“You could easily just fall off the back of the train,” I said, leaning over, staring at the rails streaming out behind us.
“Only if you were extremely stupid,” said Cameron, backing up his point with, “‘Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers, won’t drown.’” This was from Swallows and Amazons, which, before he found England, Their England, had been one of his favourite books.
There was nobody out there but us. We sat on the fixed seats and watched the outer suburbs of Montreal flash past, and then the countryside – wide, lots of lakes and trees, empty of people – everything utterly new and exciting. But also scary – it looked so wild. I could feel my heart beating in time to the wheels: Clicketty-clack! Clicketty-clack! You’re going so far you may never go back!
“Aren’t you liking any of it?” I asked Cameron at last.
“No. Yes. I don’t know,” Cameron said, scowling out at the wild scenery. “I wonder if there’s hunting here.”
After a while, Mummy came to find us.
“Isn’t it big,” she said.
I could tell she liked the wide open spaces. Nothing claustrophobic about this.
She sat with us for a while and smoked a cigarette. Her smoke streamed away with the rest of the smoke. Mummy smoked an awful lot – she always had, but she’d cut down since we left home, to save money.
At last Cameron said, “Isn’t it nearly time for lunch?”
We worked our way back to the dining car and sat down at a table nicely laid with clean linen and cutlery and glasses. After the ship, the rocking of the train merely jingled the glasses against the knives and forks.
We were just looking at the menu, which was full of strange but interesting things, when the waiter came along and asked Mummy for our tickets.
She brought them out of her handbag and gave them to him. He looked at them for a long time and I felt a sudden prickle of unease. Something was wrong.
“I am very sorry, ma’am,” he said. “These tickets only entitle you to ride the train to Saskatoon. They don’t give you any meals.”
Mummy looked at him in disbelief.
“No meals?” she said. “But my husband bought us first-class tickets from Canadian Pacific Railways in London!”
“These are standard-class tickets, ma’am. They don’t include meals.”
“So what are we to do?” Mummy asked with a shrill note in her voice.
“There’s a snack bar in the observation car,” he said, looking very uncomfortable. “You can get sandwiches, peanuts, candy bars, that sort of thing. And soft drinks. And tea,” he added, as if that made up for everything.
“For three days?” Mummy cried.
People were looking at us now, and I became aware of how we must look – travel-worn and shabby. I was suddenly so hungry I felt tears come into my eyes. I looked at Cameron. He was just laying the menu down in a very final kind of way, as if he were saying, Well, this is just what I was expecting. Complete disaster.
“Of course,” said the waiter, “if you care to pay a supplement on your tickets, to make them first class—”
Mummy stood up, and urged us to our feet.
“I can’t,” she said, as quietly as she could. “We left England with ten pounds each, of which I have less than half left. Let’s just hope Canadian Pacific Railways does very cheap sandwiches.”
She herded us into the aisle and back towards our seats, under the eyes of everybody in the dining car.
“Mummy, what happened? Didn’t Daddy buy the right tickets?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Mummy said. “I’m sure he meant to. There’s been a mistake, that’s all.”
“So now we live on sandwiches and ‘candy bars’ for three whole days,” said Cameron. “What’s a ‘candy bar’ anyway? Is it like Brighton rock? I hate Brighton rock!”
“We’ll soon find out,” Mummy said grimly.
We went back to the observation car and Mummy bought us a ham sandwich each, and lemonade. The sandwich had mustard in it, but for once I was good and didn’t grumble. I could see Mummy was in an awful state about the tickets – she hardly ate anything. I had to make her take bites from my sandwich. She told me smoking means you don’t have much appetite but I didn’t really believe her.
Candy bars turned out to be scrumptious, though. We got one each. Mummy said, “I’m sorry, darlings.” We looked at the shelves behind the bar. They were laden with delicious food – no rationing here! But now we had money rationing.
Cameron, for once, couldn’t hold back. “Could we have some peanuts, Auntie? They can’t cost much,” he said.
“Oh, why not!” said Mummy. She bought us a bag to share, and lit another cigarette.
We went back to our seats and Cameron and I played hangman for a while. Suddenly a man came and sat on the spare seat next to Cameron. He was tall and a bit grey-haired with a tanned face.
“Excuse me,” he said. “May I talk to you?”
Mummy, who’d been powdering her nose with her little swansdown puff, snapped her compact shut and said, “Yes?” rather too sharply for good manners.
“I couldn’t help hearing about your trouble – I was at the next table,” he said.
I felt Mummy stiffen. I didn’t know what was coming, but she did, and she was going to hate it.
“You’re from the Old Country,” he said.
I would soon learn that a lot of Canadians call England ‘the Old Country’. “Well, I’ve got folks there. I’m very worried about them, with all this talk of invasion and all. I want to help them, and I can’t. So I thought, maybe I could help you instead.”
Mummy just sat there. Nobody spoke. Cameron and I stopped playing our game to listen. We needed some help. Was Mummy going to say no? I knew she wanted to. She was very proud. I remembered Daddy’s talk.
“I couldn’t take money from you,” she said. “It’s kind of you. I just couldn’t.”
“No? Well, could you allow me to invite you and the kids to dine with me in the dining car this evening?”
Mummy bent her head. Then she lifted it again and looked this kind man in the face.
“Yes,” she said in a strangled voice. “I could. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I think we should eat early, don’t you? So the kids can get an early night. They begin making the berths up at around seven, and the first sitting for dinner is at seven too. They ring a bell. I’ll come by
