CHALK-PIT HILL

Each new morn

New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face, ...

Shakespeare: Macbeth

As the four children pushed close up to the old wall, seven year old George felt the rough edges of the top railings rusty against his face and smelled the bittersweet odour of rotting vegetation where the flowers on the bank had succumbed to the heat of summer and the siling rains of last week’s storms. Silently he watched the group of children playing on the dusty lawn in front of the house. Boys in grey shirts and long shorts were kicking around an old rubber ball and three girls with pinafores over faded cotton dresses bent over a set of Five Stones, their hair - tawny, long blond and brown - mimicking the coat of the fat tabby cat sunning himself on the doorstep. These were the War Orphans, newly moved into the big empty house next door to the ugly red brick Church at the top of Chalk-pit Hill, and the four local children staring through the railings were fascinated by them.

All the children had been told they must be nice to the orphans whose fathers had been killed in the fighting. A few had lost their mothers as well, in homes blitzed flat like careless cockroaches under the angry boots of George’s dad. But when next day they saw the alien group standing together in the corner of the playground, motionless and mute songbirds caged in a foreign land, isolated in their difference, George and his friends suddenly hostile turned away, back to their own exclusive games. The Orphans, they felt, already got too much attention and fuss made of them.

Sixty years later George, sitting on a lounger in the sun bathed garden, wondered if Kate remembered the old orphanage. When the West Indian immigrants arrived and moved into the long tumbledown terrace in Albert Road, the orphans as a distinctive group disappeared and the playground hierarchies changed. Dark skinned, with voices rich and smooth as melting chocolate, laughing and singing in that strange patois of theirs, these latest incomers became the new strangers. ‘We didn’t play with them either.’ thought George. ‘The kids were the same with the Ugandan Asians, and when our Jenny announced she was going to marry Rajiv, I was afraid that we would lose her to strangers.’ He sighed.

“Oh, meant to tell you,” he said to his wife, “I saw off that BNP candidate. Told him what to do with his evil fascist ideas. And, by the way, I don’t like the grandkids’ Polish Plumber jokes. Their dad was an immigrant too.” She laughed. “Be patient,” she said, “they’ll learn, like most of us did. Remember Neville and Joan who adopted me. They were a lovely Mum and Dad and they welcomed everyone wherever they came from, however different or poor they were.” She laughed again. “Even you George.” “Yes,” he agreed, “they were good people. God bless them and everyone like them. They were especially kind when the penniless soldier boy from next door asked to marry their beautiful daughter. And she was the little girl with long blonde hair whom once I’d stared at through the railings, and whom I married in the ugly brick church on Chalk-Pit Hill.”

     

Illustration by Liz