Uprooted - a Canadian War Story

After we met at the movie, our mothers became friends – ‘natch’, as Willie would say. We began to meet after school – not in each other’s houses, but in the park or at Pinder’s, our nearest drugstore. The mothers would sit in a booth and drink tea, talking and smoking, while Willie and I would look at the movie magazines, or sit at the counter and drink milkshakes and talk movie stars and dream of marshmallow sundaes or banana splits.

  Both our mothers had no money. Both our mothers were lonely, and worried sick about the war and people at home. Both of them – though we weren’t supposed to know about this – were having problems with the families we lived with.

  “You’re lucky to live with a rich family,” Willie said.

  “I don’t think they’re especially rich. They drive a Hillman Minx.”

  “Ours don’t have a car. They both work in a garage.”

  Willie told me her mum had got a big shock when they arrived and found out that the family lived in a very small house in a poor district ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’.

  “Why did they invite you, then?” I asked.

  “They’re rellies of Dad’s. They wanted to save us from Hitler,” said Willie. “I don’t think they’d thought about it properly. They never told us they’re quite poor. Mum hates to take money from them. She hates it. She thinks they can hardly afford to feed us. And she’s sick with worry about Dad. He’s overseas. We haven’t heard from him for three months.”

  To take her mind off this, I told her about the Canadian soldiers who’d been camped in the woods below my convent boarding school, and how my friend Sue and I had a club – just us two – and used to waylay them and make them do forfeits. Willie thought this was ‘fantabulous’.

  “I wish we could have a club like yours here. I love its name! The League of the Deadly Nightshade – how did you ever think of that?”

  “Nightshade berries are the most poisonous you can find.”

  “Great! I love it! But nobody’d be allowed to join if it had a name like that!”

  “We could call it the Crescent Club.”

  “I don’t live in a posh crescent! Anyway, it sounds a bit tame after Deadly Nightshade …”

  Next time we met, she’d changed her mind. “Okay, let’s have a club. I’ll be the recruiting officer.”

  Willie recruited like mad. After three days the Crescent Club had its first meeting, with a whole six members. In addition to the two of us, three were from Willie’s school and the other was a girl called Patricia, from the little park gang. (Well, I recruited her.)

  I thought we’d just have a meeting, but Willie had decided there should be a test you had to take in order to join. This sounded a bit like the Camel Club at the convent – a big girls’ club, where you had to be able to ride a bike – so I didn’t think much about it until she told us what the test was: we had to go on to the riverbank and jump off a sort of cliff, grab an overhanging branch and swing down to the river’s edge, like Tarzan.

  There was a silence when she announced this, but it didn’t last long. All the others said they’d do it. All except me.

  “Mummy won’t let me go down on the riverbank,” I said.

  Willie looked at me as if I’d said I wasn’t allowed to go to the lavatory. “But everybody plays by the river!” she exclaimed.

  I bit my lip and said nothing.

  “Your cousin goes,” said Patricia.

  I was shocked. “He does not!”

  “Yeah, he does. He went last night with my brother Bob and all the gang. They had a weenie roast.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “They make fires down there?”

  “Sure. Weenie roasts are the best fun.”

  I got up from where we were all sitting on the grass in the park and ran home. Cameron was in his bedroom doing homework. When I burst in, he at once looked up, put his finger to his lips and said, “Widdiya, woddiya.”

  This was our secret code. It meant, Keep your voice down. I closed the door.

  “Patricia Douglas says you went down on the riverbank with her brother.”

  “Oh,” said Cameron after a moment. “She does, does she?” He went back to his homework.

  “Well, did you?”

  “So what?”

  “But we’re not allowed.”

  “It’s not dangerous. It’s just woods and steep bits, and a bit of beach. Nothing can possibly happen.”

  “But Mummy said we mustn’t!”

  “Auntie must think there are bears. Do shut up and go away. I’m trying to work.”

  “I’ll tell on you!”

  He gave me his basilisk look. He didn’t do this often but when he did, I quailed.

  “You’d better not,” he said very quietly.

  We both knew I wouldn’t – we never tattled on each other. I felt torn. The trouble was, I hated to do anything I couldn’t tell Mummy. I wasn’t what you’d call the rebel type.

  Downstairs, the doorbell rang. It was Willie. She’d followed me. Her freckled face was a furious red.

  “You and I started the club,” she said the minute I opened the door. “You can’t chicken out. You’re English!”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant by that but I got the general idea.

  The next day the six of us trooped down to the river.

  The prairie around Saskatoon wasn’t only fields of wheat, after all. Lots of it was dusty flat land – no trees or bushes, just sort of rough grass. Lots of gopher holes. Nothing green. Of course, the gardens and parks were green and had trees. But that wasn’t countryside. The riverbank was, and after the little park, the polite back yards and the manicured park around the Bessborough Hotel, going down there was like going into a wonderful wild jungle.

  The moment I followed Willie across the road next to the river – the road that had always marked the border of Mummy’s ‘no-go area’ – I felt a tingle of guilt. But then I thought, Cameron’s been down here. If he can, why shouldn’t I?

  There were no paths, just tracks, beaten down by kids and dogs. There were trees and bushes and beyond them you could see the river racing by, glinting in the sun. Strange, beautiful and thrilling. An unexplored world.

  Willie led us, walking single file, to the place she’d chosen. The ‘cliff’ was about six feet high – a place where the bank had broken down, with a pile of sandy soil at the bottom. At the top was a little ledge to stand on, and across the open space was an overhanging tree branch, just the right size to grip. But it was quite a long way away from the ledge – you had to make a dive into space to grab it, and swing yourself down.

  Willie did it first. She gave Tarzan’s cry, launched herself forward and grabbed the branch, swinging down and landing beyond the pile of sand. She threw herself so strongly that when she landed she slid on her bottom nearly as far as the narrow beach before she could stop herself.

  My heart practically failed me. I could never do that, I thought. I could imagine missing the branch and just diving down face first. I could always imagine the worst that could happen. That’s why I was such a scaredy-cat about physical things. (Forget scaredy-cat – try coward.)

  Patricia made a face at me. She was scared too. But in the pause after Willie jumped, she suddenly took her place on the ledge, and as the branch stopped swaying she threw herself out and grabbed it, then down she went.

  Next, a girl called Margy did it, then one called Babe. Then Babe’s sister Rhoda. She was only nine – and small for her age. She dithered on the ledge for a minute, but then the branch swayed back from Babe’s jump and she was almost able to grab it without diving. Her trouble was, she wasn’t heavy enough for her feet to trail on the ground so she was left dangling. Willie and Babe reached up and caught her.

  Rhoda had done it. Little Rhoda! How could I chicken out? I stepped on to the ledge. Willie let the branch swing back towards me. It was only as high as my waist and looked miles away.

  “Go, Lindy! Now!”

  I shut my eyes. Truly, I did. I didn’t dare not do it and
I didn’t dare do it so I shut my eyes and threw my hands out, hoping like an idiot that the branch would magically come into them when I jumped. Of course I missed the branch, but I’d leant out far enough to lose my balance so I half fell, half jumped off the ledge, feet first.

  Luckily, I landed on the pile of sand. The others all laughed and ran to help me up. All except Willie.

  “Do it again. You didn’t do it,” she said. She sounded just like a sergeant in an army film we’d seen the week before at the Daylight.

  I would really much rather have died than do it again.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’m too scared.”

  The others stopped laughing and looked at Willie.

  “Then you can’t be in the club,” she said furiously.

  Was that so? I forgot my fear. “The club was my idea. It isn’t about daring people to do silly things.” Then I had my brainwave. “It’s about doing things for the war.”

  Willie’s mouth fell open. “What, for the war?” she said.

  “We should earn money for war bonds,” I said. “There’s some point in that.”

  This time it was Willie who left. She scrambled up the bank and stormed off. The rest of us trailed back up to the road, all talking about what we could do to earn some money.

  “We could sell candy and lemonade.”

  I remembered a sale we’d had at the convent. I said, “We could all give things – clothes, books. Stuff our mothers would give us.”

  “We’ll talk about it at the next meeting,” said Margy.

  I was worried Willie wouldn’t come back. But she did, of course, the next day – riding into the little park on a very old bicycle with a loud bell, and her little brother Alfred on the back. She’d had the best idea of all.

  “There’s a drive on to collect scrap metal. For melting down and turning into war stuff. We could do that. We’ll use Alfie’s go-cart, to put it in. Only we’ll have to let him join.”

  Our scrap-metal drive really started something. We even got our pictures in the paper: ‘Crescent Club Does Its Bit’ read one headline. But that was later.

  Other kids, especially boys, noticed us trundling our cart through the back alleys and over the rough ground near the railway, collecting all kinds of scrap, and asked what we were doing. When we told them, they went haring off to get carts of their own and before long every kid in the neighbourhood seemed to be collecting scrap.

  Soon there wasn’t even any silver cigarette paper left lying about, let alone any screws or nails. As for tin cans, nobody would be throwing any at the trains for a while.

  Margy’s father said we should be proud of our war effort. He took the scrap in the boot of his car down to some central collecting place and came to the next club meeting to tell us the man there said we’d probably collected enough to build a couple of tanks.

  “Slight exaggeration,” said Cameron when I told him. But then he said, “Well done, though. Wonder if the ginks across the river have thought of it?”

  The ‘ginks across the river’ were regarded as aliens, ruffians, gangsters – but Cameron didn’t care. He caught the streetcar over Broadway Bridge, accosted the first boy he saw in the street and suggested they do a scrap-metal drive too. When he told his pals on our side what he’d done, they gaped at him. None of them would have dreamt of going into west-bank territory.

  He admitted to me he’d tried to take Spajer with him, as a guard dog, but Spajer wouldn’t get on the streetcar. When Spaje came home alone, Luti was upset with Cameron for the first time and he was quite crushed for once. We were fond of Luti. She was sweet to us. She loved cooking things that we’d never had before, and got pink with excitement whenever we liked them. She didn’t take us around and show us off like Gordon did; she just made a home for us. I think she minded a lot, not having kids of her own. Maybe all this ‘Poppa’ and ‘Momma’ stuff Gordon played at just reminded her.

  In October, the leaves on the maple trees turned to beautiful paint-box reds and oranges and yellows. Mummy just couldn’t get over it. That was when she changed her mind about the riverbank. She took us down there herself, to get closer to the magic, and for the pleasure of sitting on the beach and looking across the river to the trees in the Bessborough Hotel’s park. She said each tree was like the Burning Bush in the Bible, blazing but never getting burnt up. Dear old Spajer used to lie across her feet on the sand, panting gently while she played with his ears.

  But Spaje was old now. One morning, we came down to breakfast to find Luti crying into the scrambled eggs.

  “My poor old darling’s gone,” she sobbed.

  We looked at each other in horror. I think we all thought, just for a second, that she meant Gordon.

  When Luti showed us Spajer dead in his basket, we all put our arms around her. Well, Mummy and I did. Cameron walked out of the room on stiff legs and later I found him out in the garden helping Gordon to dig a grave.

  Men don’t cry, I thought, except that both of them were. You never saw Cameron cry. I thought it wasn’t very manly of him, to cry for a dog when he didn’t cry for other things.

  I told Mummy about it.

  “He’s so horribly homesick,” she said. “It must’ve been like burying Bubbles.”

  I felt a shock of shame. Why hadn’t I realised that? I was very, very careful not to use any Canadian slang for a long time after that, not to annoy him.

  There were only two times a week, apart from meals and outings, when Cameron and I got together: funnies-time on Fridays and letters-time on Sundays.

  We both fell in love with the funnies. At home we’d had Pip, Squeak and Wilfred in the Daily Mirror, which we missed, but here there were tons of different ones. We read the daily strips in the local paper, the Star Phoenix – Li’l Abner, Blondie, Bringing Up Father. But our favourite – our passion – was ‘The Spirit’ in Friday’s edition of the Montreal Standard.

  Of course all of us kids – even Cameron, though he pretended not to – followed the adventures of Superman and the Masked Marvel and Wonder Woman, but the Spirit was a crime-fighter with a difference. He didn’t have any superpowers and he didn’t wear a costume, just a mask. He was so funny and believable that even Cameron wasn’t ashamed to love him, and we had tugs-of-war every Friday when the paper came – who would get first go at the comic section? Gordon used to hold it above our heads to tease us.

  The Spirit’s artist used to make things fly from one square frame to another, sometimes breaking all the frames when there was an explosion or a fire or something crazy. There was one story about a sad jazz musician who played his saxophone in New York.

  “The shadows loom

  within my room …

  And canons boom

  their dirge of doom …

  WIDDIYA

  WODDIYA …”

  (That was the saxophone playing.)

  The words and notes spilt down the page, breaking the frames.

  Quotes from The Spirit became Cameron’s and my secret language. When Gordon was in a mood, and Mummy kept shushing us, we’d whisper, “The shadows loom!” Or, if he raised his voice to Luti, “The canons boom.” Sometimes, when the whole house seemed to be crackling with tension, we just muttered, “Widdiya woddiya” and kept to our rooms. But at mealtimes we had to come to the dining table and if Gordon was still in a mood, ‘Widdiya woddiya’ could go on till bedtime.

  The worst times were when Mummy was with me in our room after supper, and Gordon would call up the stairs, “Where’s my kids? C’mon down, Poppa wants his family!”

  Mummy would call back, “They’re in bed, Gordon.”

  But Gordon would insist. “Then you come down, Alex, why don’t ya! Poppa don’t like to drink by himself! He wants a li’l company!”

  Mummy used to go down, but I could tell she didn’t want to. Luti would apologise at breakfast the next day and say that Gordon worked so hard he needed a little drink to unwind.

  Gordon was nice at other times. And Mummy kept
reminding us that he was keeping us. That we had to be grateful.

  On Sundays we’d sit down after breakfast to write our weekly letters home – me to Daddy (and sometimes, at first, to my old best friend, Sue) and Cameron to his parents. Mummy of course wrote to Daddy and Grampy and her sisters all the time. Letters took weeks to get to England, if they got there at all – Mummy said the ships were full of stuff for the war, including food parcels, because food in England was getting really short. I used to have dreams about my family looking like skeletons.

  What she didn’t mention was how much shipping was being sunk, but Cameron soon found this out and told me about it.

  “Rotten German U-boats! They’re sea-devils, creeping up on our ships. You can’t see them, you can’t stop them – hateful, lousy, bastard things!”

  Mummy usually stopped us swearing, but this time she let him. “He needs to,” she said later when I asked her why. “That’s what swearing’s for. He’s finding it hard to accept that we can’t go back till the war’s over. But it doesn’t stop him wanting to.”

  The best letters we got – and how precious they were! – weren’t from Daddy; they were from the aunts. Auntie Millie in particular. She told us everything that was happening, always trying to make even air raids and rationing sound like lots of fun. She sometimes put in Bubbles’ latest car-crimes. He was a car-chaser – if the front gate was left open he would tear into the road and chase after cars, barking madly up their exhaust pipes. Letters with Bubbles in them were Cameron’s favourites. He used to take them to his room to read over and over.

  Occasionally there were photographs. One lot showed the two aunts standing by the Galloping Maggot, our old Austin Seven car that Mummy had left with Auntie Millie. They wore long raincoats and army helmets and were surrounded by buckets and hosepipes, ready in case there were incendiary bombs, the kind that burst into flames when they land. They were all smiling as if the war was a game. And there was one with Auntie Bee and Uncle Will in his naval uniform, with our little cousin Ray in his siren-suit.

  My uncle Jack, Cameron’s father, wasn’t in any of them. I wondered why. He never wrote to Cameron, who got all his news from Auntie Millie.