Tom Tom Turnaround (5) (ii)

      It was a hard decision.  But a month later saw her sailing out of Liverpool on the Royal George with everything she owned in the world crammed into a brown cardboard suitcase, tied with string from the ball her father kept in his shed.

      "I was just a skinny whippet of a thing in those days.  Not like now.  Seventeen, I was.  Seventeen and leaving the only home and people I'd ever known for a place I knew nothing about, except what Mrs Boxall told me and the things I'd read in books.  I suppose it was a brave thing to do, but I just wanted the adventure and excitement.  It was exciting, too.  But it was quite frightening at first."

      After the crossing - after days spent in the empty, wild and bewildering limbo between lands - the ship had docked at Quebec City.  From there, she'd taken the Canadian Pacific train across the vast continent, through hundreds of miles of forests and emptiness, past lakes as vast as oceans, and then out onto the prairieland - the endless flats of empty space, stretching further than she could see, until it joined with the sky so seamlessly it was as if it were all one.        After six days on the train, she finally arrived at Regina, where Mrs Boxall was there to meet her.  Then they set off for the three-hour buggy ride across that cold vastness, under a sky as black and starry as any she'd ever seen, to the ranch near Edgeley - a sprawling log-framed ship on a lonesome ocean.

      "Four years I was out there.  Same number of years you've been alive."

      "What did you do, nan?"

      "I did everything.  Everything you had to do on a working ranch - same as on a farm over here.  Cooking for the ranch-hands, chopping the firewood, cleaning out and feeding the animals.  Helping with the harvesting in the summer.  There was nothing much around - nothing but prairies and hills and sky - but there was never any time to get bored.  I thought I knew what the countryside was, being born in it - but it was nothing like this.  Our nearest neighbour was a few miles away, not just next door like here.  It could take almost an hour to get there if we walked.  Doesn't seem possible now.

      Tom tried to imagine what it would be like if there were no other houses around, and it was all wide open spaces everywhere.  If you couldn't see your neighbour's house unless you had a telescope, like Russell had to look at the moon and stars.

      "Didn't you get lonely, nan?"

      The old woman chuckled.  "Goodness me, no.  There were more people on the ranch than I'd ever known in the village I was born in.  Mr and Mrs Boxall and their children.  Five of them, they had.  Then all the ranch-hands.  Every so often in the summertime, we'd pack up the buggies and horses and head off to one of the neighbouring ranches, and we'd all have a party and a dance.  They'd roast a hog outdoors over a big open fire, and some fellahs would strike up some music with violins and banjos, and we'd have a proper hoe-down, right there on the open land, under the moon and stars."

      She stared down into the flames of her own fire - her eyes watering with the heat of reminiscence.

      "There weren't any shops where we were, so once a week we'd ride down into Fort Qu'Appelle and spend the day, buying the goods we needed and seeing people.  There were lots of native Indians living around there, mostly out on the reservations."

      "Did they shoot at you with their bows and arrows?"

      She shook her head.  "It wasn't like they show it on the films.  They weren't like that.  They were friendly people to us.  It was their land.  It belonged to them and the settlers had moved onto it and taken it away, so it was sad, really.  The films all show them as nasty people and enemies, but you can't blame them for being that way.  You wouldn't like it if someone came and took your home away, would you."

      "No.  I'd hate it."

      "It was a beautiful place.  But so cold in the winter.  Colder than here.  We had snow for more than half the year.  That was another job that kept us busy - clearing the snow away after the storms.  You had to wear gloves to lift the latch on the door in the mornings, or your fingers would freeze to the metal and you were stuck."

      Tom sat there, feeling the heat on his legs - his mind full of dancing people and firelight and stars and snow, his heart secretly yearning for those things.

      "Why didn't you stay there, nan?"

      Again, the old woman stared at the flames.  They seemed to kindle something in and behind her eyes.

      "I hadn't seen my mum and dad or my brothers and sisters for four years and I missed them.  I wanted to see them.  So I decided to come home for a month for a holiday."

      Tom tried to imagine what it would be like to be away from mum and dad and Russell and nan, but he couldn't.  He didn't know how anyone could do something like that.

      "It was nineteen-twelve," she went on.  "It wasn't many weeks before I sailed home that the Titanic had sunk in that same part of the ocean."

      Tom had heard her speak about the Titanic before - this huge ship that was supposed to be unsinkable, but had struck an iceberg and sunk.  She'd shown him pictures of it in a book she had.

      "Didn't that scare you?"

      "I didn't think about it.  I just wanted to come home and see my family.  Like I said, it was only going to be for a month.  It was lovely to see them all again.  Then one day, for a treat, we went up to London to see some relations of my mum's.  They lived in Putney, too.  Not far from here, along by the common.  Well, that afternoon, we took a walk along by the river.  And that's where I saw this chap out sculling.  I stood there by the railings for a moment watching him, and as he rowed past he looked up at me and smiled.  And something about it caught me.  Anyway, a little further along he rowed into the slipway and climbed out of the boat, and lifted it onto his shoulders to carry up to the boathouse.  He smiled again at me as he passed."  She stole a glance up at the photograph on the tallboy.  "He was the handsomest man I'd ever seen.  So strong, he seemed... carrying that boat.  He set the boat down on the trestles and came over to me and asked my name."

      She paused again - thinking it through, like she was trying to find an answer to something.

      "Cut a long story short... we started courting soon after.  All my plans to return to Canada were put on hold.  We were married the following year.  I came up here to live and we moved into the house in Fulham, near where Russell goes to school, and where your granddad worked in the old Putney brewery."

      She stopped and leant forwards to poke the fire.  Then she put some more nuggets of coal on the lowering flames.

      "We'd only been married a year when the Great War started.  That was the first one.  Your granddad had to go, of course.  He fought in France and got gassed on the Somme.  He was lucky to survive it and his health was never the same afterwards.  But he came home.  A few years later, your uncle Reg was born.  Then came your mum and Auntie Eleanor in the next few years.  We had them all quite late, really, but that was partly to do with the war.  Then we moved to this house just before the nest war, and we stayed."

      "Did granddad fight in that war, too?"

      She shook her head.

      "He was too old by then.  And his health wasn't good.  But it was just as well he was at home.  There was an air raid one night, and we were down in the cellar, and an incendiary bomb came through the roof and landed on the stairs and started a fire.  Your granddad went straight up with a shovel, picked it up and put it in the scullery sink and turned the tap on it.  You'd never seen steam like it!  That and the smoke from the fire.  But that wasn't bad, and he soon put it out.  He saved this house, bless him.  If he hadn't been there, it might've burned to the ground."

      She paused again.

      "He was such a kind and loving man," she said.  "It's a shame you never knew him.  And to think... if I hadn't come home for that holiday from Canada, I would never have known him, either.  And then neither your mum, nor your uncle and aunt would have been born."

      She shifted her gaze from the fire to Tom sitting in his armchair next to her - feet up on the cushion, arms around his knees.

      "And you wouldn't be sitting there now either, listening to me telling you this."

(continued)