Kezzie at War

by Theresa Breslin

  Most of the rest was news of bombings and killing. In Germany, Jews had been ordered to carry special identity cards. The British government had commissioned a thousand new Spitfire fighters. As more and more out rageous acts of hatred and aggression occurred, the whole world seemed to be racing towards war. Then an item in The Globe and Mail for Saturday, 6 August caught her eye. ‘QUEEN’S READY’ ran the headline.

  Kezzie smiled as she read the article. So her grandad’s ‘royal connection’ was about to be launched from John Brown’s yard on the Clyde. She felt better at once. It had given her a brief link with home which cheered her and she knew that her friends and family would be thinking of her. She was still on edge at every stop but it eased her mind to know that at least she was making progress. Dalton was the end of Lucy’s travels, surely she would catch her there?

  Canada was beautiful, Kezzie had to acknowledge the fact. She gazed from her window as the train took her across the face of the continent.

  It was autumn, the Canadians called it the Fall. The country was coloured in crimson and gold. They passed Lake Superior at Heron Bay. On the Prairies the flat farmlands stretched to the horizon, with a farmhouse and little lakes dotted here and there. The train stopped at small towns with their tall grain elevators. Kezzie became accustomed to the bell sounding and the cheery call of the railwaymen. She consulted her map. The names intrigued her; Medicine Hat, Swift Current, Moose Jaw. Eating up the miles the train travelled across the country. She sometimes went to the observation car. She preferred to be there at night, or the early morning, with only the sound of the engine pulling and the wheels rattling for company. She would pray as she watched the sun rise on another day, but her prayers had no words, only a thought, a deep intent.

  ‘Let Lucy be safe. Let Lucy be safe,’ she whispered in time with the rhythm of the rain.

  CHAPTER 23

  Jane Smith

  LUCY FELT FAR from safe. The motion of the train for days had been only marginally better than that of the ship. When she had looked out of the window it seemed to her like another sea, a great expanse of grass and grain with waves which never stopped in the wind. She sat slumped, stupefied in her seat.

  On arrival at the home their escort discovered that some of the children’s papers were missing.

  ‘Must have gone with the other group,’ she fumed. ‘I don’t know, the organisation gets worse. I’m due to go back to Montreal. I’ll have to leave you to sort something out.’

  The matron shrugged. It was not the first time she would have to assign new names and ages to unknown children. She was understaffed and the Canadian government now frowned on child immigration. She would try to place these ones as quickly as possible. With the homes being run down perhaps she would be able to retire soon. Each batch of children appeared to her to have more problems and be more undisciplined than the last.

  The rougher ones gave her the greatest headache. One boy called Jack, who’d arrived last year, had been sent back three times by the different people she’d put him with. A swarthy little creature, who constantly stole anything and everything left unattended, she despaired of ever placing him. He had obviously been badly abused at some time and trusted no one.

  She had given the new group a quick assessment on arrival. The older boys were very rude, but seemed quite strong. Perhaps some of the logging camps would take on a few lads. It was a good job. Hard work, but fairly paid and out in the open air. These children were so pale and undernourished. She thought they must come from some of the worst slums in Europe. She had heard that Glasgow had a bad record of child mortality. Houses built too close together blocking the sun, and lack of milk and proper food meant that many children suffered from rickets. Well, at least here they had a chance to thrive in the clear air.

  The children were playing outside. She glanced out of the window. The child with the doll who shrank in the corner of the yard, staring around her vacantly, was going to be difficult to get rid of, though she recalled an outback couple who had been looking for a girl to train as a servant. They certainly weren’t the type you would want one of your own to go to, but an idiot child like that would have to take what she could get. She’d contact them tomorrow.

  Lucy stood as far away from everyone as she could possibly get. Only one other child, a boy of about nine, did not join in with the rest either. He was sallow and skinny, with black hair and furtive eyes. He played with a ball at the edge of the yard, talking all the while to himself.

  ‘Atsit,’ Jack would say, as he bounced the ball against the wall. ‘Gerronyer.’

  If anyone came near him or tried to take his ball he would snarl in a most ferocious manner. Jack had been in the home the longest and had established certain territorial rights.

  ‘Goal!’ he cried as the ball soared up and over the fence.

  Lucy watched him vaguely as he climbed over to retrieve it. On the way back he slipped and crashed heavily to the ground. The ball fell from his grasp and bounced towards her. Instinctively she put up her hands and caught it. She waited but he did not get up. She stood still, not sure what to do, and then walked slowly towards him. He rolled over, his face screwed up in pain. There was a deep gash on his leg. She looked round for help.

  ‘Don’t tell. Don’t tell,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll sort it myself.’ He took a grubby hanky from his pocket and spat on it. ‘I’ll catch it for climbing the fence if they find out. Then I’ll get locked in the cupboard.’ He mopped up the blood. ‘Don’t like bein’ in the cupboard, ’s dark an’ all. You won’t tell, will ye?’

  Lucy shook her head.

  At dinner that night Lucy was by chance beside him. He ate his food noisily and greedily. She picked up her spoon, meanwhile gazing about her, trying to make sense of where she was. She looked down at her plate. She didn’t recognise this kind of food. It wasn’t like anything Kezzie had given her to eat. A lump of brown meat lay half submerged in gravy. She looked around her hopelessly. Grandad always cut up her meat for her.

  There was a piece of bread beside her plate. She reached to pick it up and as she did so the boy from the ship stretched across the table and grabbed it from her.

  ‘Ha! Ha!’ he crowed.

  As he went to put it into his mouth, Jack with a quick movement punched him on the face, took the bread back and gave it to Lucy.

  ‘Quick,’ he said, ‘eat it fast.’

  Lucy gobbled her bread.

  The other boy got up and came round the table towards Jack. He was much bigger and heavier, Jack did not move until the boy was beside him. Then he swung round and kicked him viciously with his hobnailed tackety boots, and, leaping to his feet, shouted, ‘Matron, that boy’s out of his seat!’

  The matron hurried over. She regarded Jack suspiciously. He continued eating his dinner with an air of innocence. The other boy gave him a look of hatred.

  Jack grinned at Lucy.

  ‘Has yer doll got a name?’ he asked, nodding to Lucy’s constant companion.

  Lucy looked at her doll sadly. She was stained and smelly. Her clothes were torn. She had lost one eye and her hair was falling out.

  ‘Kissy,’ she whispered.

  Just before bedtime Jack was ambushed in the washrooms. Lucy could only stare mutely as Matron pulled him out of the middle of the fight. The boy from the ship had a bloody nose and there was a bruise rising on her protector’s eye.

  ‘He started it, didn’t he?’ the bigger boy asked the rest menacingly. They nodded.

  ‘It’s the punishment room for you, my lad,’ said the matron, dragging Jack down the corridor, ‘and you can stay in there for two days this time.’

  Lucy watched from a distance.

  As Kezzie’s train entered the high passes of the Rocky Mountains the matron of the home in Dalton made arrangements for Lucy’s adoption.

  ‘Jane Smith is the child’s name,’ she told the couple before her. ‘Though you can change it if you will.’ She looked at them. They were mean and shabby but the
child was lucky to get even that. She rang her bell. ‘I’ll get someone to bring her down.’

  When she was sent for Lucy came from the top of the house where she had been scrubbing the floors. She passed the cupboard at the bottom of the stairs in which Jack was locked. She thought of him in the dark, all alone for such a long time. She remembered herself in the coffin ship with only her dolly beside her. There was a little snib on the door. She gazed at it, a small figure in black button boots and a white pinafore covering her brown orphan’s dress. She looked up and down the corridor and then opened the door. Jack was crouched in the corner with his hands over his head. His face was streaked and blotched. Without a word Lucy handed him her doll and then went away.

  CHAPTER 24

  The rag doll

  KEZZIE FOLDED DOWN her couchette bed for the last time. Tomorrow she would be in Dalton, she had travelled over two thousand miles in the last few days. She felt a great peace inside, brought about by the fact that she knew she was close to the end of her travels but also by this great country itself.

  Each person she had spoken to in Canada was so very proud of their nation, from Janine and Alexander Dalgleish to her fellow travellers on the train.

  ‘Sure we have still got those tin-and-tarpaper shanty towns on the outskirts of the big cities,’ a construction worker she’d met in the dining-car had told her, ‘but our fish canning and tannery works are expanding. This year the Bank of Canada has been fully nationalised. They’ll control the credit rates so we’re going to make progress out of the Great Depression.’

  The train conductor had talked of the opening up of the country. A trans-Canada Air Line had recently been established, and now with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation being publicly owned it beamed a great variety of programmes and news right into the remotest areas. He’d been with the railways all his life and had watched as the ranchers followed each new track laid. Central Canada was now a vast chessboard of growing crops, warmed in spring by the strong gusty wind known as the Snow Eater, which blew down from the Rockies, and which the native people called the Chinook.

  He told her to look out for Calgary, its Gaelic name meaning ‘preserved pasture at the harbour’.

  It was still very much a frontier town and had been originally a fort for the North West Mounted Police. They’d had to control the wild wolf hunters from Montana, and the American whisky traders who created unrest among the native tribes, the Blackfoot, Salish and Sarcee. Soon after that she would see the most beautiful part of Canada as the train would swing in a great loop north and enter the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

  The territories through which the train had passed seemed to show nature’s every part. Vermilion foliage, golden plains stretching out to the limits of the earth, rivers, forests, lakes and the jagged peaks of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. The sky was a blue canopy without horizons above her when she wandered down the track to stretch her legs at the various stops. At night the air was clear and cold and the stars seemed bright and close.

  The train had reached Banff, climbed past Lake Louise to the highest point at the Great Divide of the Atlantic and Pacific watersheds. The conductor had pointed out to her the stream, parted, one to flow east to the Hudson Bay, one to flow west to the Pacific. Descending from the steep Kicking Horse Pass via the spiral tunnels, over many mountain ravines and then back up through the Selkirks to the Connaught Tunnel under Mount Macdonald. Kezzie had gazed back at the carriages snaking behind the engines across the vast gorge at Stoney Creek Bridge. What engineering skills and fortitude it had taken to conquer these mountains!

  She hardly slept at all that night and was dressed and fully packed as the train drew in to Dalton early the next morning. It was a strange thing, thought Kezzie, as she made her enquiries firstly at the station office and then the town hall, how one’s clothes mattered. Lady Fitzwilliam had bought her the most expensive costume she could find, with matching shoes, gloves, hat and handbag. And it seemed to Kezzie that people were more respectful and attentive to her. It was unfair, she thought.

  She arrived at the Distribution Home, a grey for bidding house with iron railings all around. Kezzie gazed up at the windows. Was Lucy behind one of those faded net curtains?

  ‘You’ve come all the way from Scotland?’ the matron said in disbelief. ‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you but I can’t give just anybody access to my records or to the children in my care.’

  Kezzie nodded calmly and handed her the letter from Lady Fitzwilliam.

  ‘You know this person?’ The matron hesitated.

  Kezzie looked her straight in the face. ‘A relative, actually,’ she lied.

  The matron flicked through her books.

  ‘No one of that name has been here at all,’ she said finally.

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ said Kezzie, now quite frightened. ‘The Immigration in Montreal told me, and Lady Fitzwilliam,’ she added quickly, ‘that she had come here.’

  The matron hesitated.

  ‘Papers sometimes go astray,’ she said. ‘The records are not always … quite accurate. Names and personal details may change. There have been two or three children of about that age. One is still here.’ She rang her bell.

  Kezzie examined the forlorn child with the red pigtails who stood in front of her.

  ‘That is not Lucy,’ she said.

  ‘There was one other child of a similar age who passed through my hands recently,’ said the matron. She coughed. ‘She’d been given the name Jane.’

  ‘Can you describe her?’ asked Kezzie.

  The matron thought for a minute. ‘She was quite small …’

  ‘Blue eyes?’ Kezzie asked anxiously.

  ‘I think so … Yes.’

  ‘Her hair,’ continued Kezzie excitedly, ‘little blonde curls all over her head. She is a beautiful child.’

  The matron sighed. The child she was thinking about had not been beautiful at all.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘In fact I’m sure this child’s hair was brown, it was certainly quite lank, and she was not attractive at all.’ She paused for a second. ‘Was there anything wrong with your sister?’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Kezzie.

  The matron cleared her throat.

  ‘It’s just that this child was … well, not quite right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The child was mentally retarded, and had no speech.’

  ‘No!’ cried Kezzie.

  ‘Well, that’s it then.’ The matron closed her book with finality.

  Kezzie stood up from the chair stiffly. Her body and brain were numb. To come so far …

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ the matron asked more kindly.

  Kezzie shook her head. She had to find somewhere quiet. She had to sit and think. What would she write to Grandad and Bella after her first hopeful telegram? Had they made a mistake in Montreal? Was Lucy in Carrville? Was she even in Canada?

  She waited in the hallway while the maid brought her coat and suitcase from the back. Kezzie looked round at the scrubbed lino floors and the polished wooden banisters. Very clean, too clean for children to play in. Not a happy place for someone like Lucy. Was she in another similar place on the other side of Canada? Kezzie had fought through their months of starvation to save Lucy from a fate such as this. A spartan orphanage, a sham of a ‘home’. She had failed her. Had she made a bad mistake? Was Lucy still in Scotland? Where was her sister?

  The maid helped her on with her coat. Kezzie’s arms were leaden. As she picked up her suitcase she heard a snuffling noise from the small cupboard under the stairwell.

  Kezzie looked at the maid questioningly. The maid dropped her eyes. Kezzie glanced towards the front door where the matron was waiting to see her out.

  There it was again, a strange whimpering sound. Kezzie reached forward and opened the cupboard door.

  There was a small boy crouched in the corner. He covered his face with his hands as the light shone
on him.

  ‘There’s a boy in this cupboard,’ said Kezzie.

  The matron hurried forward, tutting.

  ‘Yes, yes. That is the punishment cupboard. And that is a particularly bad boy. He is often in there.’

  Kezzie was horrified. ‘You lock children in a cupboard because they are naughty?’

  ‘He is more than naughty. He is bad. Don’t criticise what you don’t have to deal with.’

  Kezzie stepped back reluctantly. It was none of her business, but the boy seemed so frightened and pathetic. As she turned away he reached out his hand towards the light, and the thing he was holding fell to the floor.

  Kezzie picked it up and leaned forward to return it to him. And then she stopped … She looked more closely at the object in her hand. A raggedy doll with torn dirty clothes … and one blue button eye which gazed at her unblinking.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ she asked the boy hoarsely.

  He shrank from her into the furthest corner of the cupboard. Kezzie knelt down and, reaching in, tucked the doll firmly back into his arms.

  ‘I’m not going to keep it,’ she spoke quietly. ‘It’s yours.’

  She waited for a moment.

  ‘I knew a little girl who had a doll just like yours,’ she said gently. ‘Perhaps you met her?’

  He only stared back at her.

  ‘I know that she would have liked you for a friend,’ Kezzie went on. ‘And that she would have given her doll to someone to watch for her, or …’ Kezzie glanced around the cupboard. ‘Or keep them company in a dark place.’

  Something in his eyes changed.

  ‘I just wondered,’ Kezzie said carefully, ‘does this doll have a name?’

  There was a long silence. Then the answer came softly.

  ‘Her name’s Kissy.’

  CHAPTER 25

  The farmstead

  ‘THAT’S THE PLACE you’re lookin’ for.’