Everyone Brave is Forgiven - Softcover

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Chris Cleave is the author of Everyone Brave is Forgiven, Gold, Incendiary, and the #1 New York Times bestseller Little Bee. He lives with his wife and three children in London, England. Visit him at ChrisCleave.com or on Twitter @ChrisCleave.

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Everyone Brave is Forgiven

September, 1939

MARY ALMOST WEPT WHEN she learned that her first duty as a schoolmistress would be to evacuate her class to the countryside. And when she discovered that London had evacuated its zoo animals days before its children, she was furious. If one must be exiled, then at least the capital ought to value its children more highly than macaws and musk oxen.

She checked her lipstick in a pocket mirror, then raised her hand.

“Yes, Miss North?”

“Isn’t it a shame to evacuate the animals first?”

She said it in full hearing of all the children, who were lined up at their muster point outside the empty London Zoo, waiting to be evacuated. They gave a timid cheer. The headmistress eyed Mary coolly, which made her doubt herself. But surely it was wrong to throw the beasts the first lifeline? Wasn’t that the weary old man’s choice Noah had made: filling the ark with dumb livestock instead of lively children who might answer back? This was how the best roots of humanity had drowned. This was why men were the violent inbreds of Ham and Shem and Japheth, capable of declaring for war a season that Mary had earmarked for worsted.

The headmistress only sighed. So: the delay was simply because one did not need to write a marmoset’s name on a luggage tag, accompany it in a second-class train compartment and billet it with a suitable host family in the Cotswolds. The lower primates only wanted a truck for the trip and a good feed at the other end, while the higher Hominidae, with names like Henry and Sarah, had a multiplicity of needs that a diligent bureaucracy had not only to anticipate but also to meet, and furthermore to document, on forms that must first come back from the printer.

“I see,” said Mary. “Thank you.”

Of course it was that. She hated being eighteen. The insights and indignations burned through one’s good sense like hot coals through oven gloves. So, this was why London still teemed with children while London Zoo stood vacant, with three hundred halfpenny portions of monkey nuts in their little twists of newspaper waiting unsold and forlorn in the kiosk.

She raised her hand again, then let it drop.

“Yes?” said Miss Vine. “Was there something else?”

“Sorry,” said Mary. “It was nothing.”

“Oh good.”

The headmistress took her eye off the ranks of the children for a moment. She fixed Mary with a look rich in charity. “Remember you’re on our side now. You know: the grown-ups.”

Mary could almost feel her bones cracking with resentment. “Thank you, Miss Vine.”

This was when the school’s only colored child, sensing an opening, slipped away from the muster and scaled the padlocked main gate of the zoo. The headmistress spun around. “Zachary Lee! Come back here immediately!”

“Or what? You’ll send me to the countryside?”

The whole school gasped. Ten years old, invincible, the Negro boy saluted. He scissored his skinny brown legs over the top of the gate, using the penultimate and the ultimate wrought-iron O’s of LONDON ZOO as the hoops of a pommel horse, and was immediately lost to sight.

Miss Vine turned to Mary. “You had better bring the nigger back, don’t you think?”

It was her first rescue work of the war. Coppery, coltish Mary North searched the abandoned zoo using paths that were still well tended. On her own, she felt better. She sneaked a cigarette. With the other hand she massaged her brow, confident that frustration could be persuaded not to settle there. All downers could be dispatched, as one might flick ash off one’s sleeve, or pilot a wayward bee back out through an open window.

She had already checked the giraffes’ paddock and the big cats’ dens. Now, hearing a cough, she tiptoed into the great apes’ enclosure through a gate that swung unlatched. She kicked through the straw, raising a scent of urine and musk that made her heart rattle with fright. But she hoped it was not easily done, for a zookeeper to miss a whole gorilla when he was counting them into the evacuation truck.

“Come on out, Zachary Lee, I know you’re in here.”

It was eerie to be in the gorilla house, looking out through the smeared glass. “Oh do come on, Zachary darling. You’ll get us both in trouble.”

A second cough, and a rustle under the straw. Then, with his soft American accent, “I’m not coming out.”

“Fine then,” said Mary. “The two of us shall rot here until the war is over, and nobody will ever know what talent we might have shown in its prosecution.”

She sat down beside the boy, first laying her red jacket on the straw to sit on, with the rosy silk lining downward. It was hard to stay glum. One could say what one liked about the war but it had got her out of Mont-Choisi ahead of an afternoon of double French, and might yet have more mercies in store. She lit another cigarette and blew the smoke into a shaft of sunlight.

“May I have one?” said the small voice.

“Beautifully asked,” said Mary. “And no. Not until you are eleven.”

From the muster point came the sound of a tin whistle. It could mean that heavy bombers were converging on London, or it could mean that the children had been organized into two roughly matched teams to begin a game of rounders.

Zachary poked his head up through the straw. It still amazed Mary to see his brown skin, his chestnut eyes. The first time he had smiled, the flash of his pink tongue had delighted her. She had imagined it would be—well, not brown also, but certainly as antithetical to pink as brown skin was to white. A bluish tongue, perhaps, like a skink’s. It would not have surprised her to learn that his blood came out black and his feces a pale ivory. He was the first Negro she had seen up close—if one didn’t count the posters advertising minstrelsy and coon shows—and she still struggled not to gawk.

The straw clung to his hair. “Miss?” he said. “Why did they take the animals away?”

“Different reasons in each case,” said Mary, counting them off on her fingers. “The hippopotami because they are such frightful cowards, the wolves since one can never be entirely sure whose side they are on, and the lions because they are to be parachuted directly into Berlin Zoo to take on Herr Hitler’s big cats.”

“So the animals are at war too?”

“Well of course they are. Wouldn’t it be absurd if it were just us?”

The boy’s expression suggested that he had not previously taken the matter under consideration.

“What are two sevens?” asked Mary, taking advantage.

The boy began his reckoning, in the deliberate and dutiful manner of a child who intended to persevere at least until he ran out of fingers. Not for the first time that week, Mary suppressed both a smile and a delightful suspicion that teaching might not be the worst way to spend the idle hours between breakfast and society.

On Tuesday morning, after taking the register and before distributing milk in little glass bottles, Mary had written the names of her thirty-one children on brown luggage labels and looped them through the top buttonholes of their overcoats. Of course the children had exchanged labels with one another the second her back was turned. They were only human, even if they hadn’t yet made...