I hear Cameron coming out … Go and have your bath and I’ll come in and wash your hair for you.”
That first Canadian bath, after the three-inches-of-hot-water ones we’d been rationed to at home, was unforgettable. So deep, so hot, so full of bubbles! I felt as if I was washing off the grime of a coal mine, and then I felt like a movie star. As I lay chest-deep while Mummy washed my hair, I forgot all about the journey, the war, the strangeness. I just wallowed.
“Maybe it’ll be all right – Canada. Saskatoon. The Laines,” I said.
Mummy just made lots of lather and said nothing.
We had three weeks of freedom to explore and find our feet before we had to start Canadian school, but I was too excited by everything around us to think much about that. Cameron, though, as usual, was better at thinking ahead. He asked Luti questions about school and then told me the answers.
“It’ll be just an ordinary local school,” Cameron told me. “They call them public schools here – the opposite of public schools in England. I don’t think they have private schools here where you have to pay.” He fiddled with his shoelace and then said, “It’s boys and girls.”
I’d never been to anything but an all-girls school.
“Do you think that’ll be weird?” I asked Cameron, nervously.
“They’ll probably think we’re weird,” he replied.
Luti had a ‘daily’ – a Swedish woman who came in to clean and who gave us a foretaste of how interesting we were. She didn’t really talk to us (she couldn’t speak much English) but she stared at us as if we’d fallen off the moon.
That, though, wasn’t as bad as the visitors. They’d started coming on the first day. We’d hardly begun to unpack after breakfast when the doorbell rang, and after that it didn’t stop ringing. It seemed all the Laines’ friends wanted to meet us. Well – have a good look at us, anyway.
For the first week it was like one long party. Most of these strangers probably meant to be kind and welcoming, but Mummy still got the heebie-jeebies. She felt she had to be ‘on show’ to the visitors, and be a good ambassador, but she got more and more stressed. Twice I came home from playing out and found her crying (quietly) in our room.
“I feel like a fish in a bowl,” she whispered, blowing her nose. “A performing fish.” She reached for her Black Cats. She always whispered whenever we were talking privately, even with the door closed. “And the way they drink! At all hours! They tease me because I won’t knock back the whiskey like they do. They’re calling me Ice-water Alex! If I drank like they do, I’d fall flat on my face!”
“Does Luti drink a lot?” I asked.
“No. But Gordon drinks enough for both of them.” She muttered this out of the side of her mouth, but I heard it.
Gordon wasn’t around much, because he worked all day as a lawyer and had an office downtown. He had ‘KC’ after his name, which stood for King’s Councillor, and which in England you didn’t get to be until you were an important – and rich – lawyer. Gordon and Luti weren’t rich. Cameron had been quite right about the Hillman Minx. Gordon was just an ordinary small-town lawyer after all. But it was quite a while before we realised this. The Laines were determined to show us and all their friends – and maybe even themselves – that they could afford to have war guests. Mummy hardly ever had to ask them for money at first. Gordon thrust wads of dollars into her hand every Saturday but she always gave them back, taking only what she needed for little things for us, and for her Black Cats.
All the grown-ups I knew smoked. Mummy tried to cut down, but it was very hard for her. She needed her ‘coffin nails’ as she called them. Of course I hated her calling them that but Mummy knew smoking was bad for you and she told me I must never start.
“My lungs are so full of tar by now they’re like black sponges,” she said.
“But then why do you do it?”
“Because I can’t stop. Which is why you must never start.”
Mummy was invited to a lot of people’s homes. She didn’t want to go, but she felt she had to. Luckily Cameron and I weren’t included so till school started in September, we were free a lot of the time. Free in a way we’d never been before. And we made the most of it.
At first we just wandered about in the little park near the house. Spajer tagged along, hoping for a walk or a game of ball, when Luti agreed to let him out – she was terrified he’d get lost or be run over, but he stuck close to Cameron, and Cameron took good care of him.
“Bubbles is half-spaniel,” he reminded me. “We only call him a Bulgarian bulldog to make him sound like a thoroughbred.”
There were lots of other kids, and other dogs, around the neighbourhood. They stared at us too – we didn’t dress like them; Cameron in his short grey flannel trousers and me in my English dresses. But they were a friendly lot and we soon started hanging out with them.
It was girls with girls and boys with boys, mixed school or not. So while I was learning ball games like ‘One, two, three allairy’ and skipping games and sometimes being invited to play in my new friends’ ‘back yards’ (as they called their gardens), some of the boys were showing Cameron what they called ‘the ropes’.
The railway ran past the back of our house. Of course, we’d heard the trains go by, but there was a big screen of fir trees that stopped us seeing much of them.
Cameron came home one day and told me casually that the best game was throwing things at the engine drivers.
“What!” I almost screamed. “Are you mad? What do you mean?”
“Wait till it’s time for the next train, I’ll show you. The railway’s great fun. Only we’ll leave Spaje behind, because he’s not very train-wise.”
In the late afternoon, he found me in the park and beckoned. I left the other girls and followed him round by the end of the street to the railway crossing. We crossed over then followed the tracks a little way back towards the house.
He took out a one-cent coin and laid it on the track.
“What’s that for?”
“You’ll see. Now, collect tin cans.”
I looked around but only found two. He did too.
“That’s enough. It’s all you’ll have time for,” he said. “There’s a train due soon. Put your ear to the rail and you can feel it coming.”
“I’m not putting my head on the line! That’s dangerous!”
“Oh, don’t be babyish! You can see it coming for miles. It’s just fun to feel the rail vibrate.”
Very reluctantly I knelt down on one of the wooden sleeper beams and put my ear to the cold rail, next to the cent, lying there waiting for its fate.
“Don’t knock the cent off!” Cameron shouted.
After a bit I felt a trembling, and at the same time I heard a sort of humming sound. I leapt to my feet and ran away from the line. Cameron was there with a tin can in each hand. Far away down the line I could see the smoke puffing out above the trees.
“What do we do?”
“When the train goes by, you throw them at the engine driver in his cab,” he said.
We’d been up to mischief before in our