Uprooted - a Canadian War Story

  But Cameron and I weren’t going to be beaten. We just piled on everything we had with us, in layers, and each wrapped a blanket over our heads and around us, covering our hands. Then up we went.

  As we opened the door on to the deck, a blast of freezing cold air nearly knocked us over backwards. But we soon recovered and scrambled out, nearly tripping over the ledge, staring. Straight in front of us – instead of empty ocean – we saw what looked like a huge blue mountain.

  “Oh, look! An iceberg!” breathed Mummy.

  It wasn’t only blue, of course – it was mainly white, with some greeny bits. It gleamed like an enormous lump of sugar that glittered and flashed in the sun. Hundreds of other passengers had come up on deck – dressed in strange clothes like us – and stood against the rail, staring and whispering to each other.

  Why are they whispering? I wondered. It just seemed you had to, it was so awesome. I didn’t know that word then. But it’s the only one that fits.

  As we stood there, watching this magnificent thing seeming to move past us, Mummy said, “That’s the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen!”

  A man was standing beside her. There weren’t many men on the ship; it was mostly women and children. But this man turned his head and said, “Madam, you are so wrong! It’s not beautiful at all. It’s a menace – a threat to our ship! Don’t you know what happened to the great, unsinkable Titanic? One of those deadly things tore the guts out of it.”

  For once my mother had nothing to say. But I did. I said, “It’s still beautiful! Even dangerous things can be beautiful.”

  “What, for instance?” this man asked. “Guns? Bombs? You think they’re beautiful, I suppose!”

  “Tigers,” I said. “And my mother’s right. That iceberg is beautiful. And it won’t hurt us either, because we’ve passed it.”

  He turned away from us. Mummy put her arm round me and hugged me to her side. She hugged Cameron too, and he let her. We watched the iceberg get smaller behind us until it was just a blue peak on the horizon.

  “Why was that man so nasty?” I asked.

  “He’s scared,” she said. “A lot of people are scared.”

  “You’re not!”

  She hugged me closer and didn’t answer.

  What I’m going to tell now, I didn’t know about until long afterwards. The third night at sea when we were halfway through the voyage, Mummy couldn’t sleep. She didn’t know what it was going to be like where we were going, and she’d never been away from Daddy since they were married. And besides, she felt shut in. She wanted desperately to open the porthole but she knew she couldn’t. So she got dressed and went up on deck.

  She walked about for a bit, and then stood at the rail. She was quite alone. It seemed everyone else on the ship was asleep, yet it kept moving steadily through the water. She felt much better outside than she had in the cabin. She kept breathing deeply and looking at the millions of stars shining overhead like a canopy embroidered with diamonds …

  Just as she was thinking that she might be able to sleep, she saw something. The starlight shone on a straight path – a trail of whitish bubbles coming towards our ship like an arrow. I wouldn’t have known what it was, but Mummy knew. It was a torpedo.

  She was so frightened she couldn’t move, let alone cry out. She could only watch in horror and fear as that arrow of deadly bubbles came quickly nearer and nearer … Our ship steamed on, unknowing, and just as she thought the torpedo must hit us, it sped under the back of the ship and off across the sea.

  It had just missed us.

  Mummy slumped over the rail. She hadn’t been seasick at all so far, even in the rough early days. But now she threw up into the sea.

  As she straightened up, looking out across the water in dread, expecting to see a second torpedo, she got another sort of shock. A hand fell on her shoulder.

  “What are you doing here, madam? You must get below at once!” said a man’s urgent voice.

  It was one of the officers. She turned to him and gasped, “Did you see it? Did you see it? It nearly hit us! It—”

  The man took her by the shoulders. “What’s your name?” he asked, peering at her through the darkness.

  “Mrs – Hanks—”

  “Mrs Hanks,” he said, very quietly and strongly, “I want you to go back to your cabin straight away. You mustn’t come on deck at night. And whatever you thought you saw, please … say nothing to anyone. I want you to give me your word you’ll say nothing.”

  Mummy just nodded. Shaking all over, she went down the steps and found our cabin and didn’t say a word about it until long, long after we got safely to where we were going.

  A month later a ship carrying evacuees was torpedoed and sunk. She didn’t tell us about that, either. She’d always been very upfront about the war, and hadn’t tried to shield me from it, but this was too close. When I think what she must have gone through every night – maybe every day too – after that till we reached Montreal, never showing her fear, I feel very proud of her.

  Of course, we’d been told about where we were going, but I must say it didn’t mean a lot, at least not to me. Cameron, who was a brain-box, probably did a bit of research, which may have been part of why he didn’t want to go.

  Great-uncle Arthur O’Flaherty lived in a place with a very funny name – Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which was somewhere called the prairies in the middle of Canada. On the boat, whenever we’d told people where we were going, they either looked blank or said, “That’s pretty far west.” This made me feel we were going into some strange lonely place far from civilisation.

  I knew that our uncle was quite old, and lived alone in a small flat, on a pension, so he couldn’t have us to live with him. So when my family wrote to him to ask his help, he’d found a middle-aged couple called Gordon and Luti Laine, who offered to receive us as ‘war guests’. Mummy had told me that Canadians are usually very polite and nobody wanted to hurt our feelings by calling us evacuees so ‘war guests’ was what people like us were called.

  Great-uncle Arthur turned out to be one of the kindest, gentlest, most generous men in the world. Good all the way through. But the trouble with really, thoroughly good people is, they often can’t seem to realise that not everyone is as good as themselves.

  We docked at Montreal in the evening. As we sailed into the harbour, we could see a tall, pointed hill with a cross on the top, all lit up; it was our first glimpse of the city.

  Mummy sat on a bollard at the docks, after we collected all our big luggage. She took her wallet out of her handbag – which never left her – and counted our money. She’d changed it from pounds to Canadian dollars on the ship, and it looked a lot more – she got five dollars for every pound. But we’d spent a lot on the ship.

  Daddy had had a talk to me before we left. He usually left serious talks to Mummy, but this time it was about her, so he did it.

  “We’re not a rich family,” he said, “but you’ve never gone short. Now, when you and Mummy are in Canada, she won’t have any money of her own.”

  “Why not? Can’t you send us some?”

  “No. Wars are so expensive. The government wants women and children to go abroad to be safe, but still they don’t want money to go out of the country. They’re not going to let me give you more than ten pounds apiece. With Cameron’s ten pounds, that’s thirty altogether. Not very much. Just about enough, if you’re careful, to get to where you’re going. After that, you’ll have to depend on other people. Strangers.

  “And that’s going to be very hard on Mummy,” Daddy went on. “Having to ask every time she wants something. Please, Lindy, be a very good girl and try to understand and not ask for too much. You’re not greedy, I know that. But it will be hard on you too.”

  Mummy counted out the money we had left and took us to the hotel nearest to the docks for the night. It was pretty scruffy, but Mummy said, “Our train for the prairies leaves early in the morning. We have to sleep somewhere, and this place at lea
st is cheap.”

  Cameron and I were hungry. We left our small mountain of suitcases in our three-bed room and went out into the shining, thronging streets of the city.

  There were lights everywhere. England had been blacked out for months and months before we left, and it’s hard to describe how wonderful it was to see all these lights blazing – street lamps, office blocks with all their windows lit up, colourful advertisements, car headlights … The whole city was like a Christmas tree. Even Cameron, who, I knew, was determined not to like anything in Canada, couldn’t help twisting his head in all directions, drinking in all those lovely lights.

  Another thing that was different from England was that the streets were full of people. In London people didn’t go out at night much because without lights it was so dark you could fall over things. Here, there were crowds, all with loud voices – mostly French ones, which astonished me – and lit-up, cheerful faces. Nothing could have showed more clearly that we’d left the war behind. No one here was afraid of Hitler’s armies or his bombs.

  The man at the hotel desk had told us about a restaurant a short walk away. We headed there, through the bright night, not talking because it was all so strange and we were suddenly very tired. Mummy held our hands. We were still wearing our ship clothes, which were rather crumpled and grubby after five days at sea, but Mummy had dug out a mac for each of us to cover up the worst.

  We reached the restaurant and stepped inside. There was an orchestra playing. The place was crowded with lively people eating their dinners, all talking and laughing and clinking their knives and forks. But as they noticed us standing in the doorway, a silence spread out across the room.

  Then the orchestra stopped what it was playing, and struck up ‘There’ll Always Be an England’.

  Everyone stopped eating. Some people started singing the song. Several men began to stand up, and then sat down again. Every eye in the restaurant was fixed on us. It was as if we were standing in a spotlight.

  They obviously saw that we were fresh off the boat from England. ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ was the pop song of the moment and they played it for us. I thought they were being nice, but for Mummy, it was a horrible ordeal. She felt stared-at, exposed, humiliated – the poor refugee from war-torn London, an object of pity. She stood it for the whole length of the song, as if she was being punished somehow, and then she took our hands again and turned and fled.

  I don’t remember where or what we ate that night. Our first hamburger, probably, or our first hot dog. All I remember was seeing Mummy crying her eyes out for the first time since we left England.

  The next morning we got up early and took two taxis to the railway station with us and all our luggage. Mummy didn’t want to spend money for taxis – she kept watching the meter – but there was no other way.

  She told us that the train journey to Saskatoon would take three days. This gave us an idea of how big Canada was – the longest train trip I’d ever taken was three hours, to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to visit my old nanny.

  “Your fathers paid for our tickets before we left England,” Mummy explained. “So we shouldn’t have to spend any money till we get there. The ship was expensive – luckily there’s not much to buy on a train!”

  In the taxi I asked, “What will the Laines be like?”

  “I think, very nice. We got a letter from them saying how much they’re looking forward to having children in their home.”

  “Haven’t they got any?”

  “No.”

  Cameron frowned, and said, “I suppose we’ll have to be very quiet and well-mannered then.”

  “Yes, you will,” said Mummy. “And who knows for how long? It’s not like a visit. We’ll be living there. It’ll be their house and we’ll have to stick to their rules, whatever they are.”

  “Sounds like lots of fun,” muttered Cameron.

  We settled on to the train, as we had on the ship, but of course with far, far less space. We had two double seats, facing, with a folding table, to ourselves. Most of our luggage was taken away to be put in the luggage van. We just had the suitcases we’d had in the cabin.

  “Won’t I be glad when we can have proper baths and I can get all our clothes washed!” Mummy said.

  Mummy was the cleanest person in the world and it was hard for her to put the same clothes on day after day. She’d washed our undies and socks out every night on the ship, but on the train she couldn’t.

  And the train wasn’t very clean, I must say. It was a steam train, which meant a lot of smoke blowing back from the engine. Even though the windows didn’t open, everything soon felt gritty.

  The locomotive let out a long hiss and sounded its whistle. As soon as it began to move, Cameron and I jumped up and started to explore.

  We could run up and down the aisle between the seats, although Mummy said we should walk, and not disturb other passengers. There were a lot of children besides us on the train with their families, but I don’t think any of them were evacuees – they looked too clean and tidy. I somehow knew we wouldn’t make friends with any of them. We were set apart.

  We went as far towards the engine as we could go, and then the other way, towards the last coach. We passed through a dining car where the stewards were laying the tables for lunch, which cheered us up. Beyond that, past the kitchen coach with its white-coated chefs and lovely smells and another three carriages, we found it – our happy heaven! It was called the Observation Car.

  First there was a carriage with a bar in it. People were sitting around with drinks and snacks and newspapers. We sort of sneaked past them, because we could see that at the far end – the very back of the train – there was an open place. When we got out there, we stood on the rocking, swaying, racketty boards, and stared around us in amazement. It was just like the back of a small ship! A half-moon space with a curved rail around it and a roof over it, but open sides. We could hear the clacketty-clack of the wheels racing over the rails, smell the smoke from the engine far away at the front of the train, and breathe the Canadian air. How different from English air, somehow!

  “You could easily just fall off the back of the train,” I said, leaning over, staring at the rails streaming out behind us.

  “Only if you were extremely stupid,” said Cameron, backing up his point with, “‘Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers, won’t drown.’” This was from Swallows and Amazons, which, before he found England, Their England, had been one of his favourite books.

  There was nobody out there but us. We sat on the fixed seats and watched the outer suburbs of Montreal flash past, and then the countryside – wide, lots of lakes and trees, empty of people – everything utterly new and exciting. But also scary – it looked so wild. I could feel my heart beating in time to the wheels: Clicketty-clack! Clicketty-clack! You’re going so far you may never go back!

  “Aren’t you liking any of it?” I asked Cameron at last.

  “No. Yes. I don’t know,” Cameron said, scowling out at the wild scenery. “I wonder if there’s hunting here.”

  After a while, Mummy came to find us.

  “Isn’t it big,” she said.

  I could tell she liked the wide open spaces. Nothing claustrophobic about this.

  She sat with us for a while and smoked a cigarette. Her smoke streamed away with the rest of the smoke. Mummy smoked an awful lot – she always had, but she’d cut down since we left home, to save money.

  At last Cameron said, “Isn’t it nearly time for lunch?”

  We worked our way back to the dining car and sat down at a table nicely laid with clean linen and cutlery and glasses. After the ship, the rocking of the train merely jingled the glasses against the knives and forks.

  We were just looking at the menu, which was full of strange but interesting things, when the waiter came along and asked Mummy for our tickets.

  She brought them out of her handbag and gave them to him. He looked at them for a long time and I felt a sudden prickle of unease
. Something was wrong.

  “I am very sorry, ma’am,” he said. “These tickets only entitle you to ride the train to Saskatoon. They don’t give you any meals.”

  Mummy looked at him in disbelief.

  “No meals?” she said. “But my husband bought us first-class tickets from Canadian Pacific Railways in London!”

  “These are standard-class tickets, ma’am. They don’t include meals.”

  “So what are we to do?” Mummy asked with a shrill note in her voice.

  “There’s a snack bar in the observation car,” he said, looking very uncomfortable. “You can get sandwiches, peanuts, candy bars, that sort of thing. And soft drinks. And tea,” he added, as if that made up for everything.

  “For three days?” Mummy cried.

  People were looking at us now, and I became aware of how we must look – travel-worn and shabby. I was suddenly so hungry I felt tears come into my eyes. I looked at Cameron. He was just laying the menu down in a very final kind of way, as if he were saying, Well, this is just what I was expecting. Complete disaster.

  “Of course,” said the waiter, “if you care to pay a supplement on your tickets, to make them first class—”

  Mummy stood up, and urged us to our feet.

  “I can’t,” she said, as quietly as she could. “We left England with ten pounds each, of which I have less than half left. Let’s just hope Canadian Pacific Railways does very cheap sandwiches.”

  She herded us into the aisle and back towards our seats, under the eyes of everybody in the dining car.

  “Mummy, what happened? Didn’t Daddy buy the right tickets?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mummy said. “I’m sure he meant to. There’s been a mistake, that’s all.”

  “So now we live on sandwiches and ‘candy bars’ for three whole days,” said Cameron. “What’s a ‘candy bar’ anyway? Is it like Brighton rock? I hate Brighton rock!”

  “We’ll soon find out,” Mummy said grimly.

  We went back to the observation car and Mummy bought us a ham sandwich each, and lemonade. The sandwich had mustard in it, but for once I was good and didn’t grumble. I could see Mummy was in an awful state about the tickets – she hardly ate anything. I had to make her take bites from my sandwich. She told me smoking means you don’t have much appetite but I didn’t really believe her.