Uprooted - a Canadian War Story

  I heard Willie in my head, saying, I bet he could think of a way! Kissy-kissy!

  I said, “Why did he come?”

  “Because he’s Canadian and the kindest man on earth.”

  “Kinder than O’F? Kinder than Daddy?”

  Mummy climbed into bed.

  “No, but they weren’t around. I needed a kind man who was around. Now go to sleep. You’ve got school tomorrow.”

  We went to the first night of Penny Wise with Hank. He took us in a taxi to the Regent, a real little theatre downtown. We sat in the front row, the three of us, with Hank in the middle, and the auditorium filled up with people and the play happened, and it was brilliant. I thought it was as good as Life with Father. Hank laughed in all the right places and clapped like mad and even cheered at the end. And through it all I was so unhappy I didn’t laugh once. I just kept stealing glances at Hank, his eyes fixed on the stage, and thought, Willie’s right. He’s buggy about her, you can see.

  After all the curtain calls, we waited for Mummy, who was glowing with triumph, and Hank took us all out to dinner at the Bessborough. He bought Mummy flowers from the flower stall in the foyer. He bought champagne to celebrate. (I had some. It went up my nose.) Then he took us home in another taxi and kissed Mummy goodbye. Only on the cheek, but they hugged each other, and he told her he’d come back if she needed him, “Even if I have to go AWOL.”

  AWOL (I asked Cameron) meant absent without leave. You could go to jail for it if you were in the army. Or the navy. He’d go to jail for her? Was he joking? I couldn’t tell.

  Willie was right. She was so right. I had to keep watch. Daddy couldn’t help not being here, any more than Mummy could help it that she was. It was the war. But I wasn’t going to let anything bad happen.

  The next two months were probably the worst, for me, since we’d first come to Canada.

  To be honest, I hadn’t minded up to now, being away from home. I wasn’t like Cameron. I didn’t want to be in the middle of the war. The newsreels and the radio tried to bring it to me. I shut my eyes in the movies, and refused to listen at home. But it got into me somehow, making sure I didn’t escape. Bombs and fire and smoke and darkness. Buildings crashing down. Big guns firing. Soldiers marching, people running, searchlights, planes in the sky. Churchill’s speech about fighting on the beaches … I couldn’t completely keep it out. And I couldn’t help being glad I was far away from it. I was on Mrs Blundell’s side. “They can’t reach us. Thank God.”

  When I thought about how Cameron felt, I knew I should feel like a deserter, too. But I couldn’t. I wanted to be happy. And I had been, pretty much, since we got here.

  Mummy often said, “Our goal, and my war work, is to see it through,” which made me feel we were helping the war by being brave.

  But this sudden, violent change, when we moved away from Taylor Street, made me feel seriously wobbly. If our home could be sold from under us, forcing us to move, if I had to go to a new school full of new kids who had to get used to my English accent all over again, if I didn’t have Willie any more, or the Hembrows – I just felt I’d been part of a complicated game where the grown-ups made all the rules. I wasn’t sure I wanted to play any more.

  But there was something else, now. All that wasn’t so bad. Like Willie said, I got used to it. Victoria School was near home. I made friends with a girl called Poppy. Only a few kids teased me, saying my ‘mom’ coached me after school to keep up my accent. I joined the drama club. I got lousy marks in maths and good ones in English. I was elected to the student council. What can I say? It was school.

  The bad thing was, I worried all the time about Hank.

  He phoned Mummy. He phoned too often. I listened in to Mummy’s end of the conversations. She laughed a lot.

  I thought, I should be glad he’s cheering her up. I should be glad he’s around if she needs him. But I wasn’t. I was frightened.

  I kept thinking, Why doesn’t Daddy write oftener? Why does he waste his letters telling golf stories? Why isn’t he more romantic?

  Didn’t he know how lonely Mummy got, here on her own without him?

  Suddenly a lot of little things I hadn’t even realised I’d noticed, clicked into place in my head. Moods Mummy got into. Tears she tried to keep me from seeing. Getting cross sometimes over nothing. And now, from when we got off the train from New York, how she looked. All lit up. What if it wasn’t the play that had lit her up, at all? What if it was Hank?

  We went to the movies every Friday. One night at the Roxy, we saw a war movie. There was a British soldier in it who got a letter from his wife, telling him she loved someone else. It gave me nightmares.

  In one of my secret phone calls to Willie, she said it’s not safe for married people to be thousands of miles apart for months and months – and maybe, the way the war was going so badly, years. How could people wait that long for each other?

  Cameron and I still wrote to our families every Sunday. Mummy never asked to see what I wrote to Daddy, although I usually read my letters to her because I was proud of them. But I stopped doing that when I began to write hints:

  Darling Daddy-dinko,

  How are you? We’re fine. Since the play, Mummy’s been asked to do a special thing for a war-bond drive in June. It’s about the Four Freedoms. That’s something President Roosevelt said everyone in the world should have: Freedom of Speech, Freedom from Want, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Fear. Mummy has to dream up four tablos in big box-things, like stages, that they’ll build in City Park. Each tablo will illustrate one of the Four Freedoms. Nobody in the tablo will move. It’ll be like a living picture. Mummy has to plan them all, and find the people and costumes. I’m going to be in one of them! I’ll be a child in the Want one, looking hungry. Oh, and Mummy has to write a script and read it.

  Cameron’s started taking piano lessons from a man called Mr Gustin. He can already play scales with two hands.

  O’F comes to see us more often in the new place because it’s closer to his home and the taxi doesn’t cost so much. So that’s good. But I miss our neighbours from the old place, and our landlady here is a bit mean and bangs on our door early on rent day. It’s too far to go to the stables, so I’ve got another job. I help out at the drugstore on Saturdays. I have to pretend I’m twelve. I don’t serve at the counter, I just wash dishes in the kitchen. I can hear the juke-box. Lots of Bing Crosby and Tommy Dorsey. I love ‘My Sister and I’, which is about refugees. Is ‘Deep Purple’ still popular at home? And ‘The Umbrella Man’?

  Have you written to Mummy lately? I don’t mind if you don’t write to me, I can share Mummy’s letters. Not if they’re too private of course. I bet Mummy would like that kind of letter best.

  I miss you. Please write.

  Tons of love, and to Grampy and Auntie Millie and Auntie Bee. Lindy.

  I didn’t mention Hank. But I thought, If Daddy doesn’t write soon, I will mention him. In a careful way. A warning way.

  In June Mummy got very busy with the tableaux (I learnt how to spell it) for the war-bond drive and was out a lot. She had to write and practise the speech part of it, and have sessions with the people in the tableaux even though they didn’t have to move or speak.

  Cameron spent hours after school practising on the school piano. He’d gone completely daffy about his music. The Classics-lovers Club had three members and he spent time at his friend Aaron’s house playing records on Aaron’s record player, so I was on my own a lot.

  Mummy had picked up on one Canadian custom. Nobody worried about leaving any kids older than about ten alone at home. And I was eleven by now. I was very free. I biked to Poppy’s. She sure wasn’t Willie, but she had a lovely house looking over the river on Saskatchewan Crescent. I thought rich parents like Poppy’s would be strict, but they had busy social lives and we were left to do as we liked. We rode our bikes across the open front gardens, raided the fridge for picnics on the riverbank, and played Knock Down Ginger after dark – knocking on doors
and running away, which I’m sure our parents would have had a fit about.

  Alone in the house, we made trick phone calls. We’d ring any old number and pretend to be testing the telephone. We’d ask people to move around the room, whistling, and then we’d say, “Thank you, ma’am, we’ll deliver the birdseed in the morning.”

  Or:

  “Hallo? Are you the woman who washes?”

  “No …”

  “You dirty thing!” (Hang up.)

  In between times, Mummy started worrying about the long summer holiday. We’d get the whole of July and August off. Any kind of going-away holiday was bound to be expensive and Mummy hated more and more to take money from O’F; he hadn’t been well. She often took the streetcar across town to visit him, and sometimes I went too. They had friendly rows about him giving us money. She usually won, and didn’t take any. So I knew a summer holiday for us was going to be a problem.

  One day I heard her talking to Hank:

  “These people in New York have offered to have us.”

  My heart leapt. But only for a second.

  “But of course I can’t accept …”

  Of course, I thought.

  “Well, they’ve done enough already, having the kids at Easter …

  “Yes, I’ve heard it’s terribly hot down there in summer. It’s getting hot here too! Oh, how I miss the English seaside! Buckets and spades, rock pools, deckchairs on the beach, swimming in the sea … I never realised how lucky we were! Now my sisters say the beaches are all covered with barbed wire and the sea’s full of mines … I’ll have to think of something else … (Long pause.)

  “Hank, I couldn’t! It’s too sweet of you, but no, really. But thank you. You’re an angel.”

  Mummy often talked ‘actressy’. But I didn’t like it when she did it to Hank. Once I thought I heard her call him ‘darling’! I wondered what he’d offered. Money, probably. I was so relieved she’d said no. I didn’t want her to owe him anything more. But I did want a summer holiday!

  I gave Mummy all my savings from jobs. It wasn’t much. I asked if there could be water in our holiday. Her talking about the seaside made me long for it.

  She said, “Wouldn’t it be lovely … but there’s no sea for a thousand miles. It’d take a miracle!”

  A miracle, eh?

  I decided to see what St Barnabas could do. My new class teacher, Mr Jansen, was keen on poetry, so I was able to make my prayer-poem better.

  Dear St Barnabas, be my speed,

  And come to me in my hour of need!

  To swim and fish is what we crave,

  But we haven’t enough dollars saved.

  Please find us some water, salty or not,

  And I’ll say you’re a lovesome saint, God wot.

  As to the money I leave that to you,

  I’m sure you won’t fail us cos you never do.”

  I was so pleased with the first two lines, I put them in again at the end, to round it off.

  This time I did read it to Cameron.

  He said, “Why don’t you pray to God?”

  I remembered the ‘Amen’ and didn’t like to admit I didn’t believe in him. I said, “Because I didn’t think it was important enough.”

  “Well, I did,” he said, which surprised me a lot. “And my prayer was much more specific. It’s interesting you asked for water. I want to go to Emma Lake.”

  I pricked up my ears. “Emma Lake? Where’s that?”

  “It’s north of here. A huge lake in the woods. Mr Gustin has a cabin. He runs a summer school for young musicians. Maybe he’ll ask me to go.”

  “All right for you then! What about us?”

  “I’ll pray again,” he said, after a moment. I wondered if he’d forgotten all about us the first time.

  “Do you really think God bothers about people’s school holidays?”

  “Of course, what a funny question.”

  But I didn’t see how he could. With the war and everything, there must be millions of really important prayers being sent to him. And how could Cameron help noticing that a lot of them weren’t being answered, with so many people dying.

  The War Bond Tableaux was another big triumph for Mummy. She read aloud what she’d written about the Four Freedoms. I’d heard it already when she’d been practising, but hearing it over the loudspeaker, in her English voice, it sounded beautiful. The people, sitting in rows of seats in the park by the river, listened very quietly. There was music, too … Beethoven!

  I played my hungry-girl part. As I didn’t look at all hungry, quite the opposite actually, I was partly hidden at the back of the tableau, which showed someone handing out loaves of bread to children with their hands stretched out.

  The main thing was to keep absolutely still all the time Mummy was speaking. My nose itched horribly but I managed to will myself not to scratch it. One of the other hungry children got the giggles and I muttered furiously at her, afraid she’d spoil the tableau. Our arms were aching by the time the curtains dropped at the end, but our picture was in the Star Phoenix (though you couldn’t see me). Mummy’s name was printed. A lot of war bonds sold and Mummy became a bit famous.

  People in other towns started asking if they could use her script for their own war bonds pageants. There was talk of another play with the Regent Players, and maybe a Christmas show for what were called ‘underprivileged children’. I was pleased because I liked feeling proud of her. And she had loads of friends now. She talked about ‘my gang’ – her group of actors, who used to come to the flat to drink tea and chat. If she did another play, they’d be coming over more, and maybe I’d get to hear their lines. But that wouldn’t be till after the summer vacation.

  What vacation?

  At the end of the school year, Mr Gustin, Cameron’s music teacher, gave a student concert.

  Cameron had only been learning the piano since Easter, but he played easy pieces now, and Mr Gustin said he could perform at the beginning of the concert. It was held at his house on Tenth Street. All the family and friends of the students crammed into one end of the double living room on little gilt chairs. At the other end was a small grand piano.

  Cameron didn’t seem a bit nervous. He went up when Mr Gustin – a white-haired man with a sweet face – called his name and said, “First, my English pupil, who is making great progress. He will play ‘About Lands and People’ by Schubert.”

  He sat down on the piano stool and played something very pretty, without (as far as I could tell), a single mistake. Everyone clapped. He stood up and bowed.

  I could see he was pretty pleased with himself. I knew it was wrong, but I felt a bit envious – I wanted the applause to be for me. Still. I was proud of him.

  How come when Cameron makes up his mind, he can do anything he’s decided to do? I wondered. I’d decided to be an actress when I grew up, but I wouldn’t have betted on making it happen.

  But what did happen was that St Barnabas, or God, or someone, came good.

  Mr Gustin did invite Cameron to go to his summer school at Emma Lake, but only for a week. BUT! Mr Gustin also knew of another cabin, right next to his, that was for rent for the whole summer. Very cheap!

  It wasn’t cheap enough, but then Mummy was invited to do some talks on CFQC, the Saskatoon radio station, about her life as an actress, and about coming to Canada. Her talks were brilliant. In one of them she told about the conductor on the train who took her off for a cup of tea and comforted her. She didn’t know his name but she said she hoped he’d hear the broadcast and know she was grateful.

  She got paid for the talks and that’s what helped us to rent the cabin at Emma Lake, and gave us a summer none of us would ever forget. Our first full summer in Canada, and the last before what happened with Cameron.

  The day school ended, we spent the evening packing and the next day we set off by train for Prince Albert, a town nearly a hundred miles north.

  We were very excited. At least, I was. Cameron had asked Mr Gustin what it wou
ld be like, but all he’d say was, “Well, for my money it’s the most beautiful place on earth.”

  I couldn’t believe it would be more beautiful than Felpham, the seaside town where we used to go for our summer holidays in England. Felpham was my standard for summer holidays.

  I was soon to discover, though, that there was no comparison.

  We left the prairies behind, and soon the train was chugging through forests. Not forests like in England with lots of different kinds of trees. Pine forests. Sitting out on the observation platform in the heat of midday you could smell the piny scent, overpowering everything. There was so much space.

  Mummy spent a lot of time out there, smoking and writing.

  “Are you writing to Daddy?”

  “No. Auntie Millie. She’s got troubles.”

  “The war, you mean?”

  “Not only …”

  She wouldn’t say any more. And she didn’t say that much in front of Cameron.

  She’d had a letter from Daddy just before we left. I was so relieved when it came; I thought maybe there was a God after all. She read it and read it and then handed it to me. There was some news in it (our windows had been mended and the horrid aunt’s cat had died, so at least it couldn’t be eating Daddy’s rations) and no golf stories, thank goodness, but there was nothing private. Just ‘lots of love’ and ‘missing you a great deal’ at the end.

  When we arrived at Prince Albert, there was a man there to meet us. His name was Mr Kaldor. I think he was Swedish. He had a truck with an open back. He piled our cases in and then helped Cameron and me up after them. There were some old tatty cushions to sit on, otherwise it was just bare boards. Mummy sat in front.

  We drove through the town with the wind blowing pine-scent and wood smoke and horse-smell up our noses. Almost at once we were out in the country. Wild was the word! We drove for miles through the woods, not seeing any people, just the odd log cabin. The hard floor of the truck bounced under our bottoms. After a while it wasn’t even a proper road, just a narrow, rutted track with the dark woods close on each side like walls.