I've been rather introspective of late, as the passage of time takes me past a milestone.
On Thursday 12 August 1965, my family (mum, dad, sister ch'kai and me) caught a taxi to Victoria station for the boat train to Southampton. About noon, we boarded RMS Carmania.
http://www.geocities.com/chrisambidge/RMSCarmania.jpg
We sailed across the English Channel that afternoon for Le Havre; and that evening left Le Havre and the sight of dry land behind us. The next few days we crossed the North Atlantic, which was feeling rather frolicsome (read: force 9 gale). I only missed one meal to queasiness, but my mama (who, we alleged, got seasick watching *The Cruel Sea* in a perfectly stationary cinema) was confined to our cabin for days. (my dad came back from the one breakfast I missed announcing cheerfully that he'd had kippers and black pudding. It was ONLY The Moth's debilitated state [and mine, for that matter] that allowed me to get to the new world before I became an orphan).
I found that I was fine as long as I could see the ocean. I've since found out that much seasickness is congruent with that: it comes from the discordance of the evidence of your eyes (the cabin is all right angles and stationary, nothing happening) and of your inner ear (we're moving!). If the eye can see something moving to explain the up-and-down you feel, you'll be ok. Likewise, if you close your eyes, the visual mis-information isn't there. But I didn't have all that theory back in 1965.
New country / new name. "Christopher" was my middle name, and I switched to Chris on board ship. Took my mum a while to get used to it; but I changed it legally in 1985. And THAT's twenty years back.
We sailed over the north end of Newfoundland, entering the Gulf of St Lawrence by way of the Straight of Belle Isle. Dad dug us out of bed at dawn to go up on deck - the gale had ended by then - for our first sight of land in five days. Belle Isle, in the almost horizontal light of the rising sun, new land, dawn -- unforgettable.
Sailing up the St Lawrence was quite pleasant -- mum emerged, NOT pea-green - and we legally landed in Quebec City on 18 August 1965. (amazing how often I had to produce that information until I became a citizen in 1975). I can remember looking up at the upper town, the Citadelle and the Chateau Frontenac up in the sky from the dock, looking very grand.
I was of particular use that evening - the immigration people came aboard (rather than us all disembarking), and we were all assembled in the ship's cinema. This was after supper, but I was 11.5y old at this point; and the officials took families-with-children-under-12, A-F first. I've no idea how long it took to see single adults S-Z, but probably quite a while, there were about 750 people aboard.
Next day, feet actually touched Canadian soil, disembarking in Montreal. The baggage was collected in the customs shed - it was all sorted by last name. In the mid-sixties, you had a choice of flying or sailing, and the cost was about the same. Dad made the surface choice both to get us a holiday, and for the MUCH larger baggage allowance - we were moving our lives, of course. He got a dozen tea-chests: 2x2x2' cubes, originally for shipping tea from India to England (and with some tea dust still in them), they were painted white and contained most of our goods and chattels. He thought that no one ELSE would have luggage like that, and he was right - they were all there in a neat pyramid on dockside in Montreal. There had been one suitcase each for "stateroom baggage" (rather a grander name than the actual accommodation - which was fine, but it WAS economy class), with an oval label, which went with us in the taxi. The tea chests, and four or five suitcases "not wanted on the voyage", with rectangular labels, had been shipped off a couple of days before we took the taxi to Victoria Station. All of them had circular labels with a navy-blue fat "Cunard Line" border with "A" on them to aid dockside sorting. [navy blue indicating below-the-salt status; first class baggage got red-circle initial labels]. Yes, the one chance in my life I had to actually take a steamer trunk, and I didn't. I didn't realise until much later the missed opportunities there.
Those bags were all shipped off from the docks to Toronto, and we went to the railway station (Montreal had two - Central and Windsor - in those days, I can't recall which, but I do know we got a treat of a fancy-restaurant meal, before we caught the night sleeper to Toronto. So Saturday last, 20 August, was the fortieth anniversary of yr panda arriving in Toronto. Two weeks later, I was in Grade VIII at Elizabeth Simcoe Public School, but that's another set of memories.
One bag - my dad's cricket bag, with pads / bat / wickets + much other household stuff poked in there - got swallowed by the system somewhere. In the next few weeks, as we were settling in, and some item "turned up missing", the cry went up "must have been in the cricket bag". That bag must have been the size of a VW Beetle to hold all the missing items imputed to it.
There's been an awful lot of water under the bridge in those four decades. My dad was 47 when he brought his family half a world away - four years younger than I am now. Would I have done that? I don't know, but I do know I'm not planning on moving that distance myself now - did the immigrant thing once, and that's enough.
Speaking of moving - we didn't bring any furniture, but that's still not a lot of stuff for a household of four (5.5 cubic metres, or 200 cubic feet.) Yes, I know that many people have done it in less, but it was uprooting and indeed root-cutting. I had much more stuff than that to move just 57 steps down the corridor when I went from one apartment to the other, and that's just me.
We had an apartment to come to; my aunt and uncle (mum's
in-laws, actually) got a place in their building, and a few
sticks of furniture of the Goodwill/Salvation Army school to
sit on until mum and dad could get their own. One of them, a
great solid armchair, they had re-upholstered, and I've had it
redone twice, and hope to have it forever.
