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 lives. But this? “What if you hit him? You could hurt him!”
“Oh, you never hit them, they’re going too fast. It’s good throwing if you get it anywhere near the cab.”
Now we could hear the train coming. Its whistle was blowing and next moment it came into sight, round the bend. The great locomotive, spilling out smoke, came chuffing and grunting and whistling towards us. Just as the open part, where the driver and the fireman were standing, flashed past my eyes, Cameron shouted “Now!” and threw his tin cans swiftly one after the other like cricket balls.
They hit the fire-box and bounced off harmlessly, but one of the men shook his fist out of the cab at us, and then turned back, and made the whistle shriek, as if broadcasting our badness. Even though I never got around to even picking my tin cans up, let alone throwing them, I felt the shame of it.
We stood there. Cameron was panting and grinning. He looked as excited as if he’d been throwing tin cans at Hitler. When the whole long, long train – a goods train – had gone past, he rushed to the line, bent down, and picked up the coin.
“Look!”
He showed it to me. It was thin and flat and its dull copper colour had changed to silvery brightness. I touched it with one finger. It was warm.
“Here, you have it. Don’t go telling Auntie,” Cameron said.
I took the only bribe of my life – a train-flattened one-cent coin.
“I won’t if you promise not to do that again,” I said.
“Goody-goody,” he muttered, not for the first time.
On the way home, he recited, in a thoughtful, matter-of-fact voice:
“The boy stood on the railway line,
The train was coming fast.
The boy stepped off the railway line,
The train went whizzing past.
The boy stood on the railway line,
The engine gave a squeal.
The driver took an oily rag
And wiped him off the wheel.”
At the weekend Gordon ‘did things’ with us. He called himself our Poppa, as in “Poppa’s gonna take his kids out tomorrow and show them the sights!” Mummy was expected to come too. Luti mostly stayed home, or sometimes went out to play bridge. Her bridge club was very important to her. She tried to take Mummy but she said she was such a bad player she’d only spoil the game.
We didn’t always go on these trips by car because Gordon wanted us to learn how to ride the streetcars. These ran on rails down the middle of main streets, with a sort of arm on the roof that reached up to electrified wires overhead. They rocked and swayed and made a loud clanging noise. There were two sorts: the big ones that took us across the bridge into downtown, where the hotels, movie theatres and restaurants were; and the local ones that were smaller and were known as puddle-jumpers.
Apart from the movie theatres, downtown didn’t mean much to us, except for one hotel, the Bessborough. It was rather grand, with pointed turrets, and it stood in a large park on the west bank. There, Gordon liked to take ‘his family’ for Sunday lunch in the smart restaurant that overlooked the river. O’F sometimes came too. We loved seeing him but we didn’t very often, because Mummy said he preferred seeing us on our own.
Gordon seemed to know a lot of people, and the meal would always be interrupted by him jumping to his feet, waving and beckoning to these acquaintances, who would come over and be introduced to us. I could see how much this embarrassed Mummy. Luti had asked her to dress up for these outings and the men always looked admiringly at her.
“Gordie loves showing you off,” Luti had said. “He thinks you’re beautiful. He loves your hair. Could you leave your turban off, do you think?”
After lunch, Cameron and I would play in the park for a bit while the grown-ups sat on a bench talking. The river fascinated us, not just because it was so wide and sort of wild-looking but because these lunchtimes were the only chance we had to play near it. Mummy had forbidden us to go to the riverbank by ourselves. The bank on our east side was untamed – steep and thick with undergrowth. She was always afraid we’d fall in and be swept away by the strong current. Cameron muttered his favourite Swallows and Amazons quote – “Better drowned than duffers” – a lot but it didn’t make any difference.
It was especially hard for him because all the other boys went down there.
“That’s where they go sledding and tobogganing in the winter,” he said. “I hope Auntie’s got over her terrors by then. There aren’t any other hills to sled down.”
But he did go out on to the prairie with the others (riding on the crossbar of a friend’s bike) to catch gophers. He caught three, with the string-loop, and cut their tails off (when they were dead) to send in for the bounty. It was ten cents per tail. He used the thirty cents to buy Mummy some sweets.
“Candies,” I said.
“Sweets,” he said.
I was picking up lots of Canadian words that he refused to use.
On our first day at school, Gordon took the morning off. He wanted to be the one to take us.
The school was quite far away. The puddle-jumper would have taken us most of the way but Gordon said we shouldn’t use it. “All the kids here walk to school. I bet that’s something new for you, isn’t it?”
Cameron said nothing. I’d noticed he often kept a dignified silence when Gordon said something
