Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah

Author:Benjamin Zephaniah [Zephaniah, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781408109106
Google: 3VoirPFUNWMC
Amazon: B0058RE06K
Barnesnoble: B0058RE06K
Goodreads: 17552604
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

˜ Loved and Lost ˜

The next day Alem was back in school. His English was improving by the day and he was tuning in well to the accent of east Londoners but he hadn’t come to terms with the weather. Sometimes he would find himself shivering because of the bitter cold but he would not complain, he just told himself that one day he would get used to it.

Two days later Alem woke up as normal to the smell of breakfast being cooked. Thanks to the twin radiators the room was warm enough for him to push the quilt aside and have a good stretch. He jumped up, sat on the bed and reached down to pick up a book. The book that came to hand was A History of the East End, a book of large old black and white photographs with very little text. He flicked through the pages and would stop at certain photos that caught this eye. The first was a photo of Boleyn Castle. The picture had no people in it and the quality of the photo was poor. The words underneath claimed that Anne Boleyn had lived there, and Henry VIII courted her there in secret trysts. Then Alem turned to a picture taken in 1905 of ‘The Ladies of the St John Ambulance Brigade’. They were all dressed in white frocks with black capes, and stared into the camera as if they were afraid of it. As Alem looked at them he wondered what they were thinking at the time, and who was St John? He flicked through pages of photos of old churches, famous people and industrial buildings, ending up on a picture of Beckton in the Blitz. A bomb had hit a row of houses in a street; they had been reduced to rubble. Alem looked deep into the photo and began to notice small details, which at first were not visible among the mass of bricks and piping. He saw shoes, a doll, a radio, a handbag and a couple of hats, one of which looked very much like the hats that were worn by the ladies of the St John Ambulance Brigade.

Alem put the book down and went to the window. ‘Gosh!’ he shouted loudly as he looked outside. ‘That’s something else!’ Outside was foggy, frosty and cold.

‘Mrs Fitzgerald!’ he shouted. ‘Have you seen outside?’

She shouted back, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Is there something wrong with the pond?’ shouted Mr Fitzgerald.

‘Yes,’ Alem replied, ‘the pond is disappearing, everything is so white.’

‘That’s nothing,’ shouted Mr Fitzgerald. ‘You should see it when it snows. It doesn’t happen much nowadays, but that’s when it’s really white.’

At the breakfast table Mr Fitzgerald explained that England was like that. ‘You could get four seasons in a day sometimes,’ he said trying to make it sound like an original observation. He went on to give a lecture on how unlucky the kids were now, and how when he was young snow would be around for weeks and they would make sleighs and snowmen.

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