The Cuckoo's Child (4 page)

But the days of spiritual revelation and treasure trove had to end. Once again, disaster befell the site.

Mum had reluctantly allowed me to go to a birthday party at a neighbours' house. Normally she had very little to do with the neighbours and very little good to say of them, but I must have pleaded and worn her down. Invitations didn't come my way very often, and I was desperate to go.

All of the guests attended the same school as I did, so I knew them at least by name. One of them was a girl called Pamela. Mum disapproved of her, or rather of her mother—“No better than she ought to be, that one!” she would sniff—but I thought Pamela was fun, and I liked what I saw of her mother too. She laughed a lot, and wore lipstick every day, and didn't wrap her head up in a scarf like Mum did to do the housework.

Pamela was the same. She was fun to be around, always inventive and full of energy, flinging herself into games, taunting the boys, imitating the teachers, fearless and witty. Mum said she needed a good smack—“All that sauce!”—but I relished her company at school. She was the life of that birthday party too; I can't remember whose birthday it was, or what we ate or what games we played, but I remember laughing uncontrollably till I wet my pants at something Pamela said.

That was on a Friday. On Monday morning, I found a solemn group standing round Pamela's best friend, Lillian. It was most unusual for Lillian to be the centre of anybody's attention. She was the first member I ever encountered of that subset of humans who are born middle-aged. She was a miniature version of her mother: plump, with a pale round face like an uncooked bun, a worried expression, and a tendency to lumber as she walked.

There was a faint flush on Lillian's cheekbones as she talked. Her news was awful. But it seemed to me that Lillian was enjoying her moment in the spotlight and making the most of being the only one with any information.

Pamela—lively, funny Pamela—was in hospital, barely clinging to life. Lillian's eyes darted to each of us in turn as we huddled around her, avid for the story.

“She was playing on the site,” said Lillian, “just playing about like we always do, and one of them walls, you know, the one with the wallpaper, it come crashing down all of a sudden”—here her voice faltered for a moment—“and she was underneath it.”

Lillian paused and surveyed her audience before bringing out her new word, acquired from who knows what source—parent, hospital, ambulance attendant. “She was
crushed
,” she breathed, and the horror of it peered out through her eyes. “I wanted to go and see her in hospital, but they wouldn't let me. They said only her mum and dad was allowed in.”

Pamela died of her injuries, and the outcry about the unstable walls left standing to topple on children resulted in a crew being sent in to demolish the remaining ruins and clear the site. The treasures disappeared, and the snug hiding place. Mum discovered my glass bell and hurled it in the dustbin after she'd winkled out of me where I'd got it from.

“Whatever goes through your head? You could've cut yourself to the bone on that thing! And what about germs? I bet it's covered in germs—you'd turn septic before you know it, lockjaw even! Don't you let me catch you on any bombsite again, d'you hear me, or you'll get what for. Do you want to end up like that Pamela?”

And there she had a winner, of course. The evidence was in: things could happen to children, even popular ones like Pamela, and perhaps the world
was
as dangerous as Mum seemed to believe. Lord knows I believe her now. I don't think she had much trouble keeping me under her eye after that, but oddly her protectiveness didn't seem to come from love so much as a wish to keep tabs on me. She wanted me around, but at the same time she was indifferent, never very interested in what I did or thought, just as long as I did what I was told and stayed out of trouble.

For companionship I had to rely on Dad. He would let me help when he did things around the house, putting up shelves or painting chairs or papering over the cracks in the walls, and sometimes he would take me over the river to St. James Park and we would feed the ducks or ride on the top deck of the bus to Piccadilly Circus and look at the shops. He was the one who read to me, and taught me the letters, and listened when I had something to say. But he was often on shift work, out all night and sleeping all day, so that I had to be very quiet, creeping about, careful not to slam doors or talk loudly. I spent long hours with jigsaws I'd got for Christmas and knew by heart or reading the few books I possessed over and over again. Even then, I felt dimly this was not a natural life and spent a lot of time at the window of the front room looking out on the street, longing for action.

Change came suddenly. The decision to move to Canada seemed mercurial to me, although it was no doubt the result of months of planning and waiting. One day Dad told me we were leaving the street for good at the end of the week, and I had better say goodbye to my friends at school. That didn't concern me, but I was anxious to know where we were going.

Dad wasn't very helpful. “We're going to Canada,” he said. “It's way over the sea. We'll have to go on a big boat.”

“But why?” I asked.

Dad looked frazzled. “It's hard to explain,” he said finally, “we're going to make a new life over there. Start again where things are better perhaps.”

People at school thought I was lucky. Even the teacher seemed to envy me. She also showed me Canada on a big globe and drew her finger slowly across the wide blue bit between the two pink bits to show me the route I would be taking. The size of the blue bit, I remember, worried me. It was much, much wider than the pink bit the teacher said was England.

“Won't the boat get lost?” I asked. “How will we know where to go?”

The teacher laughed. “Don't worry,” she said, “there'll be sailors on the boat who'll know the way. You won't get lost.”

I was not really convinced, but the doubts and anxiety seemed to be a part of that time. I could sense them in Mum and Dad too as they finished settling their affairs and tidied the house. But finally we went, quietly leaving for the train with our suitcases, nobody apparently very interested in our going.

There is a blur of hurry and movement in my mind, of locomotives belching clouds of steam at the roofs of huge stations, of taxis and luggage and being pulled through crowds of people, of standing in long lines and finally being allowed to climb on board the biggest boat I had ever seen to take refuge in a tiny cabin where we had to walk sideways round the bunks and one another.

The voyage is a blank. All I can remember of it is standing on the deck with my parents and hundreds of strangers, watching the dock and the white rim of England slowly recede as we edged out of Southampton and round the Isle of Wight, leaving behind in the mist the only world I had ever known.

Is that how it is for you, Stephen? The familiar skyline blurring behind you? Your hand is warm under mine; I can feel the roughness of the skin, like fine sandpaper, on the fingertips, see the blackened nail where you caught it with a careless hammer just days ago, the little nicks and scratches, half-healed, ignored, traps for the dirt you can never entirely clean off any more than Neil is ever completely free of paint. All evidence of a life, of a here and now, waiting for you, the construction sites half finished, the carpenters and roofers needing instructions, plumbers and electricians moving off to other jobs, all the frantic phone calls, orders, contracts, and blueprints piling up. They need your attention, Stephen. How's Holly going to deal with all that? With the kids? But even though you're lying right here beside me, big and solid still, you've moved off, haven't you? Still in earshot, perhaps, but your back is to us, and my voice is probably just part of the murmur from the shore behind. Only the destination counts now. I know something about arriving in new worlds, you see.

Can you picture Mum and Dad and me fetching up on Canadian shores for the first time? Arrival was like our baffling departure in reverse. Where did we land? I'm not sure. Halifax, maybe? Somewhere on the St. Lawrence? It'll be recorded in a dusty file somewhere. To my seven-year-old eyes, rivers were as vast as oceans in that strange place.

In fact, the impression of size, the change of scale that made me feel as if my mouth were perpetually hanging open, is the only thing left to me of our slow traverse of a continent. Mum fretted at my silence, convinced that I was coming down with some dreadful Canadian disease, but I had simply been quelled by insignificance in the face of unrelenting grandeur. I was used to the animal closeness of our street, hearing the neighbours arguing through the walls, narrow alleys and minute garden patches jostling hugger-mugger against noisy thoroughfares choked with traffic, and steam trains clanking and swerving across the points as they approached London Bridge. The largest open space I had ever seen was Hyde Park, and even there, the trees were ordered and deliberately set in their place. I had never seen a wild forest, not even a wood, not a spinney, not a copse.

On our train clacking west across Canada, we plunged through forests that stretched to the horizon. We would accompany rivers or lakeshores for a while, then swerve back into the trees, round bare shoulders of grey rock. Sometimes we caught glimpses of unfamiliar animals—deer, eagles, even a bear—but I can't remember any people, not even a sign of any, no houses, no smoke, no lights. I'm sure there were some, but my city eyes registered nothing but a huge emptiness. Then we left the trees behind and swam again in a sea, this time of grass and grain, racing the shadows of clouds on its rippling surface. I discovered that my experience of sky was severely limited. I watched thunderheads massing and marching on the rim of a great inverted blue bowl, and felt awe stirring inside, as it had when the cat's body disappeared. When I lay in my narrow bunk at night, listening to the locomotive wail at the darkness, the sky pressed down on me still, like a lid.

But the land began to heave, and the train took on a labouring note as it negotiated the beginning of a long incline. Prairie yielded to foothills that smelled in the sun like the stuffing Mum put in the Christmas chicken, and those in turn gave way to the mountains.

The steepest slope I'd ever climbed was probably Ludgate Hill. I couldn't take my eyes off the jagged peaks, so harsh and raw, as if they had just recently snapped off. I worried about the train managing to get over these obstacles; it crawled up and up, and round and round, but I couldn't see how it would crawl over the sharp points at the top. Never did it occur to me that we would go through the mountain, burrowing through the rock and chasing our own tail down the other side. Even Mum was impressed by this: “Fancy that,” she said, “whatever will they think of next?”

More forest then but different. Every tree looked the same, dark and angular. Unwelcoming. I thought how dreadful it would be to be lost in a forest like that, unable to distinguish one tree from its neighbour, trying to find a path among those silent black trunks. In just such a forest, I knew, Hansel and Gretel had been abandoned, twice, and I suffered their terror again as the endless trees slipped past the window.

I thought we would never get off the train. I suppose I had caught some of that fatalistic rootlessness that afflicts refugees or explorers. Like Burton or Livingstone we had set ourselves adrift in the unknown; the difference, for me, was that I had no sense of destination.

It came as a shock, to step down from the train. We stood forlornly on a platform, our suitcases around us, and watched the train rock gently round a bend and out of sight.

“What is this place?” whispered Mum.

I had no idea.

I can trace our route on the map now, of course, although there are more ways to travel than one, and for some journeys there is no atlas, no compass, not even the occasional landmark. We had come to rest in the small town of Vanderhoof,
BC
, where Dad hoped to find work on the railway. He did, but how he ever heard of the place I cannot imagine. You've heard the family joke, though, that Mum and Dad settled on Vanderhoof because of its position at the geographical heart of the province. It was, as Mum said with such satisfaction before we got there, so central.

Obviously, their map had neglected to show the roads, or lack of them. Equally obviously, they had ignored the scale. Some understanding of the distances involved and the population of the few villages scattered along the only highway might well have undermined their belief in the accessibility and convenience the word
central
implied to any Londoner.

There we were, transplanted Cockneys in a tiny agricultural community at the edge of the world.

Remember that first house in Vanderhoof? We were still living there when you were little. It was a tiny clapboard affair a block away from the railway that ran straight through the centre of the small huddle of dwellings and businesses. When I first saw it, the house was a faded blue and had a covered porch sagging across the front. None of the doors fitted, and there wasn't a straight wall or a square corner in the place. Dad tutted over the workmanship, and swore at the stove, a monstrous iron box squatting in the corner that had a voracious appetite for wood but refused to light when the wind came from the east, smoking sullenly instead and forcing us to fling open the doors to breathe even when snow lay on the ground and the temperature plunged to -25°C.

Learning to cope with the house, and the currency, the dearth of shops and any form of entertainment, was a lot like learning a foreign language. For a long time after our arrival, all three of us struggled with the vernacular and felt alien. It was easier for Dad, whose work soon gave him people to talk to and places to go. Even I had school, and gradually eased into the new environment, although my only real friend was Elsie Li, whose father owned the only restaurant in town, and was as much on the outside as I was. The other children were fascinated by the way I spoke—“Say ‘about,'” they would demand, “say ‘butter,' say ‘mother,'”—and fell about laughing as I obliged with the flattened vowels and transformed consonants and glottal stops of my native dialect. And they never let me forget my gaffe when I casually asked the boy at the next desk if I could borrow his rubber to erase a mistake I'd just made in my exercise book. But that's just the stuff of childhood, and I got along well enough.