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I squeezed his hand, but he took it away from me to turn a page. Cameron never liked you to see him showing any weakness.
Now, standing on the deck, I showed him how the great propellers or ‘screws’ churned up the water into a boiling white froth, leaving a spreading trail across the sea behind us. I loved to stand on the lowest deck where I was closest to this seething mass of white water. Cameron stood beside me for a while, gazing back the way we’d come. He looked so stricken I thought he might go on hunger strike again.
But then he went off by himself. He wasn’t satisfied with just seeing the parts of the ship that any passenger could see. Before the third day was over, he’d made friends with one of the crew and managed to get down into the engine room. He emerged from the hatchway looking happier than I’d seen him look for a long time. Also dirtier.
“You should see the engines!” he said. “Huge. Fires roaring away in great tunnels. The way they have to work to keep them going! They let me throw a chunk of coal in. I threw it like a cricket ball.”
I felt happier than I’d felt so far too. Cameron – my Cameron – was back.
The captain had heard about my marathon sick day. At dinner on that third evening, he was moving among the dining tables saying a few words to some of the passengers, and he stopped next to ours.
“Are you the little girl who was sick nine times on our first day out?” he asked with a smile.
I said I was, feeling ashamed of being ‘feak and weeble’, as Daddy would have called it.
“Well, I think that’s a ship’s record,” he said. “I’ll put it in the log! Are you feeling better now? How’s your little Derby Kelly?”
“My what?” I mumbled.
“Derby Kelly – belly,” he said, patting his through his uniform, and everyone at the table (there were eight altogether) laughed, especially one woman, who said, “How do you know Cockney rhyming slang, Captain?”
“By being born within the sound of Bow Bells,” he said. Some of the others looked surprised. “They have to take all sorts in wartime,” the Captain said with a faint smile.
I asked Mummy later what he meant.
“Being born within the sound of the bells of Bow Church is supposed to be the mark of a true Londoner,” she said. “But Cockneys usually talk working class. That’s why that woman was surprised. Because working-class men don’t often get to be captains.”
“And what’s rhyming slang?”
“Oh, that’s fun,” she said. “Now let me see. Apples and pears are stairs. Frog and toad is a road. Barnet Fair is hair. Rub-a-dub-dub is a –?” She looked at us, expectantly.
My mind was a blank, but Cameron said, “A pub?”
“Yes!” said Mummy.
“What’s ‘war’?” Cameron asked with a frown.
“I don’t know. ‘Beastly bore’, perhaps … You’d better ask the captain.”
So I decided to do that. After all, he had spoken to me, and after dinner several people who’d been at tables near us stopped me and said, “Aren’t you the lucky girl, being singled out by the captain!” I thought we were practically friends.
So the next morning (the fourth day of our voyage, by which time I was feeling as if I’d been on the ship for a large part of my life) I waited around at the foot of the bridge. Cameron had told me that if the engine room was the stomach of the ship, the bridge was its brain. There was a sailor at the bottom of the steps leading to it and when I asked if I could see the captain, he said, “Sorry, miss, he’s busy steering the ship just now.”
“I only want to ask him something.”
“You and half the people on board!” he said.
“I want to ask him,” I persisted, “what’s rhyming slang for ‘war’.”
“Bless you,” he said. “You don’t need to trouble the captain for that. I can tell you! It’s ‘buckets of gore’. Or ‘buckets’ for short. And ain’t it the bleeding truth!”
I knew ‘bleeding’ was a bad swear word. Naughty little curse words – bother, dash and blow – lead you on to worse words, and take you down below! Nanny used to say. I just said, “Thank you,” and ran to find Cameron to tell him. But he was already in the middle of a group of boys and I knew I should keep clear. When boys get together they don’t want girls hanging around.
That night, tucked into our bunks before Mummy came to join us (she liked to walk around the deck on her own before she went to sleep) I dared to ask Cameron why he’d gone on strike.
“Why do you think, Lind?” he said. He sounded impatient.
“Because they made you leave England?”
“England. Parents. School. Friends. The war. Everything.”
“Do you mind leaving the war?”
“Of course,” he said, as if I was being stupid.
“But there’ll be bombs. Maybe Hitler will come,” I said.
“And do you want to be safe in Canada if that happens?”
Yes, I do, I thought. But he made me feel that was wrong. “We’re too young to help,” I mumbled.
“I’ll miss everything,” he said. And he suddenly raised his voice. “And I’ll miss Bubbles most of all. He’s old. When I get back he’ll probably be—” He turned his back on me. “Leave me alone. I want to go to sleep.”
On our last day, the fifth, it suddenly got very cold. We hadn’t expected to need our new ‘Canadian winter’ clothes until – well, until it was the Canadian winter. But now, if we wanted to go out on deck, we needed them.
Before we left England, Mummy had bought a lot of clothes with clothes coupons we’d saved up, with other members of the family contributing. We’d bought woollen jerseys and thick skirts and warm stockings and undies, and heavy winter coats, gloves, scarves and caps. Cameron’s mother had bought him winter clothes too. Now we needed them if we didn’t want to be stuck ‘below’ for the whole day. And where were they? Not in our cabin. They were down in the hold, in our big cases, completely out of our reach.
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.
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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 least 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.
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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.”
