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