Uprooted - a Canadian War Story Read online

  Copyright

  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

  Copyright © Lynne Reid Banks 2014

  Cover credit: Design © 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

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  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.

  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 d
ecided 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 tr
ouble 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.