Uprooted - A Canadian War Story. Lynne Banks Reid
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.
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