Uprooted - A Canadian War Story. Lynne Banks Reid

my amazement, everybody not only clapped, but cheered. I remembered the restaurant and ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. Well, at least they wouldn’t start singing that!

      The teacher, who was young and pretty with shiny black hair and lipstick, came over to me, and the principal left.

      “Hello, Lindy. I’m Miss Bubniuk. Now, where shall we put you? Who’d like to have Lindy share their desk?”

      Three girls sitting alone threw their hands up. Miss Bubniuk led me to one of them.

      “This is Marylou, she’ll be your desk partner.”

      Marylou was one of the girls I already knew from the little park.

      “Oh, good, Lindy!” she said, so excitedly I thought she was going to hug me. She patted the seat beside her and actually did put her arm around me when I sat down. All the others kept their faces turned towards me until Miss Bubniuk clapped her hands for attention.

      The time till lunch passed in a whirl of enthusiasm. You’d have thought I was a princess come among them, the way they treated me. At break, which they called ‘recess’, Marylou and the other girls from the park showed me off as if I were their proudest possession. My celebrity went to my head a bit so that by lunchtime I felt like a princess. I swaggered over to Cameron, who was sitting alone in a corner of the playground.

      “These kids are really swell!” I enthused.

      “Don’t say ‘kids’,” he said. “And don’t say ‘swell’. It’s beastly slang.”

      Cameron could be very scathing sometimes. But this time he couldn’t squash me. I loved the new words.

      Luti had packed sandwiches for us. We opened them up together. Peanut butter and jelly – a whole new taste experience, right up there with waffles and maple syrup, corn on the cob streaming with butter, and pork spare ribs cooked with brown sugar, one of Luti’s specialities. I loved the food in Canada. Cameron didn’t, or pretended not to. He said none of it was a patch on roast beef and fish and chips.

      “This is ridiculous,” he muttered as we sat on a wall, eating our sandwiches.

      “What is?”

      “The lessons. They’re so incredibly easy. We did the maths they’re doing ages ago. They don’t know the first thing about British history. We were up to the Industrial Revolution at home. They’ve never heard of it here. It’s all about Canada. And the book we’re reading in class is for babies.”

      I hadn’t found the lessons particularly easy, just strange. Miss Bubniuk was much less strict than the nuns and there was far more shouting out the answers and whispering. I saw two boys throwing rubbers at each other when she was writing on the board. I thought it was more fun than the convent, but so different I hadn’t thought to compare what we were actually learning. It was new, that was the long and short of it. Everything was, and that stopped me comparing it with England.

      I said, “I guess we just have to get used to it.”

      Cameron glared at me. “You suppose. You don’t ‘guess’.”

      “That’s how they talk here.”

      “Well, it’s not how I talk. If you start putting on a Canadian accent I won’t talk to you at all.”

      I wasn’t having that. “Can’t I even say ‘recess’ instead of ‘break’?” I teased.

      Just then some of the girls from my class called me to come and play a ball-bouncing game. I stuffed the last bit of sandwich into my mouth and left Cameron sitting there alone. I didn’t even stop to wonder why the ‘kids’ in 7A hadn’t made a prince out of him.

      I soon found out, though. Cameron’s teacher having come to the same realisation as my cousin – that he was a good year ahead of his classmates – suggested he move straight to the local high school. So before I’d even got completely used to the way to school, letting him lead the way, I had to manage on my own. Cameron was now a student at Nutana Collegiate. There he joined a class called 9A. The high school was, I learnt, streamed – A students (the best) in A, Bs in B and so on. Cameron was the A-est student you could imagine, although he was nearly two years younger than the others in his year group.

      I was secretly hoping that this age difference would mean that he’d fall back a bit on me, as the others in his class would be too old for him. But that wasn’t what happened. Cameron didn’t care whether people liked him or not, so of course they all wanted him to like them and he became something of a prince to them, which lasted long after I’d stopped being a princess and gone back to being just a girl who ‘talked funny’, like calling her mother Mummy instead of Mom.

      After I stopped being special, I wasn’t invited to play after school much and I didn’t seem to have any real friends. I complained to Mummy that there must be something wrong with me.

      “You’re different, that’s all. They’ll get used to you.”

      “Should I start talking like them? Would you mind if I called you Mom?”

      “I would absolutely hate it. I’d rather you called me Alex. But anyway there’s no point in putting something on that isn’t you. Be yourself and see what happens.”

      Nothing did for a couple of weeks. Then Willie happened.

      One thing that we all did together – apart from playing with Spajer and taking him for walks – was go to the movies.

      This involved a streetcar ride into Downtown, where the movie theatres were. We were all sitting in the stalls at the Capitol, the grandest, one Saturday afternoon, and I noticed another girl with plaits like mine, only red, sitting next to me with her mother. She didn’t go to Buena Vista or I’d have seen her. She was wearing trousers and a khaki top like a battledress.

      The double bill – two films – was always accompanied by a cartoon, trailers and a newsreel, and on this afternoon started with the newsreel. The famous Pathé theme music was blaring but I was eyeing this girl next to me and not paying a lot of attention, when suddenly I heard Mummy give a little gasp, and Cameron, who was on the other side of me, leant forward and gripped the seat in front.