Uprooted - a Canadian War Story

  “What do we do?”

  “When the train goes by, you throw them at the engine driver in his cab,” he said.

  We’d been up to mischief before in our lives. But this? “What if you hit him? You could hurt him!”

  “Oh, you never hit them, they’re going too fast. It’s good throwing if you get it anywhere near the cab.”

  Now we could hear the train coming. Its whistle was blowing and next moment it came into sight, round the bend. The great locomotive, spilling out smoke, came chuffing and grunting and whistling towards us. Just as the open part, where the driver and the fireman were standing, flashed past my eyes, Cameron shouted “Now!” and threw his tin cans swiftly one after the other like cricket balls.

  They hit the fire-box and bounced off harmlessly, but one of the men shook his fist out of the cab at us, and then turned back, and made the whistle shriek, as if broadcasting our badness. Even though I never got around to even picking my tin cans up, let alone throwing them, I felt the shame of it.

  We stood there. Cameron was panting and grinning. He looked as excited as if he’d been throwing tin cans at Hitler. When the whole long, long train – a goods train – had gone past, he rushed to the line, bent down, and picked up the coin.

  “Look!”

  He showed it to me. It was thin and flat and its dull copper colour had changed to silvery brightness. I touched it with one finger. It was warm.

  “Here, you have it. Don’t go telling Auntie,” Cameron said.

  I took the only bribe of my life – a train-flattened one-cent coin.

  “I won’t if you promise not to do that again,” I said.

  “Goody-goody,” he muttered, not for the first time.

  On the way home, he recited, in a thoughtful, matter-of-fact voice:

  “The boy stood on the railway line,

  The train was coming fast.

  The boy stepped off the railway line,

  The train went whizzing past.

  The boy stood on the railway line,

  The engine gave a squeal.

  The driver took an oily rag

  And wiped him off the wheel.”

  At the weekend Gordon ‘did things’ with us. He called himself our Poppa, as in “Poppa’s gonna take his kids out tomorrow and show them the sights!” Mummy was expected to come too. Luti mostly stayed home, or sometimes went out to play bridge. Her bridge club was very important to her. She tried to take Mummy but she said she was such a bad player she’d only spoil the game.

  We didn’t always go on these trips by car because Gordon wanted us to learn how to ride the streetcars. These ran on rails down the middle of main streets, with a sort of arm on the roof that reached up to electrified wires overhead. They rocked and swayed and made a loud clanging noise. There were two sorts: the big ones that took us across the bridge into downtown, where the hotels, movie theatres and restaurants were; and the local ones that were smaller and were known as puddle-jumpers.

  Apart from the movie theatres, downtown didn’t mean much to us, except for one hotel, the Bessborough. It was rather grand, with pointed turrets, and it stood in a large park on the west bank. There, Gordon liked to take ‘his family’ for Sunday lunch in the smart restaurant that overlooked the river. O’F sometimes came too. We loved seeing him but we didn’t very often, because Mummy said he preferred seeing us on our own.

  Gordon seemed to know a lot of people, and the meal would always be interrupted by him jumping to his feet, waving and beckoning to these acquaintances, who would come over and be introduced to us. I could see how much this embarrassed Mummy. Luti had asked her to dress up for these outings and the men always looked admiringly at her.

  “Gordie loves showing you off,” Luti had said. “He thinks you’re beautiful. He loves your hair. Could you leave your turban off, do you think?”

  After lunch, Cameron and I would play in the park for a bit while the grown-ups sat on a bench talking. The river fascinated us, not just because it was so wide and sort of wild-looking but because these lunchtimes were the only chance we had to play near it. Mummy had forbidden us to go to the riverbank by ourselves. The bank on our east side was untamed – steep and thick with undergrowth. She was always afraid we’d fall in and be swept away by the strong current. Cameron muttered his favourite Swallows and Amazons quote – “Better drowned than duffers” – a lot but it didn’t make any difference.

  It was especially hard for him because all the other boys went down there.

  “That’s where they go sledding and tobogganing in the winter,” he said. “I hope Auntie’s got over her terrors by then. There aren’t any other hills to sled down.”

  But he did go out on to the prairie with the others (riding on the crossbar of a friend’s bike) to catch gophers. He caught three, with the string-loop, and cut their tails off (when they were dead) to send in for the bounty. It was ten cents per tail. He used the thirty cents to buy Mummy some sweets.

  “Candies,” I said.

  “Sweets,” he said.

  I was picking up lots of Canadian words that he refused to use.

  On our first day at school, Gordon took the morning off. He wanted to be the one to take us.

  The school was quite far away. The puddle-jumper would have taken us most of the way but Gordon said we shouldn’t use it. “All the kids here walk to school. I bet that’s something new for you, isn’t it?”

  Cameron said nothing. I’d noticed he often kept a dignified silence when Gordon said something that hinted at Canada being somehow better than England. But I said, “At my first school, I always walked, even when I was only seven. By myself.” I wasn’t going to let Gordon think we were sissies or something.

  When I first saw Buena Vista Public School, I stopped dead in the gateway and couldn’t make my legs move for a minute. Gordon tugged my hand.

  “Aw, c’mon, Lindy! It’s only a big ol’ school! Bet you never went to such an impressive one, though!”

  True enough. My earliest school had been in an ordinary house. My boarding school had been a low building surrounded by fields and woods. This looked like a castle out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

  Cameron was striding ahead. He wasn’t going to let Gordon tug him along. I freed my hand and made myself walk across the front yard and up the wide stone steps; there were, after all, dozens of children and some grown-ups all around me.

  Gordon took us to the head teacher’s office. On the door was printed the word ‘PRINCIPAL’. I remembered my first day at my convent boarding school and half expected there to be a nun inside, but it was just an ordinary woman. She stood up from her desk and came to shake hands with us.

  “I’m Mrs Jameson,” she said. “I’m very glad you’ve come to our school. We’re very excited to welcome you.”

  Excited? Cameron flicked me a look. He didn’t like ‘excited’, but I did. As much as he hated to be the centre of attention, I loved it.

  “Cameron will be in 7A,” she said, “and Lindy in 6B. Your classmates are expecting you. Come with me now – I’ll introduce you.”

  Gordon tagged along, but at the door to the first classroom, the principal turned to him politely and said, “Mr Laine, I think it would be better if you left the introductions to me.”

  Gordon looked disappointed. But he said he’d pick us up after school.

  I don’t remember what happened with Cameron. But I remember very well being led into my class, 6B. There were about twenty-five children of my age, all sitting in double desks facing a huge blackboard. There were big windows along one wall, and the others were a mass of colour, which turned out to be maps and charts and pictures. When Mrs Jameson and I came in, everybody stood up and every face turned to us.

  “Class, this is Lindy Hanks. She’s our war guest from London, England. Will you please give her a real Buena Vista welcome?”

  To my amazement, everybody not only clapped, but cheered. I remembered the restaurant and ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. Well,
at least they wouldn’t start singing that!

  The teacher, who was young and pretty with shiny black hair and lipstick, came over to me, and the principal left.

  “Hello, Lindy. I’m Miss Bubniuk. Now, where shall we put you? Who’d like to have Lindy share their desk?”

  Three girls sitting alone threw their hands up. Miss Bubniuk led me to one of them.

  “This is Marylou, she’ll be your desk partner.”

  Marylou was one of the girls I already knew from the little park.

  “Oh, good, Lindy!” she said, so excitedly I thought she was going to hug me. She patted the seat beside her and actually did put her arm around me when I sat down. All the others kept their faces turned towards me until Miss Bubniuk clapped her hands for attention.

  The time till lunch passed in a whirl of enthusiasm. You’d have thought I was a princess come among them, the way they treated me. At break, which they called ‘recess’, Marylou and the other girls from the park showed me off as if I were their proudest possession. My celebrity went to my head a bit so that by lunchtime I felt like a princess. I swaggered over to Cameron, who was sitting alone in a corner of the playground.

  “These kids are really swell!” I enthused.

  “Don’t say ‘kids’,” he said. “And don’t say ‘swell’. It’s beastly slang.”

  Cameron could be very scathing sometimes. But this time he couldn’t squash me. I loved the new words.

  Luti had packed sandwiches for us. We opened them up together. Peanut butter and jelly – a whole new taste experience, right up there with waffles and maple syrup, corn on the cob streaming with butter, and pork spare ribs cooked with brown sugar, one of Luti’s specialities. I loved the food in Canada. Cameron didn’t, or pretended not to. He said none of it was a patch on roast beef and fish and chips.

  “This is ridiculous,” he muttered as we sat on a wall, eating our sandwiches.

  “What is?”

  “The lessons. They’re so incredibly easy. We did the maths they’re doing ages ago. They don’t know the first thing about British history. We were up to the Industrial Revolution at home. They’ve never heard of it here. It’s all about Canada. And the book we’re reading in class is for babies.”

  I hadn’t found the lessons particularly easy, just strange. Miss Bubniuk was much less strict than the nuns and there was far more shouting out the answers and whispering. I saw two boys throwing rubbers at each other when she was writing on the board. I thought it was more fun than the convent, but so different I hadn’t thought to compare what we were actually learning. It was new, that was the long and short of it. Everything was, and that stopped me comparing it with England.

  I said, “I guess we just have to get used to it.”

  Cameron glared at me. “You suppose. You don’t ‘guess’.”

  “That’s how they talk here.”

  “Well, it’s not how I talk. If you start putting on a Canadian accent I won’t talk to you at all.”

  I wasn’t having that. “Can’t I even say ‘recess’ instead of ‘break’?” I teased.

  Just then some of the girls from my class called me to come and play a ball-bouncing game. I stuffed the last bit of sandwich into my mouth and left Cameron sitting there alone. I didn’t even stop to wonder why the ‘kids’ in 7A hadn’t made a prince out of him.

  I soon found out, though. Cameron’s teacher having come to the same realisation as my cousin – that he was a good year ahead of his classmates – suggested he move straight to the local high school. So before I’d even got completely used to the way to school, letting him lead the way, I had to manage on my own. Cameron was now a student at Nutana Collegiate. There he joined a class called 9A. The high school was, I learnt, streamed – A students (the best) in A, Bs in B and so on. Cameron was the A-est student you could imagine, although he was nearly two years younger than the others in his year group.

  I was secretly hoping that this age difference would mean that he’d fall back a bit on me, as the others in his class would be too old for him. But that wasn’t what happened. Cameron didn’t care whether people liked him or not, so of course they all wanted him to like them and he became something of a prince to them, which lasted long after I’d stopped being a princess and gone back to being just a girl who ‘talked funny’, like calling her mother Mummy instead of Mom.

  After I stopped being special, I wasn’t invited to play after school much and I didn’t seem to have any real friends. I complained to Mummy that there must be something wrong with me.

  “You’re different, that’s all. They’ll get used to you.”

  “Should I start talking like them? Would you mind if I called you Mom?”

  “I would absolutely hate it. I’d rather you called me Alex. But anyway there’s no point in putting something on that isn’t you. Be yourself and see what happens.”

  Nothing did for a couple of weeks. Then Willie happened.

  One thing that we all did together – apart from playing with Spajer and taking him for walks – was go to the movies.

  This involved a streetcar ride into Downtown, where the movie theatres were. We were all sitting in the stalls at the Capitol, the grandest, one Saturday afternoon, and I noticed another girl with plaits like mine, only red, sitting next to me with her mother. She didn’t go to Buena Vista or I’d have seen her. She was wearing trousers and a khaki top like a battledress.

  The double bill – two films – was always accompanied by a cartoon, trailers and a newsreel, and on this afternoon started with the newsreel. The famous Pathé theme music was blaring but I was eyeing this girl next to me and not paying a lot of attention, when suddenly I heard Mummy give a little gasp, and Cameron, who was on the other side of me, leant forward and gripped the seat in front.

  I looked quickly at the screen. It seemed to have burst into black-and-white flames – there was fire all over it. People were running. There were hosepipes spraying the fire but they were obviously not going to put it out – it was far too big. Suddenly, the blazing building fell down.

  The commentator was saying in a very excited voice, “This is London, under a rain of German bombs.”

  The bombing that hadn’t begun before we left, but that Daddy always said would happen, was happening now. In London. Where I lived. Where home was. Where Daddy was – and Grampy and Auntie Bee and my little cousin Ray.

  I sat there, frozen. Everyone in the cinema seemed frozen. And after we’d watched London burning, on came a Donald Duck cartoon.

  Cameron stood up, breathing hard. He fought his way along the row of people, and out through the doors at the back. Mummy stood up and followed him.

  “Stay here, it’s all right,” she said as she pushed past my knees.

  The girl sitting next to me was watching this. She heard Mummy’s voice. She leant towards me and whispered, “Are you English?”

  I nodded, my eyes still on the screen, now full of colour and silly ducks making quacking noises.

  “Me too!” And suddenly she squeezed my hand hard. “Filthy stinking Germans!” she said, right out loud.

  “Sssssh, Willie!” hissed her mother.

  Cameron and Mummy didn’t come back. During the trailers I went out after them. Cameron was standing on the pavement shouting at Mummy.

  “I want to go home! I want to go home! I won’t stay here! We have to get back!”

  Mummy was trying to calm him. “I want to go home too, Cam, but we can’t—”

  But he wouldn’t listen or let her touch him. He turned and half ran up Second Avenue, blindly – he was going the wrong way. I started to run after him, but Mummy stopped me.

  “Leave him. He’ll come back when he’s ready.”

  I looked at her. Her face was white.

  “Do you want to go back and see the film?” she asked in a strangled voice.

  “No – yes – I don’t know. Do you?”

  She shook her head, staring after Cameron.

  “Is – is
it all over London?” I managed to ask.

  “No.” She seemed to come back to herself. She focused on me. “No, darling, no. Of course not. London’s huge. They can’t bomb all of it. It’s just the City and … some other places … They won’t bomb the suburbs. Our house is quite safe, I’m sure. And Grampy’s. They won’t bomb – Redcliffe Square.”

  Redcliffe Square – Grampy’s house – was where she’d grown up. I saw she was going to cry.

  I said quickly, “We’d better go back in to the movie. We can’t go home without Cameron.”

  So we went back in and watched, I think it was The Wizard of Oz. It must have been, because I’ve never been able to watch it since without feeling a sort of trembling in my throat.

  Mummy had a serious talk with both of us that night.

  “I know this is hard,” she said. “Specially for you, Cameron. But what we have to keep in mind – what I keep in mind, whenever it gets too hard for me – is that this is our war work. It may not seem like it, but it is. It’s my job to look after you and keep you safe, because you’re England’s future. And it’s your job to get through the war and come home safe, when the time comes, with … well, with honour. We can’t fight. But we can get through this as best we possibly can, so we can go home at the end of it and know that we did our job of being here as well as we could.”

  “So we can say that ‘This was our finest hour’,” said Cameron, quoting one of Winston Churchill’s speeches.

  I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

  Willie’s full name was Willametta Lord. She had red hair and freckles and was a tomboy. Her father was in the British army, and she and her little brother and mother were like us – evacuees. They also lived with a Canadian family, the Warrens, and Willie went to a school out near the Exhibition Grounds, where poorer people lived. They’d been here for six months longer than us.