Ship of Brides (28 page)

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.

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.

‘Yes . . . we’ve all had a bit of a chuckle at the thought of you and the hair salon. Of all the ships . . . of all the captains, eh? Still . . . I suppose it’s nice to know there’s some use for the old girl after she retires. You and she could set up the world’s first mobile beauty parlour.’

Highfield’s attention snapped away from his leg. ‘Retires?’

‘You know, when she’s decommissioned.’

‘
Victoria
’s being decommissioned?’

There was a brief silence. ‘I thought you knew, old man. She’s done. When the engineers were all over her in Woollomooloo they decided it wasn’t worth patching her up again. She’s finished when you get back to Blighty. They’ve decided they want to concentrate on a whole new class of carrier now that the war’s over. Not that it’s going to affect you too much, eh?’

Highfield sat down. Around him, the dials and maps of the meteorological office stared back mutely, oblivious of their imminent redundancy. So, he told the ship silently, you and me both. He hardly heard the other captain’s continuing conversation.

‘But jesting aside, how are you, old boy? Heard you took a knock with
Indomitable
. Quite the talk of the town, for a while. You had a few people worried.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Of course, of course. Can’t dwell on these things, can you? Shame, though. Young Hart served with me a couple of years ago. Quite shocked, when I heard. Nice young man. Stood out from the crowd.’

‘Yes. Yes, he did.’

‘Met his wife once, when we were out in Singapore. Nice little girl. I seem to recall she had just had twins. Which rather brings me to my reason for calling. London wired me this morning. They tell me you might have a few brides on board who are married to my men. We’re going to be alongside for a day or two and London thought it would be a nice gesture if we allowed them radio contact. What do you think? I dare say it would be good for my men’s morale to have a quick chat with the little woman.’

‘I don’t know . . .’

‘Well, don’t decide just yet. As I understand it, there’s only a handful of them anyway. I don’t suppose you’ll have hordes of hysterical girls knocking on your door. But it would mean a lot to my boys. And it all helps keep them out of trouble. We’re docking in Aden in a few days, and it’s always good to give the men a reminder of their responsibilities before they hit the shore.’ His laugh was low, guttural, confident that he would be understood.

Below on deck men in tropical rig were tidying away the last of the sports-day ropes and chairs, occasionally wiping sweat from their brows. A short distance away two young women strolled towards the deck canteen, the setting sun bouncing off their set, shining hair. They ducked together under the wing of one of the aircraft, one reaching out a slim hand to touch it as she passed and drawing it rapidly away, as if exclaiming that it was too hot. She was laughing at something the other had said and covered her mouth.