The Ship of Brides

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 br**sts 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 now?’ 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.