Polish refugees en route to Canada come ashore in Britain at the outbreak of the Second World War, in August, 1939.Allan/Getty Images
Terence Bendixson is a former journalist, civil servant, and the president emeritus of Living Streets.
As the train from London slowed, left the main line, and headed into Liverpool’s docks, a squealing noise came from the wheels. I was just six but knew instantly that the sound was the flanges of steel wheels being forced along the tight curves of dockside rails. The train stopped beside the Duchess of York, a Canadian Pacific liner. She was headed for Montreal. It was Aug. 10, 1940. The war was in progress, German U-boats were sinking merchant ships in the North Atlantic and my sister Tessa and I, the children of upper-class English parents, were “evacuees.” No other member of our family came on board.
Our parents, both intent on joining the Forces, stayed in England. While our mother joined the FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), which was later absorbed into the women’s army, our father joined the Royal Air Force. He was too old to be a pilot and was posted to a ground position in Singapore. Days before the Japanese invasion in February, 1942, a ship carrying servicemen and destined for India was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the Straits of Malacca. My father was amongst those who swam ashore to Sumatra where, in due course, they were found and helped by the Dutch. But when the Japanese continued their southwards advance, they rounded up and imprisoned as many Allied servicemen as they could find.
In Canada, we were given homes by merchant families who “wanted to do their bit” for the old country. Our hosts were Henry and Lilian Birks of the jewellery firm, and Gerald and Gertrude Drummond. Both had country houses at Mont-Saint-Bruno, Que., (Mount Bruno to the anglophones) across the St. Lawrence from the city, and it was at the Birks’ house that we all met for the first time.
Life in Bruno was, for me, paradise. There were enough children to form a gang, and we played games, swam in the lakes, explored the woods and generally had fun.
The winter of 1940-41 was a cold one and the main lake at Bruno became a huge skating rink. Mr. Drummond – “Uncle Gerry” – also took to making maple syrup and bought a big rectangular boiler that sat on top of a log fire. Come the spring he got the contraption going and gave me a bucket in which to collect maple sap. While he tended the fire and reduced the watery liquid to syrup, I became adept at drilling holes in maple trees with a brace and bit, hammering in galvanized steel spouts and collecting sap.
British children who were evacuated from Oxford to Canada photographed on their arrival in Toronto.Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Uncle Gerry was a keen cook and, come the summer, grilled huge steaks on a barbecue. I was also introduced to sweet corn and watched as Gerry tore the jackets off the cobs, checked if the “seeds” were ripe, and brought them to the kitchen to be boiled.
The Drummonds’ house was a long narrow bungalow with, due to its sloping site, a partial basement. Down there lurked a huge metal monster, an octopus whose shiny galvanized steel arms spread out below the floorboards and carried hot air to grilles in the floors of the rooms above. At one end of the central passage was a living room and beyond, a spacious veranda. In winter, a log fire burnt permanently in an open hearth in the living room. My room was at the opposite end of the house and all its walls and cupboards were panelled. The wood, unpainted pine, was golden and grainy and gave the room an unforgettable warmth. My bed, also pine, was a bunk on top of drawers and there, often with a flashlight under the covers, I read Lives of the Hunted by Ernest Thompson Seton, The Call of the Wild by Jack London and Black Beauty by Anna Sewell.
In the spring of 1944, when I was 10, Uncle Gerry gave me the use of an air rifle. Off I went with it and, not far from the house, spied a chipmunk sitting on a stump. Its tail formed a fluffy question mark. I crept nearer, put the gun to my shoulder and, by some miracle, shot the tiny creature stone dead. Inspection revealed purple intestine squeezing from a hole in its stomach wall. When I saw that, I vowed never to kill again.
Sex was not much a part of my Canadian years but not quite absent. At school in Montreal when I was, I think, nine, one of the other boys gave me a deck of miniature playing cards. They depicted a couple engaged in every possible position, but my recollection is that nothing in the pictures surprised me. It was as if I had been born with knowledge of what was shown. One of Marie Stopes’s books about parenthood, which I found in the Drummonds’ living room, was next in my education. Finally, while swimming in the lake, one girl, who was about five years my senior, invited me to dodge under an upturned canoe. Once there, she slipped the straps of her bathing suit off her shoulders.
The war was a disaster for my family and the Drummonds. Their son George, in the Royal Canadian Tank Corp, was killed in an accident on Salisbury Plain shortly before D-Day, while the airman husband of Libby, their oldest daughter, died in a plane crash at the start of the Allied invasion of Italy. My father died in 1944 while a prisoner of war in Sumatra.
After the war was over my sister and I were put on a train for Halifax and embarked on the Aquitania, a four-funnel Cunarder, bound for Liverpool. Having been serving as a troop ship, the Aquitania was camouflaged and every promenade deck was stacked with bunks, three-deep and four high. We were told that, when the bunks were full of D-Day-bound Canadian soldiers, the ship’s kitchens only had capacity to cook them two meals a day.
Upon arriving in Liverpool, our mother had arranged with Cunard to meet us with the captain on the bridge. She wore the uniform of a senior commander in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. Her khaki dress cap had a gleaming leather strap above its peak, crowns shone on her shoulders and brass buttons ran from below her throat, across her bosom, to her waist. A polished leather Sam Browne crossed from one shoulder to her belt. Below her khaki skirt were thick lisle stockings and polished brogues. This was our mother!
We were finally home, but I never forgot my life in Canada, and the families who took care of my sister and me during those unforgettable wartime years.
This article has been updated to remove a proper name.