So Mother and I, and a few others, we left the camp in the middle of the night and began to walk. We walked for weeks and weeks. We walked over the mountains, through the desert, followed where others went, all of us with only one thing on our minds. To find somewhere far away from the war, anywhere, that was a place of peace where there was food and water and shelter, where we could be safe. How long and how far we walked I do not know.
Sleep was our only comfort. You can forget when you are asleep. Waking up was the worst part of every day. I wanted only to stay where I was, curled up on the ground, and never get up again. I was so tired, too tired to care any more.
Mother saved my life every morning. She would never let me lie there. She always said that if I didn’t get up, and walk on, I would die, and she wasn’t going to let that happen. She would tell me sometimes that she could smell the sea, that I had to be strong and brave, like Father and Hanan had been. She promised me that beside the sea there would be a boat waiting for us, to carry us to safety, to a new life in a new home where there would be lots of smiling people like the aid workers and doctors and nurses in the camp, and where there was no more war and no bombing. All I had to do, Mother said, was to put one foot in front of the other. Her love and her promises were all that kept me walking.
There were wire fences, there were lorries, there were trains, there were more refugee camps. The police beat us. There were people who yelled at us to go home, others who took us in and fed us and gave us warm clothes, and smiled at us. We never knew what to expect.
But Mother and me, we put one foot in front of the other, and we walked.
Sure enough, after a year or more of wandering, one day we came over a hill, and there – just as Mother had promised – was the sea, and some houses and people, and, like a miracle, there was the boat waiting for us. Mother told me, her arm around me, that God was good to us, and that I should always believe that.
She had little enough left to sell, the bracelets on her arms, the rings on her fingers. They were enough to pay the men to allow me on to their boat, but not Mother. None of her tears, nor mine, were enough to persuade them to let her go with me.
I had to go on alone, she told me. She would follow on later. We would find one another in England. She promised me faithfully. And Mother always keeps her promises.
I remember her last words to me. ‘Go to your Uncle Said in his café in Mevagissey,’ she told me. ‘Fore Street. Mevagissey. Remember, Fore Street. Remember, Mevagissey. Say it over and over in your head, Omar, so that you do not ever forget. Fore Street, Mevagissey. Fore Street, Mevagissey. Wait for me there. I will come. Go now, Omar. Say to the people in England that you are his nephew, and they will let you stay. Uncle Said told me they would do this. Tell them where he lives, where he works in his café. They will let you stay with him. Do not worry. They will have smiling eyes, and there is no war there either. This way you will live, and if you live, so will I. We will meet again, we will, God willing.’
I clung to her. I cried into her.
She whispered in my ear that she loved me more than life itself, but I had to be a man now like Father had been, that I had to be brave like Hanan, that I was to go and cry no more. ‘Smile for me,’ she said, ‘so I will remember you this way.’ I tried, tried so hard, but I did not succeed. My tears would not let me.
The last time I saw Mother she was standing there on the shore watching the boat take me away. She was becoming smaller before my eyes. Soon she was not there at all, and then nor was the shore.
I was in a big rubber boat with an engine that coughed and spluttered. The boat was so full of people that it was difficult for all of us to find anywhere to sit down. To begin with the sea was calm about us, lapping but calm. People were telling one another that it wasn’t far, that it was a good boat, that we would soon be there, soon be safe.
I had seen the sea in photographs, on films, and it had always been blue. But this sea was not blue. It was grey, and wide, and darkening, and threatening, and seemed to go on forever into the distance, where it became sky, a sky that was as grey as the sea.
I do not know how many nights and days I spent on that boat. I found at last a place to sit on the side. There I passed the long cold hours, trying all the while to calm my fears. I made myself imagine Mevagissey, the place where I was going. I tried to think of Uncle Said in his café in England. I had never met him. I had seen his photograph, the one Mother kept with her all the time. I had spoken to him only once, a long time before, on Skype. But then he was pixelated, so I could not see him at all well. I could tell that he had a moustache, and not much else. I remember his voice quite well, though. He told me I should come to see him one day, and help him in his café.
‘I’m coming, Uncle Said!’ I shouted out loud. ‘Fore Street, Mevagissey! Fore Street, Mevagissey!’ Some people around me on that boat looked at me as if I had gone mad. But I didn’t mind what they thought. I was going to Mevagissey! Fore Street, Mevagissey!
Mevagissey, Fore Street, Mevagissey. I kept saying those words out loud to myself on the boat, so I should never forget them, but also because I wanted to practise them. I practised all the English words I knew, that the aid workers had taught me: Hello, son. Goal! Foul! Chocolate. High five! Manchester United. Chelsea. Goodbye. See you. Come back soon. And of course all the cricket words I knew, like: bowler, batsman, over, wicket, out, not out, four, six and owzat!
Owzat was my favourite word. It cheered me up every time I said it. I wanted to speak as many English words as I could before I arrived in England. I wanted to show off to Mother, when I saw her, how well I could speak English. And practising my English words kept my mind off the sea and the waves and the cold and sound of all the moaning and crying around me in the boat.
Hope kept me going too. I hoped everyone in England would be smiling as Mother had said they would be. I hoped we would be happy there, and safe. Just thinking about it made me happy. I would have a home again and go to school, have friends again, play cricket again. I tried only to think most about Uncle Said, and cricket, not of Mother, not of Father or Hanan. I knew that if I thought of Mother too much I would cry. And I would not cry. I wanted to be a man, like Father had been. I wanted to be brave as Hanan had been. Father had never cried. Hanan would not cry. So I would not cry.
Within a few days the last of any drinking water was gone. The engine had long since broken down. There were waves now that towered over us, and with them always a biting wind. Sitting up on the side was no longer safe. I sat huddled now with the others in the bottom of the boat. The cold shivered me, numbed my hands and feet. All around me there was crying and whimpering and praying. I could see – we all could see – that all the time the boat was lower and lower in the sea. With every wave, more seawater was coming over the side. Some of us cupped our hands and did our best to bail it out. But the water was filling the boat faster than we could get rid of it.
In the end we gave up. We were sitting in water, lying in it, many of us more dead than alive. Every one of us there realised by now that soon enough we would all