Alone on a Wide Wide Sea (2 page)

We were up on deck, the two of us, watching an albatross gliding over the waves – like me, Marty loved albatross – when a gang of these lads from my cabin were suddenly there behind us. They were northern lads, all of them – sometimes I could hardly understand what they said. One of them, their ringleader Wes Snarkey, started calling me names and taunting me, I can’t remember why. I was “nowt but a poxy cockney!” Marty stared at Wes for a moment. He just walked right up to him and knocked him flat. One punch. Then he said very quietly, “I’m a cockney too.” They all slunk away, and after that life got a whole lot easier for me down in the cabin. It might have been just as hot and sticky, just as crowded and smelly, but at least they more or less left me alone. All Marty’s doing.

It was Marty too who explained it all to me – why we
were on the ship, where we were going and why. I don’t know how much, if anything, I had understood before. We were going to Australia, that was all I knew for certain. All of us, Marty said, had been specially chosen from all the orphans in England to go out and live in Australia – that’s what he’d been told. Australia, he said, was a brand new country where there hadn’t been a war, where there hadn’t been bombings and rationing, where there was lots of food to eat, huge parks to play in, and beaches too. We’d be able to go swimming whenever we liked. I told him I couldn’t swim, and he said he’d teach me, that I’d soon learn. And, he explained, we weren’t ever going to be sent to an orphanage again like the ones we’d grown up in, but instead we were all going to live in families who wanted to look after us. So, with all that to look forward to, it was worth being sea-sick for a while, wasn’t it? Nothing was worth being sea-sick for, I said, and I promised I would never ever set foot on a ship or a boat again, not for all the tea in China. It was a promise I singularly failed to keep – often.

During that whole long voyage into an uncertain future, Marty cheered my spirits. He became like a big brother to me, which was why I confided in him about Kitty, about how
she’d been left behind and how much I missed her. I showed him the lucky key she’d given me. I could never think of her or even say her name without crying, but Marty never seemed to mind me crying. But he
did
mind me humming
London Bridge is Falling Down
, said I was always doing it, and couldn’t I hum another tune? I said I didn’t know any others. He told me that, like as not, Kitty would probably be coming out to Australia on another ship, that there wasn’t room on this one, which was why they hadn’t let her on, that I’d see her again soon enough. That was Marty through and through, always hopeful, always so certain things would work out. But Marty, as I discovered later, didn’t just hope things would get better, he’d do all he could to make sure they did too.

You need people like Marty just to keep you going. Even if things don’t seem to be working out quite as you’d like them to, you need to feel they’re going to, that all will be well in the end. If you don’t believe that, and sometimes in my life I haven’t, then there’s a deep black hole waiting for you, a black hole I came to know only too well later on. I learned a lot from Marty on that ship, about hope, about friendship. Mighty Marty everyone called him, and it was a nickname that suited him perfectly.

In my time I’ve sailed into dozens of harbours all over the world. None is more impressive than Sydney. Liverpool had been grim and grey when we left, Sydney was blue and balmy and bright and beautiful. It was an arrival I shall never forget. We came in to port in the morning in our grand red-funnelled ship, the ship’s horn sounding to announce us proudly. And I felt part of all this new glory. Marty and I stood there leaning on the ship’s rail, gazing
in wonder –
agog
is the best word for it, I think. Everything about the place was new and marvellous to me, the warmth of the breeze, the hundreds of sailing boats out in the bay, white sails straining, the majesty of Sydney Harbour Bridge, the red-roofed houses on the hillsides all around, and the sea – I never knew blue could be so blue. Nowhere could have been more perfect. I knew without question that we were steaming into paradise. And as the ship crept in, ever closer, I could see that everyone was waving up at us and smiling. We waved back. And Marty put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. I was filled with sudden hope. I was aglow with happiness, and so was Marty. He had his arm around my shoulder. “I told you, Arthur, didn’t I?” he said. “A brand-new country. We’ll be all right now.”

In all the bustle and chaos on the dockside they gathered all of us children together, gave us a roll call, and then, without telling us why, began to split us up into groups. When I saw what was happening I stayed as close to Marty as I could. The last thing I wanted was to get separated from him. But that’s just what they tried to do. Marty grabbed my arm, held on to it, and told me to stay right where I was beside him. Quick as a flash, he said, “Him and me, Mister, we’re
cousins. Where Arthur goes, I go. Where I go, Arthur goes.” The man ticking our names off his list said it was quite impossible, that arrangements had already been made and couldn’t be changed. He was adamant, and bad-tempered too. He shouted at Marty to button his lip and do as he was told. Like everyone else on the dockside, he spoke English, but it didn’t sound the same language as it had in England at all. I recognised the words, some of them, but the sounds they made were different and strange.

Marty didn’t shout back and scream. He didn’t jump up and down. Marty, I discovered, had his own very individual way of dealing with authority. He spoke very quietly, perfectly politely, fixing the man with a steady stare. “We’re staying together, Mister,” he said. And we did too, which was why I found myself later that morning sitting beside Marty on a bus, heading out of Sydney and into open country. There were ten of us on that bus, all boys, and as I looked around me I was relieved to see that only one of the boys from my cabin was there. It was Wes Snarkey, the one Marty had thumped that day on deck – he’d never given me any trouble since, so that didn’t bother me. Lady Luck really had smiled on me – that’s what I thought at the time anyway.

The driver, who seemed a chatty, cheerful sort of bloke, told us he was taking us to Cooper’s Station, a big farm over 300 miles away. It would take us all day to get there. Best to settle down and sleep, he said. But we didn’t. None of us did. There was too much to look at, too many wonders I’d never seen before. For a start, there were the wide open spaces, hardly a house in sight, hardly any people either. But that wasn’t all that amazed me that first day in Australia. All the animals and birds were as different and strange to us as the country itself. The bus driver told us what they were – and it turned out their names were about as odd as they were themselves – kookaburras and cockatoos and kangaroos and possums. They didn’t even have the same trees we had back home in England. They had gum trees and wattle trees instead. This wasn’t just a different country we were in, it was more like a different planet. And the scrubby surface of this planet seemed to go on and on, flat on every side as far as the horizon, which shimmered blue and brown and green. And the towns we drove through were like no towns I’d seen before. They had great wide dusty streets, and all the houses were low. If you saw another car it was a surprise.

I was hot and dusty and thirsty on that bus, and I
thought the journey would never end, but I was happy. I was happy to have arrived, happy not to be sea-sick any more. Tired though we were, we were buoyed up by the excitement of it all. This was a new adventure in a new world. We were on a bus ride into wonderland and we were loving it, every single moment of it.

Evening was coming on by the time we got to Cooper’s Station, but we could still see enough. We could see it was a place on its own, way out in the bush, and we could tell it was a farm. I mean you could smell it straightaway, the moment we clambered down off the bus. There were huge sheds all around, and you could hear cattle moving and shifting around inside. And from further away in the gloom there was the sound of a running creek, and ducks quacking raucously. A gramophone record was playing from the nearby farmhouse, which had a tin roof and a verandah all around it. I thought at first that was where we’d all be living, but we were led past it, carrying our suitcases, down a dirt track and into a compound with a fence all around. In the centre of this was a long wooden shed with steps at one end and a verandah.

“Your new home,” the man told us, opening the door. I didn’t take much notice of him, not then. I was too busy
looking around me. The gramophone needle got stuck as I stood there. I can never think of Cooper’s Station without that stuttering snatch of a hymn repeating itself remorselessly in my head, “What a friend we have in Jesus, have in Jesus, have in Jesus, have in Jesus”. I wasn’t to know it then, but it was the eerie overture that heralded the darkest years of my life.

I think it was from the moment they first shut us in the dormitory block at Cooper’s Station, and we heard the door bolted behind us, that I have hated walls about me and locked doors. I never lock the doors of my house even now – never. Ever since Cooper’s Station, doors and walls have made me feel like a prisoner. I was about to find out, as we all were, not what it was
like
to be a prisoner, but what it
was
to be a prisoner. Worse still we were slaves too.

I’ve had a lot of time to think things over since. I’m still angry about Cooper’s Station, about what they did to us there. But we weren’t the first. Two hundred years or so before we were sent out from England to Australia, others had made the same journey we did. They had come in chains in the stinking bowels of transport ships. We may have come in a beautiful ship, with pillar-box-red funnels and an orchestra, but we were prisoners just like them. And they must have very soon discovered, as we did, that you weren’t just a prisoner, you were a slave as well, and that when you’re a slave they don’t just take away your freedom, they take away everything else as well because they own you. They own you body and soul. And the soul, we were about to find out, was particularly important to our owners.

I can’t pretend I had any understanding of all this then, lying there clutching my lucky key in the sweltering darkness of the dormitory during my first night at Cooper’s Station, but I knew already that the dream had died. Marty lay in the bunk next to me, stunned to silence like the rest of us. He cried that night, the only time I ever heard Marty cry. I knew now this brand-new country we had come to was not a paradise after all. It was, as we were soon to
discover, a hell on earth – a hell specially devised for children by Mr Bacon, Piggy Bacon we called him, who was to be our gaoler, slave-master, preacher and brand-new father, all in one.

I can honestly say that Piggy Bacon was the only person in all my life that I ever wanted to kill. But to be fair to him, he did at least tell it to us straight. That first morning at Cooper’s Station, after washing from the buckets lined up out on the verandah, after our breakfast of lukewarm, lumpy porridge, he told us exactly why we were there. We were all gathered there shivering outside the dormitory block. Mrs Bacon was at his side in her blue dungarees and flowery apron, tiny alongside his great bulk. He was a great thickset bull of a man, red-faced with short, cropped ginger hair and a clipped ginger moustache, and little pink eyes – even his eyelashes were ginger. He always seemed to me like a man on fire and about to explode. His vast stomach looked as if it was only just held in by his checked shirt and broad belt, a belt every one of us would have good cause to fear as the months passed. He wore knee-length boots which he’d whack irritably from time to time with the stick he used to carry – the same stick he would use for punctuating his speeches – speeches which, like this one,
always turned into sermons. Sometimes he’d carry a whip for cracking at the dogs, at the cattle or the horses, or us if he felt like it. Stick or whip, it didn’t matter to us – we came to fear both just as much.

Mrs Bacon smiled the same fixed nervous smile that day that I so often saw afterwards. We didn’t know the reason she was nervous, not then. She seemed shrunk inside her dungarees – I think she always wore the same blue dungarees, only the aprons changed. I sensed from the first that Mrs Bacon was frightened, that she was hiding something. Her face was drained of all colour. I never in my life saw a woman look more weary. She stood there, her eyes downcast, as Piggy Bacon told us all the whys and wherefores, the do’s and don’ts of Cooper’s Station.

“You can count yourselves very lucky,” he began, “that Mrs Bacon and I have taken you in. No one else would, you know. We did it out of the kindness of our hearts, didn’t we, Mrs Bacon? Out of the kindness of our hearts, that’s what it was. You are the little ones no one else wanted. You are the little ones thrown out of the nest, rejected and with no home to go to, no one to look after you, no one even to feed you. But we will, won’t we, Mrs Bacon? We will feed you and house you, we will clothe you and teach you about
hard work and the ways of God. What more could a child ever want? Mrs Bacon and I are God fearin’ folk, Christian folk. We were brought up to know our duty. ‘Suffer little children to come unto me,’ the good Lord said. So we are doing his will, and this we shall train you to do as well. A child is born sinful and must be bent to the will of God. That is now our task.

“So we have offered to take you in, at our own expense mind, out of good Christian charity. We have built you this home for your shelter – your shelter from the storm of life. You will help us make a garden of Eden, a paradise out of this wilderness. Mrs Bacon and I will be like a mother and father to you, won’t we, Mrs Bacon? And your training in the ways of the Lord will begin right now. There will be no swearing, no idleness – I promise you, you will be kept too busy ever to be idle. You will work to earn your keep. And you will work because the Devil makes work for idle hands. If you work we shall feed you well. If you work well you may play for one hour at the end of each day, the last hour before sundown.