Prize: £1,000

Runners-Up:

Corrie Haldane, Aggie Novak, Daisy Agnes Jones, Bobby Timonio Nelson, Chad Frame.

Top-Tier Finalists:

Corrie Haldane, Jo Kerr, Anna Gebbie, Lin Morris, Alyssa Buchthal, Stephen Kingston, Barlow Crassmont, Sarah Hirons, Shahina Rahman, Ben L Graham, Jesper V. J. Fröjdö, Deidra Whitt Lovegren, Raymond Tilma, Rachel Green, Maddie Logemann, Lisa H. Owens, Johnson Matandi, Michael Crouch, Lana Dove, Hannah Andrews, Janet Bowstead, Jan McEwan.

Finalists:

Chris Doty-Dunn, Cristina Farinas, Ann Marie Struck, Lisa Verdekal, Sam Bromley, Lisa Robertson, MA Robinson, Hannah Andrews, December Knight, J.L. Theoret, Lin Whitehouse, David Thoenen, Cheyenne Bishop, Sarah Heald, Evian Keen, Barlow Crassmont, Robert Burns, Alice Shaw, Sasha Deepwell, Michelle Council, Annie Blackwell, Lydia Terry, Hala Giles, Sarah Haggett, Debbie Wingate, Jenna Burns, Val Rodgers, Rachel Thomson, Bluebelle Wednesday Carroll, Derick Turner, Tamsin Showbrook, Fiona Ritchie Walker, Marty S J White, Christine Ractliff, Matthew Dunne, Laurel Hanson, Laura Varney, Matt Whittleton, Wendy Markel, Richard Attree.

and the winner is…

Jane Thomas

Ladybird, Ladybird

 I’m cold. I tug on mummy’s coat and ask to go home. My butterflies have turned into a heavy, hard lump. I am wearing a straw hat and a blue skirt with a matching blazer and a big gold ‘F’ on the pocket. They’re new and I want to be excited but all I can think about is being warm in my bed. Along the platform I see a girl, younger than me, in the same uniform. A mean-looking seagull screams. 

Step One in creating the perfect Fairbridge child: remove any trace of individuality. Observations: successful.

I open my eyes; finger by finger, I release my grip on the table. It’s the first time in seventy years I’ve thought about the day I left England. I look around the carriage to see if anyone is watching me but they are just faces fixated on phone screens or looking out, eyes dull, at the blackened backs of terraces. I am invisible. 

Daddy hasn’t looked at me all day. He’s staring at the clock or down the tracks or straightening his tie. Mummy looks straight ahead, her fingers playing with her necklace. The train arrives, hissing and screeching, and people bundle out of the waiting room, and Daddy opens a door and picks me up and lifts me onto the top step – and still he doesn’t look at me. 

Mummy pulls a box from a bag and says I can open it once the train has gone and just like that the butterflies are back again, ready for my day trip to Rhodesia. I smile my biggest smile and say thank you, thank you for my present, and I’ll tell them all about it this evening when I get home, and I turn into the corridor and find my seat in the right compartment and will the train to pull out of the station so I don’t have to sit here looking out at them not looking at me and I can open my present. 

On the first rough jolt I lift the lid and there’s a doll looking up at me, a beautiful doll with golden hair that smells like mummy’s perfume. Pinned to her blue dress is a name tag: Emily. 

I Will Not Cry I will not cry iwillnotcry iwillnotcry. I climb down from my bunk repeating this on every step of the ladder and, legs like jelly, go up on deck, lifting my chin and throwing back my shoulders as I look out at sea the colour of smashed slate. So someone stole Emily while I was sick on this stupid boat. So what. Mummy will get me a new doll. A warm wind whips my hair, tossing away bits of week-old black soot left over from the train ride. Africa takes the last pieces of England. 

Step Two: instil resilience. Observations: well done! Keep it up.

I watch as a small blonde boy tries to read a sign. Daddy, daddy, daddy finally acknowledges him, looking up from his phone for a moment to tell his son it says Emergency Exit. My father taught me to read, too; I sat on his knee and with his newspaper he showed me how the syllables of ‘deoxyribonucleic’ and ‘intelligence’ and ‘Soviets’ merged together to make words I could say but not understand. Because I could read big words I was considered smart enough for proper work in the future. It wasn’t a day trip to Rhodesia; it was intentional, permanent displacement, designed to populate the far-flung corner of the British Empire. Sometimes, I hated my father for it, for having taught me the skill that defined my future, but I enjoyed dropping words like ‘loquacious’ and ‘perspicacious’ into conversation just because I could and they sounded nice and nobody else knew they didn’t belong either. 

Maybe I am making a mistake going to England, and going alone. That’s on my insistence. Thomas shrugs his shoulders and retreats to his workshop. My daughter – practical, with compartmentalised emotions – organises everything and it seems simple from six thousand miles away: a plane, and a plane; a train, and a train. At school we talked of throwing ourselves to our knees and kissing the ground when we first went back and part of me thinks I want that, even now, but by the time I’ve located my bag, the straggler on a motionless carousel, and followed the black and yellow signs to the Heathrow Express I still haven’t been outside and the airport is just an airport and I could be anywhere in the world. After rattling through the underworld I am in Paddington Station, a blur of people with heads down following familiar trajectories, and the sunlight beyond the concourse winks at me but I have a train to catch and it seems foolish now. The moment has gone. 

A woman clatters up the aisle with a collection of lurid packets. The young man opposite chooses a muffin and waves his phone over a machine that beeps its approval. I crane my neck to watch this scenario repeated again and again, reaching into my pocket to feel the crisp new ten pound note, still with the Queen’s face on even though she’s been dead more than two years now. 

Mummy tells me to put on my best dress and I line the four of them up on my bed and I suppose she means this one, with the lace and the bow, and I put it on but I can’t do up the buttons at the back so I go to her room and watch as she looks into her dressing table mirror, lipstick in one hand and fingertips of the other tracing the line of scar that runs down her cheek. She calls it her ‘Blitz blemish’. I’m not sure what that means, but I know it isn’t as fun as the words sound. I step forwards and touch it too and mummy spins around and slaps me, and daddy comes in and shouts that she mustn’t do that and mummy snaps that she’d never wanted one reminder of the sodding war, never mind two.  

Anger flashes between them before she fixes a smile in place and says turn around, turn around Maggie, and I turn and she does up my buttons with hands that shake. 

We are walking, my left hand in daddy’s and my right in mummy’s, and we are going to Mrs Prendergast’s because Mrs Prendergast has a television and she has invited half the street to come and see the Queen get her crown. In the crowded room, I sit on daddy’s knee. Through a mist of cigarette smoke that itches my throat, the beautiful Queen turns and smiles right at me and now she’s waving and I smile and wave back and everyone, even mummy, laughs, so I stop and wrap my arms around myself. Daddy leans in and whispers that I mustn’t mind them and they’re only jealous the Queen didn’t wave to them, and I tuck my head under his chin and he pulls me close into his tobacco-scented sanctuary.

Six months later as I am given my first pocket money I know everything is going to be okay because the money has pictures of the Queen on it, and if she’s here in Rhodesia then it must be alright. The Queen wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me, the girl she waved to and smiled at.

A woman is emptying her handbag, crumpled up tissues joining a phone, a wallet and a passport on the fold-down table. I too have a British passport; that was part of the deal. We saluted the flag on weekday mornings and asked God to save the Queen, and all the time we were breathing in the hot, dry African air and learning the sounds of cicadas and scent of the earth after long-awaited rains. I renewed it, every ten years, but this is the first time I’ve used it. It was always at the back of my mind, during the Bush Wars, and when Mugabe roared into power, and even when they came for us on the farm, a machete held to my neck as they snapped Thomas’s left arm and then his right and behind him a tar-black mamba slipped into the shadows of the barn, and when I piled things – random things, desperate things – into the truck and drove, fingernails biting down into my palms as we fled, somewhere, anywhere. The woman looks over and I realise I’ve been staring and flash her a smile; she glares back and starts tapping away on her phone, glancing my way as she shares the scene with someone in the world beyond our carriage. 

Step Three: create unwavering devotion to the Motherland. Observations: jolly good job, well done.

I glance back at the luggage rack, relieved to see my suitcase still nestled in place. Someone has balanced a backpack on top. I look around, guessing its owner, settling on a middle-aged woman wearing pristine walking boots, too-tight trousers, and talking loudly on the phone about ‘finding herself’. When she hangs up I want to tell her I’m doing the same thing – I’m finding myself, too – but already she is on another call, announcing her mission with practised phrases and a string of expletives that shock me into silence. 

It is Saturday and a group of us are exchanging forms for tents and roll-mats. We hitchhike from Bulawayo down to Matopos then walk through the bush in our bare feet, ears alert for the cough of a leopard. And later, we climb the smooth round boulders, the ‘bald heads’ that give the place its name, heading for the highest point where we can sleep alongside the grave of Cecil Rhodes. From here we can watch the sun rise and set and lose the mosquitoes to the breeze. 

Step Four: encourage independence. Observations: shows promise.

Three ladies get on and fill the carriage with noise; they squeeze into seats at the table opposite mine, bodies straining at crisp blue uniforms. There is laughter, generously given, and I see others exchanging amused glances or grimacing, and I can’t stand it and I lean over and say salibonani, hello, salibonani. Three heads turn together and before they ask I say yes, yes I speak Ndebele, and for a while I am home again where people talk with strangers and don’t hide behind scowls and smirks and screens. They alight a few stops later, all smiles and shouts of hamba kahle, gogo, travel safe as the door closes, waving to me as the train glides away in silence. I sense judgment in my fellow passengers, my secret is out: the benign old white lady in the blouse and pink cardigan doesn’t belong. 

There is a metal sign arching over the entrance to the school. It’s Latin. Oh. It means, ‘In Discrimination, there is Safety’. And because I don’t want the older boy to know that I don’t know what this means, even though he has put it into English, I say right and nod my head. He asks how old I am and I tell him I’m seven – nearly eight years old – and he snorts and says I’m one of those, and I don’t know what he means but someone else explains I am a prize because my parents survived the war and often those were a mistake, a foolish fumbled mistake. 

I learn that we aren’t supposed to talk to the people with the black skin. This is one of the first things they tell us. I don’t understand, and I don’t like being told ‘no’. And one day, when I’m walking to school, I see a black boy with one sock on and one sock off, and he’s windmilling his sock around and around trying to dry it in the hot air and I imagine him leaping over a puddle and not quite making it, and for a minute I want to laugh at him and then I think of something better and I take off one of my socks and I run to catch up. His eyes widen as I chase after him with my sock and then we are laughing and finally he takes it and asks if I won’t get into trouble if I only have one sock and I say not as much trouble as him and he grins at me and puts the dry sock on and hides the wet one in his pocket. 

I get scolded for my missing sock, but I don’t get beaten. Come, come, Victoria. You’re better than this. I tell my housemistress that I don’t understand why they call me Victoria, I don’t think that’s my name, and maybe they can write and ask my parents – just to be sure. She puts down her pen and folds her arms, looking across her desk at me as she says my mother and father are dead, they’re dead Victoria. Just like that, I’m an orphan; any trace of ‘Maggie’ is gone. 

Step Five: change their identity and kill off their parents. Observations: flawless execution.

There’s an announcement: we’re coming to my stop, Penzance, and I look out of the window searching for familiar in the unfamiliar. A teenager with long unwashed hair sulks as he responds to my elbow’s nudge and helps with my suitcase; I doubt he hears my ‘thank you’ since he doesn’t remove his headphones as he slopes away. My daughter has arranged a taxi and there’s a man holding a sign, Victoria Beadle, and we exchange minimal stilted niceties. 

Brightside bed and breakfast? I nod – then put a hand on his arm. I have somewhere else I’d like to go first, if that isn’t too much trouble. His protracted sigh suggests it is, so I reach into my pocket for the ten pound note and hand it over with an apologetic smile. He sniffs and thrusts it into a wallet. People back home have all the time in the world. Here, it seems, time is available for a price.

The day after the Queen smiles and waves at me I am lying on my belly on the grass in the garden counting ladybirds. I nudge one onto the end of my finger and whisper that she must fly away home and she opens her wings and zigzags off towards the lilac. It’s a hot day and the window is open and mummy’s voice spills out in a yell and she’s telling daddy that he’s changed, he’s changed, and he’s saying of course he’s bloody changed after what he went through. And I focus on the ladybirds and try to count the spots on their backs but mummy is screaming and saying she just wants to forget everything and daddy is saying what if Maggie goes, what if she isn’t here and maybe that will help, and I screw up my eyes and look at a ladybird opening and closing her wings as she balances on a blade of grass. 

The house isn’t here anymore. There’s a concrete cube in its place with small windows and a grey, windowless door and gravel where there ought to be grass. Looking along the street all the houses are the same and how, how is it possible that the lazy verandahs and dappled boulevards of Bulawayo were conceived by people from this same country where everything is so small and close and dull. I close my eyes and think of the space back home, horizons only interrupted by a single spreading silhouette of an acacia. 

The cemetery is a mile away and the taxi driver keeps looking at his watch, and he takes a call and says yeah, yeah mate, I’ll be a bit longer, this one is going to take a bit longer and he raises an eyebrow at me in the rearview mirror and I fumble in my bag for another ten pound note with the Queen staring, impassive, back at me. He steps out into the sunshine, leans against the bonnet and lights up a cigarette. 

There’s a lady with a ledger and she helps me find the graves. They’re buried side by side: mother died first, a ‘beloved wife’; father died a few years later, a ‘devoted husband’. I know the dates by heart. My daughter found them in the documents released in 2018, a century of secrets that exposed the extent of the deception, the guilt of successive governments and the support of the Crown. She found my name, too. Five years earlier and this reunion wouldn’t be taking place in a graveyard. 

There are weeds growing on my mother’s grave. I spy a ladybird on a dandelion and place her on the headstone. I follow her movements and she guides me to more words hidden by the long grass and now, now I fall to my knees and feel the earth of England beneath my hands. As I pull at the grass my mother is once more handing over my present at the station only now she is biting her lip so hard it bleeds, and when my father looks down a single teardrop lands on the polished toe of his shoe. 

Also mother to Maggie. She never stopped searching.  

And part of me wants to scream because mummy was looking for me and she wanted me back but it is too late, too late for me and a thousand others, and maybe her scar faded and maybe I became more than just one of ‘those’ only I will never know, I will never get the chance to know. 

And I don’t know anymore if I am British or Zimbabwean, if my veins are filled with the salt air of Cornwall or the red earth of Africa, but I know that here, in a rush of reclaimed memories, seagulls wheeling overhead, I am home.