Uprooted - a Canadian War Story

  “Oh, no. Not that!”

  “That and more. ‘If Ice-water Alex would only join him in a li’l snifter she’d soon give him a li’l kiss.’ Really, it was too much, Irene! I couldn’t stand it. With Luti upstairs, probably crying her eyes out! Impossible. I couldn’t stay under his roof after that.”

  “Of course you couldn’t. Ask me, he deserves to be ruined!” She leant back in her chair. “I think I’ll send the story to the Star Phoenix to put on their front page!” She made headlines with her hands. “‘Dawn Escape of English Fugitive! War guest Flees Crescent Lothario!’”

  We all burst out laughing, even Alfie, who was listening with all his ears. Willie said, “What’s a Lothario?”

  “A lover-boy,” said her mother.

  Willie giggled and dished out the eggs and bacon. We fairly wolfed them down. There’s nothing like escaping at dawn for giving you an appetite.

  We had a wonderful first day with them – Runaway Sunday. There were no shops open so Mrs Lord – Irene, as I was told to call her – cleared out the cupboards of tins and packets and we made a crazy mixed-up main meal, like the first supper in The Railway Children. I remember pancakes from a packet, made by Willie and me (I really admired Willie for being able to cook – I’d never cooked in my life before), and tinned peas and some popcorn that we popped and poured maple syrup over, and plenty of saltine crackers and butter. Alfie found some old dog biscuits at the back of a cupboard, ripped open the box and chewed on them as if he were starving. We laughed so much, like people let out of—

  No. I knew I shouldn’t think that. I did have good memories of our time at the Laines’, and sadness about Luti. What must she be feeling? What will she say to Gordon? I wondered. Will she miss us? Well, I knew she would. She loved us. And we’d loved her, in a way. But that didn’t make me sorry we’d left.

  Cameron had something else on his mind.

  “I suppose we can’t go back for the bikes,” he said.

  “I’m afraid not,” said Mummy. “We can’t go back at all. Which is tiresome, because I couldn’t bring everything. There’s another suitcase, down in the basement, with our summer clothes in it.”

  “You should ask Mr Laine to send it on,” said Irene.

  Mummy shuddered. “I couldn’t.”

  But she didn’t have to.

  It took Gordon about forty-eight hours to find out where we’d gone. Then, on the Tuesday afternoon when we were at school, he came knocking on the door.

  He’d brought our summer suitcase – and the bikes and the skates and the sled. He stood on the porch, where he’d unloaded all this from the Hillman before he knocked, so Mummy would see how reasonable he was being. He was totally sober, totally calm. He didn’t beg or plead or make any fuss at all. He just stood there in his heavy overcoat, and said, “Alex, I’ve brought your things. May I have two words with you – that’s all I ask.”

  “Of course,” said Mummy, and stood aside.

  Irene hovered in the background, but she had the tact to leave them alone in the little sitting room. Gordon didn’t take off his outdoor things except his cap. They sat down and Gordon put his hands on his knees, the way he did when he had something important to say.

  “I won’t trouble you with apologies. You must know how ashamed I am about what happened. Not just on Saturday, but other times. I’d just like to say that your leaving my house is just about the most shaming thing that’s ever happened to me. No, don’t say anything. I understand you had to leave. But I have some standing in this town, and if people find out that you left because of anything I did, my name will be mud, and I will probably lose my legal practice. So for old time’s sake – and there have been some good times, you can’t deny that – I ask that we cook up some story between us to explain why you’re not living with us any more.”

  Mummy nodded. “I wasn’t going to spread stories, Gordon. You’ve been very kind and generous to us and I won’t forget that. The last thing I want is to harm you. Let’s just say that since our money came through from England we all agreed it would be better if the children and I had our own household. If you like, you can say that either you or Luti haven’t been well, and that I didn’t want to burden you with having kids in the house. Everyone will just think you’ve done very well to keep us for six months. And so you have.”

  Gordon stared at her for a long time. She was shocked to see tears behind his glasses.

  “You are so kind, and so pure, and so much, much too good for me,” he said. “The kids were no trouble. Luti is heartbroken. And I did this. With my damned stupid drinking. I’m a changed man, Alex. I swear it. You’ve changed me. No, I’m not asking you to come back. I don’t deserve it.”

  And with that, he got up, shook hands with her, and led the way to the front door. He asked if he could help bring the things in, but Mummy, who was overwhelmed by the scene, and only wanted him to go, said no. He walked down the path to the car and drove away without looking back.

  We never saw him again. Even in a small town, it’s possible to avoid someone you don’t want to bump into.

  ‘Bunking-in’, as Cameron called it, with the Lords was great fun. At least, I thought so, and so did Willie. The Lords were really welcoming and absolutely fantabulous about it, treating our stay as a sort of game.

  The ‘three bedrooms’ were actually two and a half. The two both had twin beds in them, and had been occupied by the Warrens, and Mrs Lord and Willie, with Alfie having the little bedroom, which wasn’t much bigger than a large cupboard.

  What happened now was that Alfie moved out of his little room and handed it over to Cameron, while the two mothers slept in one of the twin rooms and Willie and I in the other. Alfie slept on the floor in the mothers’ room, on a blow-up mattress between the two beds; the mothers just had to get in and out of their beds from the bottom, or risk treading on him.

  Every now and then, Mummy told me, she would go and peep into Cameron’s tiny room at the back of the house and remember the cabin on the ship that she’d refused to sleep in, and be grateful for a double room, even though it was so small the beds were pushed against the walls. I knew it must feel pretty claustrophobic for Mummy, but Mrs Lord gave her the bed next to the window, so it wasn’t too bad.

  Sharing was great for Willie and me, because we could talk at night before we fell asleep. We giggled and gossiped, talked about our schools and sang to each other.

  “I got tears in my ears

  From lying on my back

  In my bed while I cry over you-oo!

  And those tears in my ears

  Are off the beaten track

  Since you said, it’s goodbye,

  We are through!”

  We talked about our fathers too. I didn’t talk about Daddy much to Mummy because it made her sad, but to Willie I could tell all the nice things I remembered about him. I told how his patients loved him, how one of them once told me over the phone, “Dr Hanks only has to come into the room and you feel better.” How he had to get up in the middle of the night when someone rang up. How he delivered babies, and how he taught me to dance.

  And she told me about her dad, who she was very proud of for fighting the ‘filthystinkingGermans’. She never said ‘Germans’ without the other two words, as if they were one.

  I felt sorry for Cameron, with no one to talk to in the night, and once when I went to the toot and saw the light under his door, I fetched Willie and we crept into the little room and sat on his bed to keep him company. But you could see he wanted us to push off so he could read Prester John. Cameron was a loner, and that’s all there was to it.

  It was a good time, staying with the Lords. We loved being just English people and not having to be on best behaviour. It was our house, small and shabby as it was, and we felt free in it to do what we liked and be ourselves. Nobody ever said “Shhhh!” As for “Widdiya woddiya”, that was forgotten. There were no more fights over The Spirit because we decided buying the Montreal Standard was a luxury
we couldn’t afford.

  One good thing the little house made me do.

  The old man Willie had wanted to scare at Hallowe’en still lived next door to us. The first day I saw him coming out on to his front path to shovel snow, the memory of what happened that night hit me afresh and I felt my heart start thumping with guilt at the old lady falling down in a faint. I hadn’t seen anything of her since we’d moved in. I took my conscience to Mummy as I always did.

  “Yes, and? What do you want me to say?” she asked.

  “What can I do?”

  “Oh, come on, Lindy. You don’t need me to tell you that.”

  It took me a week to get up courage – a week when I was going to school every day on the streetcar, answering questions from the little park gang about why I wasn’t showing up for skating. About that Mummy had given me very strict instructions what to say.

  “We moved to Taylor Street. We decided it would be good to try living on our own. Not to be a burden.”

  No doubt primed by their curious parents, one or two of the kids asked, “Did the Laines agree you should leave?”

  “Well, in the end,” I said. “They didn’t want us to, but Mum thought we should try to be independent.”

  It was Patricia who pressed me more. “Was there a row?”

  I remembered the scene on the doorstep, with Gordon shouting and clinging. I remembered the noise the handbag made on his face. But the houses in the crescent weren’t that close together, it was misty, and very early, so I said firmly, “A row? Of course not. They gave a party to say goodbye to Mum, and the next morning we left.”

  (Willie had advised me to start calling Mummy ‘Mom’ but I couldn’t. Mum was the best I could do.)

  The principal had to know my new address. Mummy sent her a note. She called me in.

  “So you’ve moved to Taylor Street, Lindy,” she said. “That’s really out of our catchment area. Are you planning to change schools?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Well … you’re settled here … we wouldn’t like to lose you. We could probably make an exception … But it’s rather far for you to come.”

  “I don’t mind. The streetcar nearly passes our door.”

  The truth was, although I’d have liked to go to school with Willie, I didn’t want the hassle of getting used to a new school. I loved Miss Bubniuk (I had a bit of a crush on her, as a matter of fact, she was so beautiful and so much fun) and there was going to be a play at the end of the school year that I had a good part in.

  So I stuck. The goings-on at school gave Willie and me something more to talk about after ‘lights out’. Her school was a bit rougher than mine, and once she came home with a black eye. She said some fat boy called Cecil, who kept jeering at her and calling her Scarlett O’Hara because of her red hair, went too far, so she socked him, and he socked her right back.

  If any boy had socked a girl at Buena Vista he’d have been expelled, but nothing happened to Cecil, who kept right on, only now he called Willie Joe Louis, after the famous world heavyweight championship boxer. He kept dancing about in front of her shouting “Put ’em up! Scared to sock me again? You better be!”

  But she didn’t care. She just said, “I am Joe Louis and I only pick on people my size. You’re too feak and weeble.” She’d got that from me, of course. Cecil didn’t know what it meant and it drove him crazy.

  One night in bed I talked to Willie about my guilt about the old couple next door. She was quiet for a bit, and then she said, “Do you think I haven’t been feeling bad about it too? That night, when I didn’t come back, I was sitting in the kitchen in my witch costume crying because I thought we’d killed her. I just couldn’t face going out there again.” After a few moments, lying there in the dark, she added, “I guess you all thought I’d run out on you. Huh?”

  “Well ….”

  “What shall we do?”

  “Say sorry, I guess.”

  “Yeah. You did the scaring, but I did the planning. We should both do it.”

  We made up our minds to do it the next day before school. We got up early. There had been quite a heavy fall of snow in the night, and the paths and pavements were a good five inches thick with it. Again. This job seemed to be endless … Now that the only ‘men’ about the place were Cameron and Alfie, they couldn’t do all the furnace-feeding and snow-sweeping, so we all took turns at it, letting Cameron off most of it because he had so much homework.

  That morning, as we were getting ready to go to say sorry to the old couple, Willie said, “Tell you what – let’s sweep their path as well as ours. Let’s do that first.”

  So we did. But while we were doing it, the door flew open and the old man came fuming and panting down the steps.

  “What the Sam Hill do you girls think you’re doing on my property?”

  “We’re sweeping your snow for you, Mr Hembrow,” said Willie.

  “And why the devil should you do that? Do you think I’m too ancient and helpless to sweep my own snow?”

  “No. We thought we’d do it to show how sorry we are.”

  He jerked his head back and stared at us with his mouth open. He was a tall, rangy man, with hard lines on his face, and a mop of white curly hair. He must have been handsome once. But now he was about eighty years old. Maybe more.

  “Sorry? For what?” he barked.

  Willie put down the yard broom she was holding and went up to him. I followed, clutching the shovel.

  “Mr Hembrow, it was us – on Hallowe’en. We were the ones who scared your wife. We didn’t mean to. We’re very sorry.”

  He went on staring at us for a long time. Finally he said, “Then you can finish the work. Do the sidewalk too. I don’t want to see one scrap of snow on either of ’em when I look out again.” And he turned on his heel and marched up the steps and slammed the door.

  We both heaved deep sighs. “Well. That wasn’t very nice,” I said.

  “No. But still, we’d better do it.”

  We were doing the last bit, pushing the snow from the pavement into the gutter, when he came bursting out again.

  “Hallowe’en was three goldarned months ago!” he yelled. “If you’re so all-fired sorry, where’ve you been for three months?”

  There was no answer to this. I hadn’t said anything so far, and I knew I needed to.

  I said, “How’s your wife now, Mr – Henbow?”

  “She’s sick,” he said, and went in again.

  I’d overheard Mummy ring O’F to let him know about what happened with Gordon, to explain why we’d moved. I could tell she was trying not to make him feel any worse about it than he was bound to, for putting us with the Laines in the first place. I heard her swear him to secrecy, and then tell him we were coming over to see him at the weekend. But he insisted on coming to us.

  “He says he wants to see the house,” said Mummy. She gave me a look. “We must make him understand how happy we are here, because when he sees it, he may think we’ve moved into the sticks, and that it’s his fault.”

  So the house wouldn’t look too crowded, Irene took Willie and Alfie out skating to the big rink downtown; she really was a very tactful person. We made a special tea for O’F and laid it nicely on the kitchen table, which was where we all ate as there wasn’t a separate dining room. Mummy used some of her lovely scarves, in rainbow colours, that she’d had since she was a famous actress, and draped them around the living room to make it look a bit exotic and not shabby.

  O’F arrived by taxi, as always. He’d had even further to come than before and Mummy rushed out to try to pay the driver but O’F shook his head.

  “Call it a ‘taxi’ on my stupidity,” he said.

  He hugged Mummy, and then me, and shook hands with Cameron, who he knew by now was not the huggy type.

  We had tea. O’F was quieter than usual. Normally he’d tell us a joke – he loved jokes, especially Irish ones. But today he didn’t tell us any jokes and seemed very down.

  “Da
rling,” said Mummy at last. “You must not blame yourself. How could you know?”

  “I should have. I should have made enquiries. I’m sure everyone who knows him, knows about his drink problem. I just never thought they’d volunteer to have war guests when … I’m really afraid he only did it to impress all his cronies.”

  “Well, even if he did, he was a good host. He did everything he could for us. We must have cost him a lot of money. If it hadn’t been for that one thing—”

  “That one vital thing,” said O’F. “That one terrible thing. The thing that made me give up alcohol altogether. The thing that cost me my job and my marriage …”

  “O’F! Darling O’F – you didn’t tell us!”

  “No, of course not. And I won’t. It’s all ancient history. Having you here, my dear ones … It’s made such a difference to my old age. Like a blessing. And in return I land you in a situation like that!” He shook his head. “What a fool. What a prize idiot.” He sighed. “Oh well. No good crying over spilt milk, eh? Tell me some gossip. Have you got some nice neighbours here?”

  I hung my head.

  “Go on, Lindy,” Mummy said. “Tell him.”

  So I did. He sat there, sucking on an empty pipe, drinking his tea. When I finished my sorry tale, he said, “What did you say their name is?”

  “Henbow or something,” I said.

  “Are you sure it’s not Hembrow?” he said, sitting up.

  “Yes! That’s it.”

  “Good lord. I wonder …” He stood up, and moved to the kitchen window. “Could it be? Is his first name Bernard?”

  “I don’t know …”

  “Bernard Hembrow! Do you know who he is?”

  We shook our heads.

  “Bernard Hembrow was one of the pioneers of the town. A true old-timer.”

  “What?” Mummy said. “But I thought it began back in the eighteen hundreds!”

  “Well? Bernard Hembrow is eighty if he’s a day. That takes him well back to when this place was little more than bare prairie.”