What follows I know to be true.
Some prequel, I have worked in hospice care for eleven years. Longer by far than most of my colleagues. I take care of the forgotten, the alone, the abandoned. I have changed bedpans, cleaned bed sores, fed and bathed patients. I have been spat upon and worse, hit and bite and worse. I have seen minds fade away, bodies wither, I have held hands with the dead. I have cried in my car and nearly quit a hundred times. But I have stayed on because between dosing medicine and changing soiled sheets my main job is to listen.
To hear the stories of lives that history will not remember, stories that children and loved ones never hear. In their last years my patients just want to be heard, to have an ear for all the secrets they fear to carry to the grave. None will haunt me more than the story of Edward Jonathan Ravenscroft.
Edward was born in 1932, came to us in 2010. He was an angel of a patient. Mobile enough to reach the bathroom nine times out of ten, old world polite, and still had his wits. I was understandably surprised to learn that this was the seventeenth home he’d been in. He had the money to live somewhere far better than my facility where the fruit came canned and the jello only in green. I became his sole provider, the other nurses and attendees avoided him, taking on more of my responsibilities so they wouldn’t have to deal with him. I didn’t know why, none of them seemed able to articulate why themselves. I guess they sensed something I didn’t.
In 2015 his health took a bad turn and by August he was gone. On his last night, his Swan Song, he told me this tale.
It was 1940. Churchill was Prime Minister, ruling from tunnels underground, and the Germans were winning. The Blitzkrieg was slowly demolishing London while the English kept calm and carried on, working by day in buildings with shattered windows and missing walls and taking refuge in subways at night.
Edward’s father worked in the war office and died fighting the good fight, executed by a Nazi bullet. His brother, older than him by a decade, had done as all other boys his age and joined the army; he never made it out of Dunkirk. His mother, a seamstress, would spend the war putting her needlework to use in mud crusted field hospitals. She would return home only to drown in drink a year later.
Edward went north to live with his Aunt Lydia at the Ravenscroft School for Boys. In his picture, the last his mother would ever take of him, he’s a boy of ten. Small for his age, thin blond hair with shy eyes, dressed in his Sunday’s best for the train ride north.
In her picture Lydia Ravenscroft is a tall dark woman, with the severe face of a widow determined to carry on after the loss of her only love and child. She’d established the school in the quiet years when people still thought the Great War was going to be the last. She stands before her school, once the Ravenscroft Manner. A sprawling three story Victorian building doomed to be devoured by climbing ivy. It looked like a castle to me. Built by Edward’s grandfather who made a fortune in spice and tea trade from India before two bad marriages wrought every last penny out of him.
Edward was not the only boy to be evacuated there. The school was packed to capacity, housing an hundred and fifty-two boys when the previous year only seventy-six had filled its halls. A hundred and fifty-two boys to be managed by Lydia Ravenscroft, one nurse, one cook, and seven matrons. The poor women never stood a chance. Lydia was strict, enacting a precise schedule and severe punishment. A whipping might have been suitable deterrence for the boys born with silver spoons but many of these children had lived in London and fell beneath their father’s belt most nights. It did not take long for these boys to find outlet for the anger and fear in harassing Edward, the only child upon which Lydia showed favor.
This was how Edward me Furnace Boy.
