Remember Me (6 page)

The shed was part ward room, part office. At the centre of it was a table littered with papers and lit by a couple of candles. It looked to Mary as though this man had been writing, for there was an open notebook and an inkwell in front of the stool he’d obviously just vacated.

Mary had no way of knowing if this was Watkin Tench. But the gold braid on his well-fitting red jacket and his spotless white breeches proved he was an officer, and he spoke like a gentleman. He was of slender build, with dark crinkly hair and brown eyes, and she thought he was around twenty-four or -five. His face was unremarkable, with small, neat features and clear and glowing skin. While he looked irritated at being disturbed, he certainly didn’t give the impression of being bad-tempered by nature.

‘Your name?’ he asked curtly.

‘Mary Broad, sir,’ she said. ‘I was trying to make the women let the sick ones have some soup,’ she added quickly. ‘Some of them didn’t like it, and one hit me, then these two dragged me out.’

‘She was trying to start a fight,’ one of the guards claimed. ‘We had to separate her.’

‘Wait outside, you two,’ the young officer said.

They left, one muttering something under his breath. Once the door was closed, the officer perched on his stool and looked hard at Mary.

‘Why were you calling out my name?’ he asked.

Mary felt a sense of relief that she had found the right man. ‘I’d been told you were fair,’ she said.

Tench nodded noncommittally, and asked Mary to explain what had happened.

Now that she had a platform to air her complaints, she spared him nothing. She said how the strongest women got the food while the weakest were starving, and that in her opinion there wasn’t enough food to keep so many women alive.

‘Our punishment is supposed to be transportation,’ she said heatedly. ‘Surely it’s wrong to try and kill us before we ever get put on a ship?’

Tench had been surprised enough to hear his name being called out, and even more so by this woman’s obvious intelligence. But most of all he was touched that she had the courage to speak up for her weaker fellow prisoners.

He had been a prisoner of war himself in America and had feared he would die from the terrible conditions there. When he arrived at this posting on the
Dunkirk
, he was horrified to find his fellow countrymen were capable of even worse barbarities. To his distress he found there was nothing a Marine officer could do to prevent it. The
hulks were run by private companies, and the Marines were merely there to keep order, without any control over the management.

When he had voiced his strong feelings on the matter he’d been severely reprimanded, and as he was only a junior officer without anyone higher up in agreement with him, there was nothing more he could do, and in truth he had become apathetic. When he took men to work outside, he was kindly to them; he tried to make certain the guards were giving the full quota of rations to the prisoners, and when someone was brought to him for punishment he was always fair. But he knew that wasn’t enough.

Mary’s Cornish dialect sliced through his apathy. He had spent his childhood in Penzance and had a store of happy memories of its natives. He felt compelled to find out a little more about this woman before dismissing her. Realizing she must have foregone her own supper during this skirmish, he put his head outside the door and ordered one of the men to bring something from the galley.

‘Am I to be flogged?’ Mary asked, once he’d shut the door again. She didn’t hear what he had said to the men, and assumed he’d sent one of them to fetch someone of a higher rank than himself.

‘No,’ he said. ‘And in future I shall order the guards to make sure the rations are shared out equally.’

‘While you are about it, could we have more?’ she asked cheekily.

Tench had an overwhelming desire to laugh. The
woman reminded him poignantly of many Cornish miners he’d known, dogged, tough and fearless. He remembered from the records that she had assaulted the woman she’d robbed, yet her calm grey eyes and gentle manner belied a vicious nature. Likewise, the innocence in her face sat uneasily with her impudent demands. A woman to be watched, he thought. But a rather admirable one for all that.

The guard brought in a plate of bread, cheese and pilchards. Tench pulled up another stool at the table and told Mary to eat.

It was so long since she had tasted either cheese or pilchards that it was all she could do not to cry. She wolfed down the food, holding on to the plate with one hand, afraid Tench might snatch it before she’d finished.

He poured her a little rum too, and topped it up with water, taking a glass neat himself. As he watched her bent over the plate, he noted that although her hair was alive with lice, her neck was very clean, an extremely unusual sight in a prisoner.

‘I’ll get someone to take you back now,’ he said when she’d finished.

Mary had always found it easy to talk to men, but she had no idea how to flirt with them, nor would she know if a man found her attractive. As she looked into his soft brown eyes she thought she read curiosity in them, and she wished wholeheartedly she was in a clean dress with her hair newly washed, at least to give herself some sort of chance.

‘Can’t I stay a while longer?’ she blurted out impulsively.

He smiled, and his eyes twinkled. ‘No, you can’t, Mary,’ he said. ‘I have work to do. But why do you want to stay? I’ve given you food, you aren’t to be flogged.’

‘Because…’ she began, but to her horror she felt tears welling up in her eyes. She couldn’t find the words to explain what it meant to be out of that stinking hold, or how it felt to have a full belly. And she certainly couldn’t say it had been her intention to offer him her virginity in the hope she would get some privileges.

Perhaps he understood at least some of it, for he put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You have to go back,’ he said gently. ‘But we’ll talk again.’

Watkin Tench’s kindness comforted Mary that night. As she lay between Bessie and Nancy, she wasn’t so aware of the moans and groans, the coughing and the sobbing from the other women. Nor was she so aware of the stench or the rats scuttling around. Instead she was able to immerse herself in the thought of the amusement in his eyes, the shininess of his hair, and his gentle manner. For just a few brief minutes she’d felt clean, forgotten she was a felon. It was a form of escape, and a very welcome one.

Mary didn’t know whether it was as the result of Tench’s influence or not, but a couple of days later she, Bessie and two other women, Sarah Giles and Hannah Brown, were called out of the hold for work. There had already been a marked improvement in the food sharing, as the
guards stayed in the hold to check everyone got fair shares, whether sick or not. To Mary that was enough. And to be called out for work was an unexpected bonus.

The job they were given was washing clothes, mainly shirts. It wasn’t an easy task as they had to carry the four heavy wooden tubs out on to the deck from a store-room, which was difficult wearing chains, then lower buckets on a rope to the river to fill them with water. But it was good to be out in the sunshine, to be able to look over to the shore and see the lush green of fields and woods, and even if the guards did watch their every move, at times leering at them in a frightening manner, it was a million times better than being cooped up in the hold.

‘Do you think we could wash ourselves when we’ve finished all these?’ Mary whispered to Sarah as they scrubbed at the dirty shirts with blocks of hard soap.

Sarah was one of the women the others called whores. Small and pretty, with red-gold hair, she was twenty-five, a widow with two small children. Her fisherman husband had been lost at sea when his ship went down in a storm, and Sarah had left the children with her mother in St Ives and gone to Plymouth. Her story was very like Mary’s – she’d turned to stealing because she couldn’t get work – and she’d already been on the
Dunkirk
for eight months.

‘You can if you want,’ Sarah said, and laughed as if it was funny. ‘But I hope you ain’t intending to do it with nothing on.’

‘Of course not.’ Mary coloured up. ‘I’ll just get in the tub with my dress on and wash that too while I’m about it.’

‘Chains and all?’ Sarah raised one eyebrow.

‘Well, I can’t get those off,’ Mary said offhandedly, and looked round at Bessie. ‘What about you? Fancy a bath?’

Bessie began to giggle, and it infected them all. Sarah rubbed soap into her hands and blew bubbles, Hannah splashed Mary with water, and Mary retaliated by slapping her with a wet shirt. If the guards noticed they didn’t intervene or stop them, and all at once it was as if they were just girls at a Sunday school picnic. They giggled, chatted and sang. Bessie even did a little dance, rattling her chains in time with her feet.

Once the washed shirts were hanging up on lines to dry, the women were completely hidden from the guards’ view. ‘Go on then if you’re going to,’ Sarah urged Mary. ‘Before we empty the tubs.’

While Bessie and Hannah looked on, tempted to join her, but afraid of being caught at it, Mary stepped into the tub, gasping at the cold. Elated by the almost sensual touch of water on her skin, she began to laugh. ‘It feels wonderful,’ she gasped out, crouching down so that the water came up to her middle and looking to the others to join her in their tubs. ‘Do it quickly if you’re going to, before we get caught.’

Bessie and Hannah got into theirs without any hesitation; only Sarah held back, claiming she was keeping watch. The three women scrubbed themselves and their clothes eagerly, aware they hadn’t long to finish the task, yet smiling with delight as they saw the dirt floating away from them.

After soaping her hair, Mary dunked herself right under
the water several times. As she came up for the last time, to her horror she saw the two guards and an officer staring down at her. A quick glance revealed that Bessie and Hannah were already out of their tubs, trying vainly to wring the water from their dresses. Sarah was white-faced and agitated.

‘We weren’t doing no harm, sir,’ Mary said, addressing the officer. He was a portly man with a big nose and he looked astonished. ‘Just using up the water before we threw it overboard. We’ve done all the washing.’

Mary could see no good reason why bathing should be considered something punishable. But one glance at her two wet friends alarmed her. Their dresses were clinging to their bodies, showing clearly the curve of their breasts and hips, and the guards were looking at them with naked lust. Aware that her own body must be similarly displayed, she was stricken with embarrassment.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said as she struggled to get out of the tub. ‘But you can’t blame us, we’re never given enough water to wash properly.’

‘Why is it that you women always take advantage of any situation?’ the officer asked.

Mary glanced at her companions and guessed they were tongue-tied with fear. The officer was older than Tench, perhaps thirty or more, his voice high-pitched and clipped. Yet she could see no cruelty in his eyes, only puzzlement.

‘Wouldn’t you?’ she retorted. ‘What else are we to do? That hold you keep us in wouldn’t stink so much if we were allowed to bathe and come up here for exercise, and
if it was scrubbed out now and then. If you kept animals in such a place there’d be a riot.’

One of the guards sniggered, and the officer silenced him with a stern look. ‘Take those three back,’ he said, pointing to Bessie, Sarah and Hannah. ‘I’ll deal with this one.’

The other women were pushed away through the lines of washing by the guards, leaving Mary alone with the officer. She vainly tried to wring out her skirt as she waited for him to speak.

‘Your name?’ he asked.

‘Mary Broad, sir,’ she said. ‘Am I allowed to know yours?’

She thought she saw a glimmer of a smile, and she ran her fingers through her hair and smiled back defiantly. Her mother and sister had often remarked how pretty her hair was wet, as it sprang into ringlets, and she hoped that was true because the wind felt chill now she was wet, and she wouldn’t look anything more than pathetic if she began shivering.

‘Lieutenant Graham,’ he said. ‘It seems to me, Mary, that you haven’t quite grasped the gravity of your situation.’

Graham was a name she’d also heard from the men prisoners. He was reputed to be dangerous when crossed, but decent enough most of the time.

‘Oh, I have, sir,’ she said boldly. ‘I can see that I won’t be alive to be transported, not unless I get a lucky break and a chance to have a bath and some extra food from time to time.’

He gave her a long, appraising stare which seemed to go right through her clothes, and she knew in that moment that he wanted her.

She had set her heart on Tench as a prospective saviour, and Lieutenant Graham would be an extremely poor substitute. His face was fat and flabby and she suspected he had little hair under his very well-cared-for wig. But there was no harm in having someone in reserve in case Tench couldn’t be tempted. And Graham wasn’t entirely repulsive as his teeth and skin were good. Besides, she wasn’t looking for true love, only to survive long enough to escape.

‘Are you trying to suggest something?’ he said, his eyes narrowing. They were a muddy brown, not the kind which could keep her awake as Tench’s did.

‘It’s not for me to suggest anything, sir,’ she said, making a bob of a curtsy and grinning impudently. ‘I was just saying how it is for me.’

He ordered her back to the hold at that, but as the guard roughly pushed her down through the companion-way, she felt Graham was watching her with interest.

Down in the hold, the afternoon’s bath was being discussed by all those women still strong enough to be interested in the others. As Mary was pushed inside, they broke off their chatter to look up at her.

‘What happened to you?’ Bessie asked, wringing her hands with anxiety. ‘We were afraid you’d be punished, or…’ She broke off, not wanting to add the word ‘raped’.

‘I told him we need more food, fresh air, and this hovel cleaned out,’ Mary said. She didn’t feel inclined to discuss
it any further as her wet clothes were making her cold and she wanted to talk in private to Sarah.