The Lost Place

O0O0O0O

The evacuations began with what Bill could only think of as great timidity. He helped, so he felt he was in a position to judge. The few boats that came, the few men they pulled off the beaches . . . it was all wretchedly disheartening at first. The first day was the worst, just a few thousand men . . . they went to bed that night worn out, and certain that most of them would still be left to die.

The next day, granted, it got a bit better. More boats, a few more men gotten off the beaches . . but the German planes came, and they made it hard to feel victorious. Amidst the bombing and the desperate attempts to get as many men off the beaches, out of the water and into the boats as they could, everything took on a sort of mechanical feel; Bill ached to escape it, but every day he was on the beach, helping as many men get off it as they could.

They, he felt, should go first. They didn't have what he did: a whole other world to escape to each night. And each night when he closed his eyes for however much sleep he could get, it would be there, the place where his children were strong and grown, alive in a way that he had begun to think he might never have to chance to see. So it would be selfish, he felt, to fight to be the first to escape when he had something as wonderful as that.

Daylight evacuations, everybody agreed as they bedded down for that night, were soon going to be impossible, with the way the German planes kept targeting them, but things were starting to pick up. Tens of thousands, they were certain, had been rescued that day. Although nobody could put an actual number on their success, they found the progress immeasurably encouraging. Soon, they dared to hope, they would be going home.

That night, as he put his head back and shut his eyes, Bill took comfort in knowing that he would be seeing home a little sooner than most.

O0O0O0O

This time it was Maura. Maura, seated at their kitchen table, quite in their own, regular world. She had a sodden handkerchief clutched in her hands, her knuckles bleaching white under the strain of staying composed.

She looked different than she had when he had left her. He couldn't put a finger on it, really; she wasn't older, or younger looking . . . she hadn't even done anything extraordinary with her hair. She simply sat at the table in a dress that was wearing thin at the shoulders, clutching a photograph of the family.

It was not, Bill noted, the photograph in which they had all been scrubbed to within an inch of their lives; it was one that had been taken nearly two years ago, when the family made a trip to the shore. Bill remembered the day vividly: Lucy had lost her pail and spade, Susan and Maura had gotten sunburned and Edmund had put sand in Peter's sandwich, prompting an energetic tussle between the brothers that Bill himself had jammed his thumb in trying to separate, but on the way home they had revelled in the good, clean exhaustion of a day well spent.

"I want to go back!" Lucy had declared, just moments before dropping into a sleep so sound that she had had to be carried up to her bed and undressed by her mother, as they simply could not wake her.

They had planned to go back, too, but that year it hadn't been possible, and the next the war had come. Trips to the shore suddenly seemed very extravagant and far away, and they had not discussed even the possibility of it, since. Now Maura sat at the table, her shoulders quivering as she touched one shaking fingertip to each of the faces in the snapshot.

"Be safe," she murmured with each one. "Please, oh please, be safe . . ."

She was changed. He still could not work out how it had happened, and he was certain he did not want to know why, but writ in every line of his wife's face was the change that had taken place since he left her. She worried more, laughed less, and longed for home as much as he.

The empty house around her was not the home they had made.

She was crying, now; tears slipping from clear green eyes as she bent her golden head over the photographs scattered on the table before her, and cried.

Bill almost crossed to touch her. It was what he would have done if he had walked in on this scene in his home, after all— he would have crossed to rest his hands on her shoulders, to squeeze just firmly enough to infuse her with whatever courage she could draw from him, and to look down into her upturned face and draw the same courage from her expression of unswerving determination and devotion to everything she loved as much as did he.

He started to move toward her, too, his hands outstretched, his love and compassion for her a physical ache within him . . . but the kitchen began to blur, the lines fuzzing, the scene clouding over, and he was leaving her, even when he wanted nothing more than to take hold of her, hug her to him, and stay.

O0O0O0O

The room solidified once more, but the kitchen in which Bill now stood was not his own. This was a larger kitchen, and for a moment the stone walls and flagstone floors made him believe he was in that other place, where his children were grown and merry. But then he saw the icebox, and heard the crackle of a wireless set, and he knew it was not so. There were no animals working to make the meals, either; the only animal he could see was a fat, rather dull-looking cat basking in front of the radiator, and the manner in which the women in the kitchen stepped over it made it plain they would not be seeking the pleasure of its conversation any time soon. Instead, they talked amongst themselves, fussing as they did.

"I don't know what's wrong with the poor things," one girl moaned, dicing carrots so vigorously Bill expected that at any moment she would miss, and strike a thumb instead, "they've just been the moodiest children you've ever seen."

"Not at all as they was before," another, slightly older girl concurred, giving a bubbling pot a careless stir. "Mrs Macready, d'you think we ought to mention it to the Professor? Didn't he say as we was to tell him if they was unhappy?"

"That he did, Margaret, but if you don't watch that pot more carefully I'll be the unhappy one, and you'll have far worse to worry about than the children. There, that's much better." Mrs Macready, a short, stout woman with a rolling Scottish burr waited a moment to make sure Margaret was taking her instructions to heart before turning back to count the silverware on the table before her.

"Would the Professor really want to know about this, though?" the girl with the carrots wondered. "I mean, them being only children, and all."

"The Professor, Ivy, was a child himself once, and I'll not hear you accusing him of hard-heartedness," Mrs Macready scowled, and Ivy ducked her head, suitably chastened. "There, third count through, we are still missing a soup spoon. I want the drawers turned inside out until it's found. And where is Betty, anyhow? It's been almost two hours since I sent her to— oh!" with a small start of surprise, turning around, "now, if you didn't give me such a fright!"

"I'm awfully sorry, Mrs Macready," the boy said softly, and Bill stared. He stared, it must be confessed, even harder than he had when he had first seen his son grown; to see Edmund a small child once more was twice as shocking as it was to see him a man. But there he was, short trousers and all, with that familiar cowlick sticking up at the back of his head. He regarded the woman with solemn grey eyes as he made his apology.

"Well," Mrs Macready said, and Bill could see that she was really making an effort to smile at the boy, "no harm done, I suppose. Are you hungry?" A note of hope entered her voice. "You hardly touched your tea."

"I'm sorry," Edmund said, still in that same strange, quiet voice, "I just don't feel like eating."

"None of you have felt like eating since yesterday afternoon, when those day-trippers came through. I hope they didn't give you any sweets; you must know better than to take presents from strangers, a great boy like you."

"Yes, thank you, Mrs Macready, I do," Edmund agreed. "And no, they didn't give any of us any sweets; we just aren't very hungry. May I go out to the garden until supper?"

"I suppose so," Mrs Macready said, her face perplexed. "And here, now," with a sudden, decisive motion of her hand, sweeping a tumbler down from a shelf and filling it with the amber-coloured contents of a nearby pitcher, "would you like a little treat? Your sisters said you like liquorice water."

Edmund, with frightening politeness, agreed that he did. Then he took a few calm, measured sips of the offering, thanked Mrs Macready once more, and set the tumbler on the edge of the table before walking out of the kitchen and through the door that Bill supposed led to the garden.

Before the door closed behind his son, Bill saw the room beginning to melt once more.

O0O0O0O

This time, there was an upward rush. It felt, Bill thought, rather as if he had been standing in a lift, and suddenly he started rising upward, through a foggy mist of a house. The fog cleared only when his feet settled firmly on the floorboards, and he realised he was in a room he had seen before. It was, he saw, the same long room that he had seen the children in ages —no, wait, surely it had only been a few nights— ago. It was brighter and sunnier than it had been then, though, and there was more clutter— a few books strewn about, and a soft shawl of bright and interesting colours padded the back of a large wing chair.

In that chair sat Susan, once more a girl who was not quite a woman. Her hair no longer fell in waves to her feet, but was bound neatly in two rather severe plaits. She no longer wore the sweeping gowns that she and Lucy had favoured in that Other Place; she wore again the plain blouses and simple skirts suited to a child her age. Her young face, however, was pinched and pale enough to make her look a dozen years older, and in Susan's arms, Bill saw, wept Lucy.

Lucy had, Bill remembered, been weeping the last time he saw her here, too. Now, though, her tears were not born of hurt or injustice; they were the deep, melancholy sobs of a woman whose heart was breaking, and they looked painful on a little girl who should have had nothing worse to cry over than a skinned knee.

"Darling," Susan murmured, her little hand petting her sister's tangled blonde hair, "I know it hurts, but we can't keep on like this. We must try to be more like Peter and Edmund, and not think about it very much, else what will the Professor think? He told us not to speak of it if we could help it, do you remember? He said people wouldn't understand."

"Then he doesn't either," Lucy sobbed. "He can't, if he says we shouldn't think of it . . . how can we not?"

"Well," said Susan, "maybe it's something that we'll understand better when we're older. Again." And she cuddled her sister a little closer, looking up only when the door to the room was thrown open with rather a bang.

"Susan, have you seen the— oh." Peter stopped, and stared.

"She's homesick," Susan murmured, and pressed her lips to her sister's bowed head. Peter swallowed, shuffled his feet, and nodded.

"Right," he mumbled, "right, she . . . she misses Mum."

Susan looked steadily across the room, her gaze accusing. Bill saw Peter flinch as if struck.

"No, Peter," said Susan, "that's not it." Then she looked back to their sister. "You go on," she said softly, and though she looked at Lucy, it was clearly Peter to whom she spoke. "If it's Edmund you're looking for, you'll find him at the bottom of the garden. He likes to sit there a lot, now. He says it helps him think."

"Look, Su," Peter began plaintively, then stopped. Susan was murmuring soft things to Lucy, and Lucy was still weeping. Peter shook his head, and tugged an agitated hand through his hair. "Right," he said, and left.

He shut the door behind him.

Lucy still wept, and Susan still spoke softly, but it was getting harder to hear. The hard lines of the room were softening; dropping away. Bill recognised what was happening, and he felt himself slipping back from the safety of the dream world. This time, though, he fought it. He knew all too well the feeling of removal and he clung, stubbornly trying to stay there. It might not have always been a happy place, but it was the place where his family was, and that alone was enough to make him desperate to linger. He was winning, too; he felt the warmth of sleep rising around him again, saw the room solidifying once more, and heard Susan's soft, gentle voice drawing closer. He was returning to the safe, sweet familiarity of all that sleeping encompassed . . .

And then he heard the voice. It was not a voice he had heard speak before; not exactly. But he knew that voice as surely as if he had held a thousand conversations with it over the course of a thousand years. In its richness and tone, he heard something he had always known; something he cleaved toward, aching to hear more of it. He felt the warmth of a gentle breath on his face, and heard a stern admonition.

"You yearn for what is past, as do they, but that place is not for you any longer. It was yours for a season, but what I give you now is yours for your lifetime. Your wife is waiting, and your children also. William Pevensie," with a terrible, wonderful echo of the roar that shook the world, "get up!"

O0O0O0O

Bill bolted upright in bed, his heart racing, his mind clearer than it had been in a lifetime. The planes overhead were firing on the beach . . . he heard the groans of a ship that had been fatally hit as it foundered and sank. Men were shouting, as they had been for days now, and . . . daylight filtered in.

Blinking, still not sure that this was what he was meant to do, Bill found his way down to the beach, heedless of the way the bullets from the German plans spat up sand along the shore, mindless of the bodies of the men around him. There was a boat, a modest little holiday steamer, bobbing close to hand in an English Channel that was the calmest it had ever been. The vessel, he saw, was remarkably like the one he and Maura had ridden on their honeymoon; it was remarkably like the one onto which he and Maura had taken the children for their holiday before the wars began.

Lucy had left her hat behind on that steamer.

Now it was crammed with soldiers in uniform, their faces haggard, their bodies wounded and their minds incomplete. Bill studied them in wonder; it did not occur to him that he must look just like them. Then a member of the steamer's crew spotted him, and shouted an unintelligible order to the pilot to wait a moment. He turned toward Bill, leaned over the side and held out his hand.

"You there, soldier!" he shouted over the hum of the planes and the shouts along the beach and in the water, "you, there, come on! We can manage one more."

Bill looked around. There was nobody within reach but he; had there been, he would have boosted the man up without a second thought. Instead, he stood alone. As if this were nothing more than another dream, he moved forward, wading into the water, walking out until the waves lapped at the highest part of his chest. Reaching up, he found his hand caught in the grip of the older man who stood on the ship above him.

"Steady now," the man cautioned, and with a strength disproportionate to his advanced years he hauled Bill up bodily from the waves, pulling him over the side onto the deck of the ship. "All right, Johnny," he hollered in the direction of the pilot house, "that's all she can hold. Take us home."

The ship responded to the coaxing of the unseen Johnny, moving forward through the waves, cutting cleanly through the water as she left the bloodied beach behind. Bill, sprawled on the deck in an inglorious puddle of mud and seawater, laboured to understand what had just happened. Almost as if he understood the young man's confusion, the man who had pulled Bill on board leaned over, beaming, and gave him a firm, friendly pat on the shoulder.

"That's the ticket, son, you just settle back there and catch your breath. We've been at this two days now and we haven't yet pulled a chap out who hasn't been worn out!"

And a heavy rug was produced, and wrapped around him, and Bill felt perfectly at his leisure to flop back onto the deck and stare up at the sky.

The planes still flew overhead, and he could hear the sounds of their attack all around him. He knew, in a very far and remote part of him, that men —many, many men. Thousands of men— were dying. But thousands more were being rescued. And when the planes weren't passing above the boat, the air was clear, the sky was blue . . . and the sun was shining.

O0O0O0O

A.N.: Your unasked-for history lesson follows; feel free to skip over it!

More than three hundred and thirty thousand men were rescued over the course of nine days. Nearly two hundred and forty rescue boats —out of more than eight hundred— were lost in the effort, as were the lives of many thousands of men; a great number of casualty reports, however, were suppressed or doctored for some time following the event in an effort to further boost British morale.

The Battle of Dunkirk is a contentious issue for many, since although it boosted British spirits it was terribly disheartening to the French, who felt abandoned by their allies. Some argue to this day that French capitulation to the Germans was directly connected to the evacuation at Dunkirk, while others point out that the Allies would have been over three hundred thousand troops short without it.

Another, only slightly smaller-scale evacuation involving the rescue of British, Polish, French and Canadian troops from Cherbourg and St Malo was also effected just over a week later, but this effort remains far less well known than the evacuation from Dunkirk. For all the mixed feelings still surrounding the event, the rescue at Dunkirk remains one of the most decisive —and certainly one of the earliest— turning points of the Second World War.

Up next: The Last Place.