Читать книгу Uprooted - A Canadian War Story - Lynne Banks Reid - Страница 7

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.

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.