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 Cameron – was back.
The captain had heard about my marathon sick day. At dinner on that third evening, he was moving among the dining tables saying a few words to some of the passengers, and he stopped next to ours.
“Are you the little girl who was sick nine times on our first day out?” he asked with a smile.
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
