The Midnight Watch (31 page)

Stella thinks of going to find her father and brothers but decides against it. Instead she gathers up two lifejackets and runs aft again to her mother’s cabin. She tells her what she has seen and insists they put on their warmest clothes and the lifejackets: there are more beneath the bottom bunks. Leaving her mother and Dolly to help each other, she gets the younger children into jackets. They all gather together in the alleyway. Stella has never seen her family look so odd – the children are like bizarre creatures in a school play. Tom doesn’t want to wear his jacket; it’s too big for him, the cork panels pressing up under his chin so that he cannot move his arms freely. He’s clutching his favourite blue blanket, which has sewn onto it the image of a yellow giraffe.

‘Jimmy Giraffe wants you to wear it,’ she says, and Tom seems satisfied. He’s fascinated by giraffes and tends to do what Jimmy tells him.

Stella leads them forward and up the stairs to the third-class reception foyer on D deck. There are now perhaps a hundred people jostling and shoving around the central stairway. Most are wearing lifejackets. There is much complaining, but there’s laughter too. Stella lines the children up along the portside wall and leaves her mother with them while she goes to find her father and brothers.

But she does not need to: they’re pushing their way through the crowd towards her. Her father seems thin and tired, but her brothers – George, eighteen; Doug, seventeen; Fred, sixteen – are tall and strong, with cloth caps at jaunty angles and cheeky smiles. Dolly rushes up to them.

‘Look at me,’ she says, doing a turn in her lifejacket. ‘Stella made me wear it. I think it’s ugly.’

‘Come now,’ Stella says, giving her father a quick hug, ‘surely it’s better to wear clothes that save our lives than make us pretty?’ Her sister pouts a little, but Stella cheers her with a wink. Dolly once nearly drowned in a backyard well, and the family have indulged her ever since.

Stella sees that her father’s and brothers’ legs are wet. Her mother kneels to feel the bottom of their trousers then stands again. ‘There was water in our cabin,’ her father apologises, as if it were his fault. ‘We might have to bunk in up here for the rest of the trip.’

Stella glances at her brothers: their lifejackets have squared up their shoulders so that they look like powerful rugby players, and they’re staring at the ladies all around. ‘That would put the foxes in the chicken coop,’ she says, laughing.

Ada, ten years old and prone to whining, says she’s tired and wants to go back to bed. Will wants to go upstairs to look outside. Stella tells Ada to be quiet and Will to stay right where he is. From now on they need to keep together.

A young man runs into the foyer carrying a large chunk of ice in his gloved hands. ‘It’s from the berg!’ he says. ‘There’s tons of it up the front!’

The children gather round to look in wonder at its strange translucence. Will is captivated. He presses the tips of his warm fingers against the ice until they melt tiny indents in the surface.

Stella can hear patches of lively ragtime music drifting down from somewhere above. She thinks how odd it is that a band should be playing so late. It is well after midnight.

Mr Hart appears and announces that the women and children are to go topside. ‘There’s no occasion for alarm,’ he says, ‘it’s only a precaution. You’ll be taken up in groups.’

The Sages are not in the first group and when Stella complains, Mr Hart says again that there’s no occasion to worry. Either he or another steward will be back down shortly to get them.

When he’s gone, taking twenty or so women with him, Connie sways her hips and copies his high-pitched, singsong voice. ‘There’s no occasion, there’s no occasion…’ Although only seven, she’s an excellent mimic and Stella can’t help but laugh. Soon Doug and Fred join in the fun, saying the words in as many different voices as they can.

Minutes pass. Even though the doors to the welldeck above are open, the room is warm; someone has opened all the radiator cocks. All around, people are waiting, some standing in groups, some sitting on their luggage, others smoking.

Then there’s a distant roaring sound – escaping steam, Stella thinks – followed by a single pop, like a cork being pulled from a bottle. A moment later, a young stewardess runs down the stairs towards them. Her lifejacket makes her movements awkward; she looks as if she will fall. Her eyes are alight.

‘A rocket!’ the stewardess says. ‘They’ve just fired a rocket, I saw it – it went right up into the sky and then exploded.’

People who have been sitting stand up and there’s murmuring and whispering among the crowd. Everyone knows what a rocket at sea means.

Stella looks to her father, willing him to lead them all up to the open deck. ‘Don’t you see?’ she asks him. ‘This ship is in trouble. We must go up.’

Her mother steps closer to her husband and slips her arm through his. Stella can see her father is trying to decide what to do. She turns to her eldest brother. ‘George, please tell him. We’ve got to go.’

When George is silent she looks again to her father. She knows she’s his favourite – he’s always loved her wild curls, her playful energy – and she can persuade him to do almost anything. But now he surprises her with his resolve.

‘No,’ he says. ‘This isn’t one of your rallies. We’ll do what we’re told. We will wait for Mr Hart.’

*   *   *

On the SS
Californian
, Herbert Stone, the 24-year-old second officer, is standing the midnight watch on the cold, open bridge. His ship is stopped and he’s looking at the lights of a distant steamer. He has been trying to contact her with the Morse lamp, but to no avail. Then, just after half past twelve, he sees a small white light climb into the air above her and burst into stars. The cluster drifts slowly downwards.

A few weeks later, in the warm spring air of the Scottish Drill Hall in London, he describes what he saw to a polite and attentive audience. ‘I was walking up and down the bridge,’ he tells them, ‘and I saw one white flash in the sky immediately above this other steamer. I did not know what it was; I thought it might be a shooting star.’

There is a gasp in the ladies’ gallery and excited whispers. A shooting star! Behind the flimsy witness stand, Stone begins to fidget.

‘
What
did you think it was?’ asks Mr Butler Aspinall, KC, appearing for the Board of Trade and on behalf of the British public.

Stone shrugs. ‘It was just a white flash in the sky.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘It might have been anything.’ He looks up at the gallery, as if its occupants are just as likely as he to know what the flash might have been.

Aspinall is not satisfied. He tries to narrow down the possibilities. ‘But what did it suggest to your mind? What did you say to yourself? What did you think it was?’

Stone, wide-eyed, shifting left and right, is throwing nervous half-smiles this way and that. He appears to be thinking hard about what he’d thought on that night, and at last he answers, ‘I thought nothing.’

So, on the
Californian
, Herbert Stone, officer of the watch, eight years at sea, sees a white flash and thinks nothing; but he does bring the binoculars to his eyes so he can study the steamer more intently. ‘Watch that steamer,’ the captain had said, and Stone is doing what he was told.

Meanwhile, below and behind him, standing at the starboard rail of the shelter deck smoking a cigarette, Ernie Gill is thinking many things: that the fourth engineer has no right to talk to him in the way he does, that it wasn’t his fault the pump broke, that he didn’t mean to drop the spanner. He has a mind to go to the chief engineer about it. He ought to, because he’s not just a fireman or a greaser but the assistant donkeyman, and he knows his rights.

He draws hard on his cigarette and its tip glows bright red. The smoke gathers and thickens because there is absolutely no wind. Then, on the horizon, he sees a white light.

‘I had pretty nearly finished my smoke and was looking around and I saw what I took to be a falling star,’ he explains later to the enthralled spectators in the Drill Hall. He has never had such a large audience in his life. ‘It descended and then disappeared. That is how a star does fall…’

A falling star. On the
Californian
’s shelter deck, Ernie Gill makes a wish. It involves the fourth engineer getting what’s coming to him.

The second rocket

Stella is worried. Mr Hart has not yet come back and the third-class reception area has become dangerously crowded. More men have arrived, bringing their luggage with them, and there’s not much room to move around. Mr Kieran, the chief third-class steward, has taken up a position at the top of the stairs and will let no one pass.

Another steward smiles at Stella’s father and says he ought to take his family down to F deck to wait in the dining room, where it’s warmer and there’s more space.

‘No, thank you very much,’ says Stella, placing herself between the steward and her father. ‘We want to go up, not down.’

The man wanders off and Stella places her coat over Connie and Ada, who’ve fallen asleep on the floor in their lifejackets. She reties the laces of Dolly’s boots – never in her life has Dolly been able to keep her laces tied – and slides young Tom’s golden curls behind his ears. When Fred and Doug begin to bounce their chests together like fighting seals, she says they should stop their tomfoolery but can’t help laughing.

Her mother stands with her father, talking softly in his ear. She’s always been his support. When he took up work as a corn grinder she learned to make cornbread; when he became landlord of a public house in Norfolk she waitressed at tables; when he bought the bakery at Peterborough she woke at four every morning to stoke the ovens. And when he announced that he was taking the whole family to Florida to grow oranges, it was her mother who persuaded Stella that she must come too. ‘You have a special strength,’ her mother said, ‘that your father needs.’

Stella has always thought of her father as a man of action, and admired his various schemes, but the emergency on this ship seems to have overwhelmed him. Normally a fast thinker, he’s become slow and passive. He wants to wait rather than act, and speaks only of doing what he’s told. Stella wonders whether something has broken inside him.

Just then she hears again the distant popping sound. It is another rocket. If her mother is right and she has a special strength, then now is the time to use it.

*   *   *

The
Californian
is swinging imperceptibly anticlockwise, bringing her bow around to the south. Alone on the bridge, Herbert Stone is wondering what to do. The more he thinks about it, the more it seems that it was only a flash he saw, something in his peripheral vision, hardly anything really, and if he’d been looking the other way he wouldn’t have seen it at all. His eyes linger on the speaking tube leading to the captain’s cabin. If he were to call down, what would he say? That he’d seen a shooting star?

He wishes Gibson, the apprentice, would come back from below decks so he could talk to him about it.

Three or four minutes pass and then – there, above the steamer – another flash of white light. This time he’s looking through the binoculars when it happens and what he sees is very clearly a rocket, streaking skyward and bursting into white stars.

He knows the regulations about distress signals. He learned them verbatim for his First Mate’s Certificate, memorising them from crib cards he’d written up in neat capitals. Rockets throwing stars are a signal of distress. But when he studies the ship closely there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. She’s been sitting there stationary and silent for an hour. Why, all of a sudden, start firing rockets? Stone isn’t sure what to do. If he wakes the captain, what would the captain do anyway? He wouldn’t steam anywhere tonight – not with so much ice about, not in this darkness. And if he wakes him for nothing the captain will think him a fool. ‘It will be an easy watch,’ the captain had said, ‘with nothing much to do.’

Stone decides to wait just a little longer and see what happens. If there’s another rocket,
then
he will call the captain.

Ernie Gill, meanwhile, stands aft on the shelter deck. ‘I threw my cigarette away,’ he later tells the audience in the Drill Hall, ‘and looked over, and I could see from the water’s edge – what appeared to be the water’s edge – a great distance away, well, it was unmistakably a rocket. You could make no mistake about it.’

He watches for a few more minutes. Over his shoulder he can see the shadowy outline of his own ship’s bridge, silent and dark.

‘It was not my business to notify the bridge, but they could not have helped but see it,’ he explains to his sorrowful listeners in London. They are spellbound, and he tries to look each of them in the eye. He knows they understand. He can’t do every job on the ship. Others should do their job properly, just as he does his. ‘I am not a sailor,’ he says, his voice heavy with regret: if only he
had
been a sailor, this whole sad business might have turned out differently. ‘I do not know anything about latitude or longitude. My compass is the steam gauge.’

So he goes below and slides back into his bunk.

The third rocket

The slope of the deck beneath her feet is increasing; Stella has to lean a little to keep her balance. There are rumours that wireless messages have been sent out asking for help and that the first-class passengers are being put into boats. And Mr Kieran, at the top of the stairs, now has two more stewards, with broad chests and thick arms, standing with him.

Most of the people crowded into the reception area are women and children. Stella wonders where the rest of the third-class men are. Her father has said there were hundreds quartered with him and the boys in the ship’s bow, but there are only about twenty here.

At last Mr Hart returns, out of breath, and says that he will now take another group up to the boat deck. There’s a surge of people towards him, and Stella pushes through and reminds him of his promise. When Mr Hart agrees to take them, Stella tells her brothers and sisters to join hands, youngest to oldest, and not to let go no matter what. Her father picks up his suitcase and the older boys their satchels.