Lynne Banks – Uprooted - A Canadian War Story (страница 3)

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.

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.