They both giggled as I took the books and we walked our separate ways. ‘Transferred…’ compulsory relocation to a different site maybe… or maybe they had ended up somewhere else. I now knew what happened to teachers who couldn’t cut it here.
I was searching for the technology department, and I eventually found it down a corridor, locked behind a set of double doors. I broke the glass to get in; by this point I had few scruples left. The woodworking rooms had mostly been stripped of tools, but in the supply cupboard I found a pair of electrical pliers.
I was ready to leave. It would be fairly easy to get away. As far as I could tell, I wasn’t being watched in my own house, and the soldiers weren’t watching the area outside the fence at all, their eyes turned inwards when then walked the circuit. But as I pondered the ways and means, a slow conviction began to dawn on me, I was going to take all the refugee students with me, they were my kids… my classes… the way they were being treated was wrong and somehow we would all get out together.
I think Ruth thought I had resigned myself to the situation, but a couple of weeks after we had talked, I put a note in her physics exercise book. It was risky but I sketched out a spacecraft in orbit with a stick figure showing in a round window. I drew an arrow pointing to it and put a couple of fancy equations beside it. The words I used were oblique:
‘The bigger the mass, the greater velocity required to escape orbit. This spaceship has the ability to reach a much greater velocity and carry a much larger mass than the design shows’
Then I added some questions beneath;
1) Calculate the maximum load the spacecraft could carry on its’ trip to Mars.
2) The vessel must leave before the hot season starts on Mars; calculate the shortest time it can be ready to launch.
3) The ship needs to carry enough fuel to reach the correct velocity. If it will take eight hours to reach its destination how much fuel does it need to have stored?
I hoped Ruth would be able to decode the invitation and respond.
I was not disappointed. The paper was returned with ‘50 x 14 = 700kg’ next to question one, and ‘60x60x72 = 259200s’ under question two. Question three filled up the rest of the paper with some very complicated maths using the formulas I had given and a doodle of a stick figure walking under a clock. I interpreted her answers; fourteen students wanted to escape, they could be ready in three days and she had got the message about walking for eight hours.
We met up that evening at the usual footpath. I got straight to the point. ‘What’s stopping you from leaving?’ I asked. It really didn’t seem that hard to me, there weren’t that many guards and the fence seemed easy to get through.
‘We’re watched closely, we can’t just go where we want, like you,’ said Mark impatiently.
I looked around at where we were and raised my eyebrows ‘but…’
‘Our evening duty at the allotments start at 6pm,’ said Ruth, ‘after school we have to be back at the student hostel by 4pm, that’s why we don’t stay for any of the after-school clubs. We eat and have to be at the allotments by 6pm.’
I glanced at my watch; it was 5:40. ‘So what happens if you are late?’ I asked.
‘It’s very simple; the gatekeeper at the allotment takes a register on the computer, it automatically updates at the hostel; if we are marked late, we don’t get our next meal.’ Mark sounded pretty angry about it.
‘No-one is usually late more than once or twice, it’s a very effective punishment,’ said Ruth, ‘If we are booked for a work order then the forms end up at school and the headmaster’s PA enters them into the system. The hostel always tracks where we are supposed to be.’
‘And the forms have to be signed to show what time we finished,’ added Mark, ‘if we finish a job early we have to get back to the hostel and hand in our forms; otherwise we miss the next two meals.’
‘And if someone doesn’t turn up to where they are supposed to be then the soldiers at the army base are alerted and they send men around the perimeter checking.’
‘A couple in our year tried escaping,’ said Mark, ‘they were caught cutting through the perimeter fence. The next day they were assigned chicken factory jobs even though they were months away from reaching sixteen.’
‘Chicken factory?’ I asked.
‘The hostel overseers laugh about it sometimes, but it sounds horrible, the workers are locked in all the time there,’ said Mark.
I shivered; this is what they had to look forward to. I glanced at my watch again 5:45, ‘I have David’s signature, I’m sure I can do something with that, I’ll get you out somehow,’ I promised. Then let them walk briskly ahead. It sounded like all their time was regulated, but then I remembered; I had been able to get Ruth assigned to wheel my barrow of compost home. All it had taken was a bit of feigned helplessness. It might be possible to get the students assigned to work for me. If we picked a long hard job at a weekend, I could get a work order that freed them up for the whole day.
I needed a reason to get them to my house and in the end it was Stephen who gave me the idea. We were marking exercise books in the staffroom, waiting for the day to end. ‘What are you working on in your garden Stephen?’ I asked, trying to make conversation.
He looked up, a smile on his face, ‘I’m thinking of ripping up the decking and putting in a pond,’ he said, ‘there’s a garden centre and aquarium shop just outside town with plenty of supplies.’
I was intrigued, ‘How are you going to get there?’ I asked.
‘David has arranged for a pass for me, and a jeep from Halton camp.’ He rubbed his hands together ‘I could get a large pond liner and a waterfall feature… there might even be some koi carp still alive…’ His eyes stared into the distance dreamily as he listed all the things he was hoping to find.
Stephen was becoming more of a mystery to me, he seemed a nice guy; pleasant and friendly. A good teacher; caring about the kids work and conscientious, but he seemed to be totally ok with the strict regime and unquestioning of the status quo. I didn’t understand how he was so placid and content. But Stephen wasn’t my problem, I was interested in his familiarity with the camp procedures.
‘Oh, a garden centre! Can I come?’
For the first time Stephen looked slightly uncomfortable, ‘well, you have to ask David, he arranged it all, although I don’t think people are supposed to know that I’m going off site.’
I smiled, ‘ok, don’t worry, I won’t tell as long as you bring me back a nice fern.’ I turned back to my marking, maybe I could use Stephen’s trip somehow. He was ripping up his decking, maybe I could rip up my patio, that would be a backbreaking job, and moving the rubble would require a lot of bodies. The only problem was that I’d have to be sure that the right kids were assigned the work.
In the end, Mark swiped a blank work order from the gatekeeper at the allotment. I was trying to find the right way to ask David, I didn’t want him to say no, as that would have scuppered the plan completely and I was dithering about how to approach him. But one afternoon, I found the work order in Ruth’s exercise book, with the names of the students filled in. I stared at it in surprise and then quickly shut the book, looking around the staff room to see if anyone had noticed. I took it home and traced David’s signature onto it using the remade lightbox. The next morning I popped the completed form in the PA’s in-tray when she wasn’t looking. The names were read out at assembly and, as simply as that, it was sorted; we were leaving on Saturday.
I examined the maps I still had in my backpack, there were many paths, but one option stood out; the grand union canal. The disused Wendover arm of the canal ran alongside the school, up northeast to Tring, where it met the main canal. This then curved in a huge arc down to Watford. The vegetation on the banks of the canal would shield us from view and we couldn’t possibly get lost. If we made it out past Halton without being seen, we would find it pretty easy to get to Tring which was only 5 miles away. The full loop would be over twenty-five miles, which was too far to walk in one day, but if we could get bikes we could easily cycle the whole journey along the towpath. The difficulty would be getting to Tring and finding bikes before we were missed.