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Uprooted - A Canadian War Story
Lynne Reid Banks
From the author of The Indian in the Cupboard and The L-Shaped Room comes a fascinating story of a wartime childhood, heavily influenced by her own experience.In 1940 as war rages across Europe, ten-year-old Lindy, waves goodbye to England and makes the long journey to Saskatoon, Canada, along with her Mother and her cousin Cameron. They may be far from the war but they are also far from home and everyone they know and love. Life in Canada is very different but it is also full of exciting new adventures…This captivating story is inspired by Lynne Reid Banks’ own childhood experience and her time in Canada.
Copyright (#u6578861f-43f6-5984-aa0b-8b8c4cca9b45)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2014
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © Lynne Reid Banks 2014
Cover credit: Design © www.beckyglibbery.co.uk (http://www.beckyglibbery.co.uk)
Cover photographs: Figures © Mark Owen/Trevillion, Ship © Getty Images, Suitcases and tree branch © Shutterstock
Lynne Reid Banks asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007589432
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007589449
Version: 2014-07-21
To Glady who read and liked it first.
To ‘Cameron’ who wouldn’t read it at all!
And in memory of ‘Alex’ – Pat Reid Banks, my mother.
Table of Contents
Cover (#udbf128f0-01f1-577e-aa9f-6ff4626cce54)
Title Page (#ue4429a56-7dca-5866-aefe-92844a5d32e8)
Copyright
Dedication (#ua5556ca3-d16b-589c-835d-ce83175813cd)
Prologue
Chapter One: The Voyage
Chapter Two: Montreal
Chapter Three: On the Train
Chapter Four: We Arrive
Chapter Five: Freedom
Chapter Six: School
Chapter Seven: Willie and the Crescent Club
Chapter Eight: Fall (OK, Cameron – Autumn)
Chapter Nine: Snow
Chapter Ten: Changes
Chapter Eleven: Across the Tracks
Chapter Twelve: Our New Life
Chapter Thirteen: The End of Winter
Chapter Fourteen: Penny Wise and Other Dramas
Chapter Fifteen: New York, New York!
Chapter Sixteen: Fairyland
Chapter Seventeen: Back to the Real World
Chapter Eighteen: All Change
Chapter Nineteen: Worries
Chapter Twenty: Emma Lake
Chapter Twenty-one: Wooding
Chapter Twenty-two: Music Hath Charms (Even For Me)
Chapter Twenty-three: Laddie’s Adventure
Chapter Twenty-four: The Menace Returns
Chapter Twenty-five: The Muskeg
Chapter Twenty-six: Bad News
Chapter Twenty-seven: Cameron’s Adventure
Chapter Twenty-eight: Benjy
Postscript
Also by Lynne Reid Banks
About the Publisher
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Our families travelled to Liverpool from London, where I lived, and Cheltenham, where Cameron lived, to see us off.
My mother and father, two aunties, an uncle – even Grampy, our mothers’ father, made the journey, although Grampy was old and not well, but he would come. And Shott, his dog. He wouldn’t leave Shott behind in case he got bombed.
Travelling by train was crowded and very uncomfortable in wartime, with all the soldiers and people being moved around the country on war work. But Shott was popular. Grampy had to stop the soldiers feeding him. I’d never liked him much – he sometimes growled and even snapped – but now, for some reason, I wanted him on my knee. I stroked and stroked his curly fur and for once he let me. He was quivering. Dogs sense things. And there was a lot to sense. The whole carriage was crackling with feelings.
Cameron kept looking at Shott, but he didn’t touch him. I didn’t always know what Cameron was thinking because he kept his feelings shut in. But I knew then – he was thinking of Bubbles, his dog. The ‘Bulgarian bulldog’. Leaving Bubbles must have been awful. Not as bad as leaving both his parents, but awful just the same.
I kept my eyes down a lot of the way. I didn’t want to look at my beautiful daddy, grim-faced, holding my mother’s hand. Hardly talking. Or at my Auntie Millie, Cameron’s mother, keeping Cameron close to her. Uncle Jack, reading a medical journal. And Grampy. He only spoke to Shott. I think he was struggling not to cry. My mother was his favourite, and she was going away.
Mummy didn’t say much, either, except to ask me every now and then if I was all right, if I wanted anything. Only the aunts chatted, brightly, trying to keep up our spirits. Auntie Millie, who was the liveliest of us all and could always cheer us up, had her work cut out this time. Mummy, Cameron and I were going to get on a ship and sail far away. Who knew when, if ever, we’d all be together again?
I didn’t know how I felt. I think I just didn’t know how to feel. There was too much feeling all around me. If I thought anything on that long train journey, it was, I wish this was over. I wish we could be on the ship. Did I not mind leaving Daddy, leaving the aunts, leaving England? I couldn’t get to grips with that. I had Mummy. I had Cameron – though not then; he just sat by the window watching England go by. Auntie’s arm was round his shoulders but once I saw him twitch as if he simply wanted to be left alone.
At Liverpool docks, I remember standing there with them all around us. The ship’s great side – grey, dotted with portholes – loomed up beside us. The gangway was ready and the loudspeakers were telling us to go on board. Grampy clasped me to his little round stomach.
“Be a good girl, Lindy,” he said. “Help your dear mother. Keep your eyes and your mind open. New things are frightening at first but sometimes they turn out better than the old. And don’t worry about us!” He held me away and smiled through his tears. Then he boomed, “I always wanted to go to Canada! Wonderful country! It’ll be a great adventure!”
I saw over Grampy’s shoulder Cameron’s parents hugging him. And Daddy holding Mummy tight. Then Daddy held me tight. His moustache scratched my cheek and it was wet. Daddy crying? Never. I’d never seen him cry. It must be the rain … I held him round the waist … Then somehow we’d left them and were on the ship, standing against the rail, waving and waving. Shott was barking up at us, shrill little goodbye yaps. Then the ship’s hooter drowned out every other sound, the saddest note I’d ever heard.
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The sea journey, Liverpool to Montreal, took five days. It was summer, 1940 – the first summer of World War Two – but the ocean didn’t seem to know it was summer. It didn’t want us on it. It pitched our ship, the Duchess of Atholl, from end to end and from side to side, and then in a sort of swirl, like a spoon stirring, which was the worst.
When you’re seasick you can’t think about anything else. Nine times on the first day out of Liverpool I threw up – twice over the rail, three times in the washbasin in our cabin, three times on the deck before I could reach the rail, and once at dinner in the dining room in front of everybody.
I shouldn’t have gone to dinner of course. Cameron didn’t, but then he was on hunger strike. He wouldn’t leave our cabin or eat anything we brought him from the dining room to tempt him. He didn’t eat a thing for two days. What doesn’t go in, can’t come out, as Mummy used to say, so he wasn’t sick even once. I tried to coax him out by telling him about the life-drills.
“But you have to! Everyone has to do lifeboat drill!”
“Leave me alone.”
“But what if the ship sinks?”
“I don’t care if it does!”
By the time he decided to come out of our cabin and out of his strike, the worst was over. The ocean had calmed down. Even I wasn’t being sick any more, and I was able to show him around Our Ship.
It was a big ship, with two funnels and three decks. It had a large lounge and two dining rooms with tables and chairs fixed to the floor. Not much else was fixed. If your glass of water started to slide, you had to drop your knife, quick, and grab it.
I told Cameron about the boat-drills again. When a siren blew, we had to take our lifebelts and go to our stations. Everyone on board knew where their station was. Ours was on the port side – the left – near the back of the ship. I showed Cameron our lifeboat, swinging overhead.
“How do you think we’ll get into it?” I asked. I’d been worried about this, being a bit plump and not very athletic.
“They’ll bring it down level with the deck then they’ll open the rail – here. See? There’s a gate – and we’ll have to jump in.”
I didn’t speak. I didn’t think I could jump that far. Especially the way the ship could rock … Perhaps a sailor would lift me in. I wondered if Mummy would be able to jump. If she couldn’t, I wouldn’t let the sailor lift me in without her. I could imagine the lifeboat dropping down into the sea with Cameron in it and Mummy and me still on the sinking ship. Only I knew Mummy wouldn’t be parted from Cameron.
Cameron shared Mummy’s and my cabin, but he nearly hadn’t. Mummy made it happen. On the first day, when we’d pulled out of Liverpool Harbour, an officer showed us to a cabin for two down on the lowest deck. Mummy took one look through the narrow doorway, at the tiny room with an upper and lower bunk and no window, and said, “I’m very sorry, officer, but there must be some mistake.”
“No mistake, madam.” He looked at his clipboard. “Hanks – that’s the name, isn’t it? You and your little girl are in here.”
“No,” said Mummy, politely but firmly. “There are three of us. Where is my nephew to sleep?”
“Male passengers over the age of eleven have to sleep in all-male cabins.”
“My nephew is sleeping with me. I am responsible for him. How can I be, if he’s somewhere else?”
“I’m sorry, madam—”
“Please don’t be sorry. Just give me another cabin with three berths in it. In any case I can’t sleep down here, in such a tiny space. I suffer from claustrophobia.”
This was true. When she was little, Mummy had been playing hide-and-seek with her sisters at a party. She’d hidden in a wardrobe in an upstairs room. The door had stuck. She’d shouted and hammered on the door for what felt like hours and finally she panicked and banged so hard the wardrobe fell over, and since then she’d been terribly afraid of being shut in small spaces.
She wasn’t panicking now, but she was an actress. She made a sort of mad gleam come into her eye and did a funny twitchy thing she could do with her face. One of my favourite stories was how, when she was on tour with a play, she would sit on the train and do twitches whenever someone who wasn’t one of the actors tried to come into their carriage.
It had worked then, and it worked now.
The officer took one horrified look at the twitchings and said, “Oh. Well, that’s different. I’ll see what I can do.”
And before long we were led upstairs (up the companionway) to a higher level and shown a cabin for four with a porthole. We could see the sea through it, and although we were told we mustn’t open it, it was much better than being in the dark, stuffy cabin downstairs, where we would have been “battened under the hatches”, as Mummy said later.
“Have we got this whole cabin to ourselves?” I asked. “The spare bunk too?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s for the suitcases.”
“You are clever, Auntie,” said Cameron in a strange, flat voice. He went and lay on one of the bottom bunks, took his favourite book, England, Their England,out of his backpack, and began to read.
“Absurd,” Mummy muttered. “Off somewhere in a cabin full of men! Imagine what your mother would say to me!”
I saw Cameron bite hard on his lips.
What must it be like, not to have your mother with you? To have left her behind to be bombed? I wondered.
