evacuation camps the government had built—in itself an act of great foresight.
Life became routine for a while. I went to school, did my chores as Edith bade me, just as my mother insisted I should in her letters. Her notes to me arrived every few days. My father wrote less often, and shorter letters, but I was glad to hear from both of them.