WAGBAI: EUSTON STATION

     Imagine yourself at Euston Station in September, 1944, at the beginning of school term. It feels safe now, much safer than it would have felt a couple of years ago. While the threat of buzz bombs is still real—but more sporadic and more widely scattered—the nightly carpet-bombing of the city is long past. The allied armies are still fighting the Nazis in Europe, but here at home things are relatively quiet. You’ll still see those barriers of protective sandbags in front of buildings, but the normal activities of life proceed. There are black London taxis and big red buses everywhere. There are endless streams of people on the city streets. And the trains still leave from the railway stations, taking children off to school.

            Our train is waiting at the platform...

... a massive, hissing hulk of steel that puts out bursts of steam and clanks ominously with metallic sounds. The station reeks of oil, and grease, and coal. Whistles shriek. Vast spaces extend all around you, making you feel yet more insignificant and tiny than you might already feel, your hand grasping urgently in your mother’s or your father’s. All around are porters’ carts and towering stacks of trunks, some of them ringed with black and white bands like your own. And all around there are, mostly, boys, some of them as small as you but others bigger, more confident, noisy, shouting out gleeful greetings to the friends they already made in previous years at school.

            You are on your way to boarding school for the first time. You are seven years old. You want to be brave but there is a big lump in your throat, because you know there are only minutes more before you have to leave your mummy and daddy and join the dozens of other boys, all strangers, who are already piling into the carriages; before the train leaves, before you have to say goodbye. You recognize deep down the feeling you always have when you know you need to cry, but you also know you’re not allowed to, not in any circumstance, not here, not now, with all these other boys around you. You know that crying would only invite ridicule and contempt, and you can’t start out that way. You know you have to be brave because all the other boys are brave and you don’t want to be marked out as a cry-baby from the very start.

            And yet… the time comes. You father offers you his hand to shake. That’s the man’s way of saying goodbye. Does your mother dare to hug you? Does she want to? Does she even want you to leave? These are agonizing questions that go through your mind—questions you don’t even dare to ask yourself. Your mother’s blue eyes, so familiar to you, refuse to fill with tears. If she is unhappy to send you off to school she will not show it. Must not. Stepping off the platform and into the carriage, you can’t even remember if she hugged you.

Not our station, but a similar scene

            Your parents are standing there, a blur, nothing more than pale faces in a crowd of other faces, with a forest of hands waving at you as the train jolts into action and begins to move slowly away with a great burst of noise, steel wheels clanking on steel rails, a hiss of accumulated steam. As the train gathers speed you realize just how alone you feel, the smallest of boys in this caterwauling crowd of other boys. Just how alone you’ll be feeling for what looms like an eternity ahead.

            Once past the end of the railway platform and out into the full grey, misty light of day, you know you’re gone for good. Raindrops streak in diagonal paths across the grimy window. No way to turn back. And hours to go, and hundreds of miles ahead.