Ship of Brides Read online

  So they waited. And Frances, after a moment’s hesitation, sat down, the dirty plates piled high in front of her. She told them in quiet, unemotional tones, her words the polar opposite to Avice’s gush of love. She had met him in Malaya while she had been nursing. Private Engineer ‘Chalkie’ Mackenzie, twenty-eight years old. From a town called Cheltenham. He had shrapnel wounds, which had become infected because of the tropical humidity. She had nursed him and, over the weeks, he had grown fond of her.

  ‘Sometimes, when he had a fever, he became delirious and thought we were already married. We weren’t meant to form attachments with the men, but his captain, who was in the next bed, indulged him. We all did. We went along with all sorts if it made the men feel better.’

  ‘So, when did he ask you?’ said Jean. Above her, the neon lights came on abruptly, illuminating the women’s faces.

  ‘Well . . . he asked me lots of times, actually. There wasn’t really one occasion. I think it was about sixteen before I agreed.’

  ‘Sixteen times!’ said Avice. It was as if she couldn’t believe Frances could provoke such persistence.

  ‘What made you say yes?’ said Margaret. ‘In the end, I mean.’

  ‘What made him keep asking?’ muttered Avice.

  But Frances stood up and glanced at her watch. ‘Goodness, Maggie! Look at the time. That dog of yours will be desperate for her walk.’

  ‘Oh, darn. You’re right. Better get back downstairs,’ said Margaret. With a nod to the others, she and Frances half walked, half ran towards the cabin.

  The girls were kissing. They did it once, briefly, then turned to look at him, and laughed at his failure to react. The shorter one leant back on her bar stool, eyeing him lazily, then stretched out a bare leg. The other, in a green dress several sizes too big for her slight frame, muttered something he didn’t understand, and leant forwards to ruffle his hair. ‘Two two.’ She held up two fingers. ‘Very nice time. Two two.’ Initially, he had ordered them both another drink. It had taken him several minutes to understand what she was suggesting. Then he shook his head, even when she reduced the price to almost a third of the original amount. ‘No more money,’ he said, his words sounding strange and unfocused to his ears. ‘All gone.’

  ‘No no,’ the girl in the green dress said. It was as if she had heard refusals too many times, and that they had all been meaningless. ‘Two two. Very nice time.’

  At some point in the evening he had lost his watch, and no longer had any idea what time it was. Men catcalled or fought incompetently in the street outside. Girls disappeared upstairs, came down again and chattered or squabbled with their colleagues. Outside, the neon bar sign cast the blue light of a cold grey dawn across the entrance.

  On the wall behind the girls he could see a picture of Eisenhower, probably donated by some visiting GI. What time was it in America? Nicol tried to recall how he had calculated the difference earlier that evening.

  Across the room, half seated, half lying on a banquette, Jones-the-Welsh was placing cigarettes in a girl’s mouth and laughing as she coughed them out again. ‘Don’t inhale so much,’ he was saying, as she hit him playfully with a slim hand. ‘You’re making yourself ill.’ He caught Nicol watching him. ‘Ah . . . no . . . Don’t tell me you like Annie here too?’ he called. ‘Greedy bastard. You’ve got two of your own already.’

  Nicol tried to formulate some reply, but it turned to powder in his mouth.

  ‘To wives and sweethearts,’ Jones-the-Welsh announced, his drink aloft. ‘May they never meet.’

  Nicol raised his glass to his mate and took a slug. ‘And no rubbish tip,’ he muttered. Jones, just about hearing him, burst out laughing.

  Their last visit to Ceylon had comprised duty, not leave, and they had been charged with the ‘drunk patrol’, looking for ratings who, weighed down by their paypackets but unencumbered by either sense or inhibition, took advantage of their few hours’ freedom to drink as much as possible of whatever local brew they could find with disastrous results. Shortly before dawn, he and Jones, having emptied several of the local brothels, had found several young hands lying comatose at the base of a local rubbish tip. Over the course of their night out, they had evidently been relieved of money, watches, paybooks and even station cards, and were now incapable of either thought or speech. Not knowing without those documents who the men were, he and Jones, after some discussion, had dumped them, soiled, stinking uniforms and all, on the nearest Allied ship. There they would await a double dose of wrath – from the superiors of their adopted ship and from those they belonged to.

  ‘Too right. No rubbish tip for us, mate,’ said Jones, lifting a glass. ‘Just remember to say Viceroy. Got it? Just you remember the name of your ship. Viceroy.’ And he burst out laughing again.

  ‘You come now.’

  The girl in the green dress was tugging his sleeve. The other had vanished. She closed her hand round his with the proprietorial confidence of a child and led him up the stairs. He had to let go of her to negotiate them, clutching the banister as the wooden steps rose and fell beneath his feet like a deck in a storm.

  The door of the room was paper light in his hand; the fragility of the dividing walls apparent in the noises he could hear from the next room.

  ‘Nice time, uh?’ The girl followed his gaze and giggled.

  He felt suddenly weary, and seated himself heavily on the side of the bed, watching as she undid her dress. The knobs of her spine were distinct under her pale skin. It made him think of Frances, of her bony fingers as she had held the picture of his boys.

  ‘You help me?’ she said, twisting nimbly to look at him, and gesturing towards her zip.

  The thin coverlet was immaculately laundered. Beside it, on a rickety table, stood a bottle with several beautifully arranged blossoms. These two domestic details, a suggestion of some desire far removed from the depravity he could hear in the next room, made his eyes fill with tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t think—’

  She turned, and he caught something raw in her expression. ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, her smile rapidly in place again. ‘You be happy man. I see you before? You know me. I make you happy man.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  She clasped his hand then, in a surprisingly firm grip. Her glance towards the door told him that perhaps she had her own reasons for not wanting him to leave. ‘You wait little while,’ she pleaded.

  ‘I just want to—’

  ‘Just little while stay-stay.’

  He realised then that her eyes made her seem older. Something weary and resigned in them, even when she had smiled mischievously, fluttered her eyelids like a young girl. But now that he looked, her breasts were curiously undefined, as if they had not yet reached maturity. And her nails, when he looked at her hands, were bitten as his sister’s once were; down to the bloodied quick, childishly uncaring of their appearance. Nicol closed his eyes, feeling suddenly ashamed to have been complicit in such corruption. This is what war does, he said silently. Even we who survived. It does for us in the end.

  He felt her weight upon him then, light hands stroking his face.

  ‘Please you wait little while,’ whispered the voice in his ear. He could smell her perfume, something heavy and cloying, at odds with her youth, the insubstantial nature of her frame.

  She had reached round his neck, was pulling him down. ‘You wait little while with me.’ She reached down with nimble fingers, let out a muffled exclamation into his neck when he gently stayed her hand.

  ‘There’s nothing left in me,’ he said. ‘I’m empty.’

  Then, as she lay against him, her dark eyes searching his for some sign of his intention, he lay back on the pillow. Through the partially open window he could hear shouting. The smell of something frying drifted up, sharp and gingery. He took her hand. ‘You tell me something,’ he said. He could feel her breath on his neck, careful, expectant, and realised he was drifting towards sleep.

  ‘I make you happy n
ow?’ she whispered.

  He hesitated. Knew these would probably be the last words he said tonight: ‘What time is it in America?’

  12

  The ship has been in contact with London by telephone! This was done by a broadcast to Sydney over TBS. The TBS receiver in Sydney was fed into a microphone connected to the London–Sydney telephone line . . . This is a great advance in the communication world and promises great things for the future.

  From the private journal of midshipman Henry Stamper,

  13 January 1946, by courtesy of Margaret Stamper

  Twenty-one days

  It had never happened before. She had certainly never meant it to happen at all. But Frances was forced to concede that she was falling in love.

  Every evening she would tell herself that she should stay away, that it would do her no good, that by her actions she was putting her passage in danger. And in spite of that, every evening, with the minimum explanation to her cabin mates, she found herself disappearing through the metal door. With a furtive glance towards each end of the gangway, she would tread swiftly past the other cabins, lightly up the stairs and along the upper length of the hangar deck until she reached the heavy steel hatch that opened out on to the flight deck.

  When she thought about it afterwards, she realised that part of it was that they had all got used to each other: the sailors, the women and the routines of the ship, the air thick with longing and waiting, the never knowing. She had got used to not having a purpose in the morning, had perhaps lost a little of the institutional briskness that she had carried with her, like armour, for years. She felt easier around people. She might even venture that she liked a few. It was hard not to care about someone like Margaret.

  But it was really the ship she loved: the size of it, like a leviathan, surely too huge to have been created by mere men, propelled by an epic strength through the roughest seas. She loved the scars, the streaks of rust that, despite years of painting and repainting, were visible on her skin, testament to the time she had spent at sea. Frances loved the infinite space visible all around her, the sense of boundless, irrevocable movement west. She loved the sense of possibility that the ship bestowed on her. The nautical miles and unfathomable fathoms that it opened up between her and her past as it glided through the water.

  If it wasn’t too cold at night, she would sit on the flight deck for hours, reading a book or a magazine, glancing up occasionally to make sure she couldn’t be seen by whoever was on watch at the bridge. Their attention trained on the seas, no one noticed her. Now, in the increasing heat, it offered sweet relief; she would locate her favoured spot under the aircraft and enjoy in solitude the soft breezes, the ceaseless sound of the waves rushing beneath, the taste of salt on her parted lips. She liked the way you could see the sky’s mood changing miles away, a distant storm, its power diminished by distance. And there were the sunsets, the primeval oranges and blues that bled into the edge of the earth until you could no longer see where the sky ended and the sea began.

  Occasionally, if she was lucky, she would sight a shoal of porpoises and laugh at the joy of their movement. It felt like they were complicit with the ship, the way they eyed her, moving alongside the vessel in perfect accord. But mostly she lay against one of the aircraft wheels, her wide-brimmed hat tipped back, and just stared at the sky. A sky now free of droning enemy aircraft, of silent, malevolent missiles, of the screams of the wounded. Of the judgements of those who thought they knew her. There was nothing between her and her destination – no mountains, no trees, no buildings. No people.

  At night, alone, she could shrug off, temporarily, both past and future. She could just sit and be, comforted by the fact that here she was just Frances – a tiny, meaningless nothing amid the sky, the sea and the stars.

  ‘So, how’s your ship of brides?’

  The warship Alexandra was the first British vessel the Victoria had passed within radio distance since they had left Sydney. But Highfield had taken Captain Edward Baxter’s call with less enthusiasm than he might have done in other circumstances, having something of an inkling as to how the exchange would run.

  ‘And how’s sports day? Dobson tells me you’re letting the girls out for a bit of a hop, skip and jump. Or am I thinking of something else?’

  Highfield closed his eyes, listening to the distant rattle of laughter.

  In spite of everyone’s best efforts, sports day, it was widely agreed afterwards, could not be described as an unequivocal success. Despite the mirror-flat sea, whose surface the Victoria glided across so smoothly that you could have balanced a penny upright on her bow half-way back to Trincomalee, the deck hockey had had to be abandoned after the pucks, in three successive matches, sailed overboard. The same went for the baton during the relay race, prompting one bride to burst into tears at the booing and jeering that greeted her mistake. Another suffered burns to her legs when she braked too late and skidded along the deck dangerously until she was hauled back from the edge. Girls, the officers observed, were not used to the specialist skills required to play sports in the confines of a ship, even one as large as Victoria.

  The women’s officers, growing impatient in the heat, tried to extend the games area as far as the aircraft. But it had proven impossible to run the wheelbarrow and sack races safely around the planes, and even when they were moved, hoisted around by the gantry or pushed by whistling deck hands, the women, unused to their shape, would repeatedly bang themselves on wings or knock into propellers. The absence of the liftwells meant that it was impossible to place them anywhere else. Meanwhile, as the ship maintained its course across the Indian Ocean it had found itself in the midst of a heatwave, the vast flight deck absorbing the heat of the sun, so that feet blistered on the decks, and many found it too hot to run, the drinking fountains sent up warm water and throughout the afternoon the competitors drifted away, pleading exhaustion, sunburn, or headache. The sweltering temperatures in the cabins meant they were all fractious with lack of sleep. In the midst of this, two brides (one, rather unfortunately, the founder of the Brides’ Bible Club) had helped carry a friend with a sprained ankle to the infirmary. There, Dr Duxbury was reeking of alcohol and engrossed in reading matter that, had he been in a condition to do so, he might have defended at best as ‘medically informative’. The ankle forgotten, the shaken brides had sprinted to the head of the ship’s Red Cross to make a formal complaint.

  ‘I thought it was important for me to be fully conversant with all aspects of female anatomy,’ Dr Duxbury told Captain Highfield.

  ‘I’m not sure that Hollywood Starlets was quite the biological textbook our passengers had in mind,’ the captain replied. And decided that, unorthodox as it was, it might be best if he hung on to the infirmary keys for the foreseeable future.

  It was then that two brides fell into fisticuffs over the egg and spoon. (Pointless, really, as all the eggs were wooden.) The ‘Carry the Maiden’ race had culminated in an argument when a girl accused a rating of hoisting up her skirt. Sports day had officially ended.

  ‘I think the question all the chaps want to know is how’s your water consumption?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Highfield, thinking back to that morning’s report. They had had some trouble with one of the desalination units, but the chief engineer had told him they were now running as normal.

  Baxter was talking too loudly, as if conscious that he was listened to by other people at his end. ‘It’s just that we hear on the grapevine you’ve set up a hair salon, and we were wondering how you looked after a shampoo and set . . .’ He guffawed heartily, and Highfield thought he heard an echoing laugh behind him.

  He was alone in the meteorological office, high above the shimmering deck and his leg had throbbed steadily all day. He had felt a vague sense of betrayal when it started; for days it had given him hardly any trouble, to the point at which he had convinced himself that it was healing without the need for medical intervention.

  ‘I spoke to Dobson before they
put me through to you. He says those Aussie girls are giving you all a run for your money.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Causing the odd upset. Getting the men a bit agitated. Can’t say I envy you, old man. Load of women littering up the place with their washing and nail varnish and frillies and what-have-you. Wandering around in their next-to-nothings, distracting the men from their work. My boys here have opened a book on how many little Victors and Victorias will be running around in nine months’ time.’

  There had been a noticeable lightening in the way senior naval personnel talked to each other since the end of the war. Now they were determined to poke fun, make jokes. Highfield, not for the first time, found himself hankering after the old ways. He tried to keep the affront from his voice. ‘My men are conducting themselves properly.’

  ‘It’s not the men’s behaviour I’m thinking of, George. I’ve heard about these colonial girls. Not quite the same reserve as their British sisters, if what I’ve heard about the nocturnal activities in Sydney are anything to go by . . .’

  ‘These girls are fine. Everything’s under control.’ He thought uncomfortably of the incident the women’s service officer had reported the previous week. Baxter and his like would know soon enough.

  ‘Yes. Well. My advice would be to keep ’em locked up as much as you can. We’ve had all sorts of trouble with our younger lads and women passengers. And that’s just the odd Wren or two. Dread to think what it must be like with more than six hundred. I think some of them have lost their heads now they know they’re heading home.’

  In Highfield’s answering silence, he seemed finally to acknowledge that he was not going to get the response he desired. Highfield, meanwhile, had pulled up his trouser leg. It might have been his imagination, but the colour of the skin surrounding the wound was angrier than it had been when he last examined it. He dropped the fabric, clenching his jaw, as if he could make the damn thing better by a sheer act of will.