No Man’s Land. Simon Tolkien

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      In the receiving ward Adam was told to take off his clothes by a male attendant who went through all the pockets, searching for contraband, before packaging them up in brown paper. And then he had to endure a bath in cold water and a badly executed haircut before he was allowed to get dressed again, this time in the workhouse uniform: a striped cotton shirt, ill-fitting trousers and a jacket made of some coarse fabric with ‘Islington Workhouse’ stitched above the breast pocket.

      He felt tired suddenly and wanted desperately to sit down, but the attendant pushed him forward down yet another corridor and into a small windowless office where a grey-haired man with half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose was sitting behind a large kneehole desk from which he never seemed to look up. He asked Adam questions about his history and recorded the answers in a huge ledger, pausing frequently to dip his pen in the inkwell, and then listened without interruption to Adam’s account of how he had ended up at the workhouse door before writing the single word, ‘Abandonment’ in the ‘Reason for admission’ column.

      ‘What’ll happen to me?’ asked Adam. There was fear in his voice: each stage of the admission process had seemed to strip another layer of his identity away until he felt that there was almost nothing left.

      ‘Perhaps they’ll send you back to school, although you’re almost too old for that. The Guardians will decide,’ he told Adam.

      ‘When?’

      ‘At their next meeting,’ the grey-haired man laconically replied, and turned his attention to the next admission, an old man with his belongings tied up in a dirty red handkerchief, distraught because he’d just been separated from his wife of forty years. His protests fell on deaf ears. The Poor Law required separation of the sexes and in the workhouse the law was absolute.

      It was a terrible place: everything was regulated – from the exact weight of stones required to be broken in the yard each day to the precise allowances of food for each inmate (Adam received six ounces of bread at supper, although he would have been entitled to eight if he had been a year older). The refectory vividly reminded Adam of the penny sit-up that his father had taken him to in what felt like another lifetime. The inmates sat in rows facing forward, eating their allotted portions in silence before the bell called them back to work.

      Because of his age Adam was excused from stone-breaking and was instead put to work picking apart tarred ropes to make oakum that the shipyards used for caulking boats. After unravelling the rope into corkscrew strands, the inmates had to roll them on their knees until the mesh became loose and the fibres could be broken up into hemp. Soon Adam’s fingers became red and raw, so they looked like his father’s hands had sometimes used to look when he came back from work after using soda water to strip old paper from the walls of houses that his crew was refurbishing.

      Throughout the day two old sallow-faced officials dressed in identical threadbare black suits walked up and down the aisles between the benches, watchful for any slacking. The inmates picked in silence and the overseers’ monotonous pacing of the hard boards was the only noise in the big windowless workroom in which all the light came from above through circular skylights set in the flat roof. And at the end of the day each worker’s oakum was weighed at a desk by the door; failure to pick the required quota was punished by a reduction in the malefactor’s food allowance. In this, as in all its rules and regulations, the workhouse was mindful of its legal duty to ‘provide relief that was inferior to the standard of living that a labourer could obtain without assistance’. The Guardians wanted to be quite sure that nobody in their right mind would choose this life if he could possibly avoid it.

      At night the inmates slept side by side on flock-filled sacks in narrow unheated dormitories. There were men of all ages and boys all mixed together. Some screamed out in their sleep: unintelligible cries which kept Adam awake into the small hours. Lying on his back in the dark, he thought of his mother and then tried not to because it hurt to remember her when she was dead. But blocking her out of his mind made him feel guilty – it felt as though he was killing her a second time. He remembered what the children in his street said about the dead: touching them stopped you dreaming of them. That’s why the old midwife who lived above the Cricketers was paid to lay out the corpse; that’s why bereaved families stopped the clocks and kept candlelit vigils around the body while the neighbours came by and paid their respects. But Adam’s father had refused to do any of this. He’d refused to employ the midwife; he’d shut the door on his neighbours. And as a result Adam had never seen his mother dead; he’d never had the chance to say goodbye.

      Adam blamed his father for his mother’s death and for abandoning him in the workhouse. He was angry with his father, angrier than he had ever been with anyone in his whole life, and yet he longed for his father to return and take him away as he’d promised. But he heard nothing. It was as if he had been forgotten, walled up and left to rot like the Frenchman in the iron mask in the story that his mother had read to him the year before from a book that she’d bought second-hand from the barrow man.

      In the workhouse only the birds were free, able to escape. Adam looked up through the skylights in the workroom and saw them circling overhead and remembered an autumn evening years and years before when his mother had come and woken him. He was sleepy and she had carried him down the stairs and out of the door and pointed up into the misty sky where he could make out the shapes of hundreds of low-flying swallows, calling to one another as they flew over.

      ‘Where are they going?’ he’d asked.

      ‘To Africa where it’s warm. They’ll be back in the spring. Aren’t they wonderful, Adam?’ she’d said – and he thought for a moment that he could hear her voice in his head like a distant echo. The vividness of the unexpected memory jolted him – it seemed significant, as if his mother was communicating with him in some invisible way. Suddenly the hope that had been draining out of him ever since her death returned. And when Daniel arrived at the workhouse the next day with two third-class railway tickets in his hand, it was almost as if Adam was expecting him.

      The destination was somewhere Adam had never heard of – a place called Scarsdale.

      ‘Where is it?’ he asked as they came out through the workhouse door into the early-morning sunshine.

      ‘In the north,’ said Daniel.

      Adam saw his father was smiling, as though he didn’t have a care in the world, and it made him angry. ‘How far in the north?’ he asked.

      ‘A long way.’

      ‘Well, I hope it’s as far away as Australia,’ said Adam fiercely. ‘Because I never want to see this place again and I never want to remember that you put me here.’

      ‘I had no choice,’ said Daniel, biting his lip.

      ‘There’s always a choice,’ said Adam.

      Daniel didn’t answer. He’d seen inside the workhouse and he felt ashamed of having left his son in such a place, and he also sensed obscurely that he didn’t have the same authority over him that he’d had before. The last weeks had changed Adam: he was no longer a boy even if he was not yet a man. Daniel had mixed feelings about the transformation: he mourned the past but he was also glad, knowing that Adam would need all the inner strength and independence he could muster to survive in the place where they were going.

      They reached the end of the street and turned the corner and Adam didn’t once look back.

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