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 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