The Pirate Queen (22 page)

We climbed back up the hill, negotiating marshy bits and a fence with barbed wire that had popped out of nowhere. It was bright, very bright, but the wind took your breath away. We threw ourselves back inside the car and panted.

“I guess I'm still giddy from Foula,” said Dorothy. “Or the sunshine. I feel like I could just wander around Shetland all day.”

This worried me slightly. “Eventually I have to get to Lerwick,” I said. “I have some more work to do at the library.”

“We'll go by my house first,” decided Dorothy. “I haven't been home for over a week. I need to check my mail and messages, take a bath. Then we'll drive straight on to Lerwick. You'll be there by lunchtime!”

Since it was already noon, I suspected not, but a delay of an hour or two couldn't hurt. The landscape grew more and more beautiful to me. We passed signs that said Hill of Vatsie, Ness of Queyon, Otterswick, Saddle of Swarister. We came to the ferry landing at Ulsta and crossed to Toft. We drove another twenty minutes or so to Brae, where Dorothy lived in a terrace house that, she told me, had been hastily constructed when the workers were building the oil terminal and airport at Sullom Voe, not far away.

“Just be a tick,” she said. “Make yourself at home. Have a cup of tea, a biscuit. Wander around. See my collection of Japanese dolls upstairs. I'm just going to ring a friend, then I'll have a bath.” I sat at the kitchen table and had a cup of tea and toast. By a strange coincidence Dorothy's Seaman's Record Book and Certificate of Discharge were sitting on the table among piles of paper. An authority had declared that “the person to whom this Discharge Book relates has satisfied me that he (she) is a seaman. . . .” There was a photograph of Dorothy Cogle, as she was called then, in the faded blue book.
She already had the blue swallowtail butterfly on her arm.

I heard Dorothy animatedly talking on the phone, while the water ran into the tub across the hall. She came downstairs with a book, a newspaper clip, and a sheaf of notebook paper. “I wondered if you might be interested in some notes that one of the social hostesses gave me. We had a get-together a while back.” She rushed into the bath to turn off the water and soon was splashing noisily. She'd brought her phone in with her and was talking as she bathed: “You'll never guess! I have a writer here with me. I found her in Unst when I was up visiting my son. Now she's at my kitchen table. She's writing a book and I'm telling her about the
Northern Star.
Yes, my old ship.”

I read the newspaper clipping first. It was an interview with Dorothy in a q-and-a format in the
Shetland Times.
One of the questions was “What's your greatest ambition?”

“I'd like to be the first female Pope,” Dorothy had responded. “Just to be called el Mama.”

The book Dorothy had handed me was
Splendid Sisters,
a history of the
Southern Cross
and the
Northern Star,
published in 1966. The fourteen pages of handwritten notes were a copy of “Instructions to Hostesses,” originally compiled by one of the
Northern Star's
first social hostesses, a woman named Jeanne. At the top of the first page, in caps, was written: KEEP YOUR SENSE OF HUMOUR AT ALL TIMES.

The writer of the instructions obviously had, because her detailing of what was expected of the hostess—bridge, Woman's Hour, cocktail parties, the Children's Fancy Dress Ball, and organizing PR for the important passengers in different ports—was laced with wit: “Never say no to any (reasonable) passenger request—i.e. for a ‘jugglers' get-together,' or ‘discussion into psychic research,' etc.”

The
Northern Star
sailed from Southampton to Las Palmas and down the African coast to Cape Town and Durban, and from there to Perth in Western Australia. There was a week in Melbourne and Sydney, then it was over to Wellington, where the ship was completely cleaned, and all the passengers, except those few who were round-the-world voyagers, finally disembarked. Some of the passengers were emigrating to South Africa, Australia, or New Zealand, about to begin new lives; some were returning home for visits. The return journey crossed the Pacific to Fiji and Tahiti, then passed through the Panama Canal to Curaçao and Trinidad (Note to hostesses: “Get to a Caribbean nightclub!”), before returning to Southampton.

R
EADING ABOUT
the voyages, I felt my old, seafaring wanderlust. I had imagined, after the summer on the
Kong Olav,
that I'd try to find a job on another ship, perhaps one going around the world. I had my Norwegian seaman's papers and a work permit. I could have even tried to go to a maritime academy. Instead, I'd used the money I'd earned to make my way to Seattle. Although I'd still fantasized, from time to time, of going to San Francisco and sitting in the Scandinavian hiring hall, within a year I was working at an alternative newspaper and soon after that started a publishing company. Why had I given it up? I wondered. I could have seen Japan; I could have seen the Caribbean.

Dorothy came out of the bathroom, wearing nothing but a big towel.

“Can I get a copy of these notes?”

“Of course. You'll need that for your research, won't you? We'll go to the high school where I used to teach; they have a copy machine.”

But first the post arrived, and the postman, who was something of a writer himself, came in and was introduced; the post must be read and more calls made, and then Dorothy had to put on her face. As I read again through the notes, I began to recall a television comedy I saw as a child in the late fifties,
The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna.
Gale Storm, a former B-movie actress who had become one of television's first sitcom stars in
My Little Margie,
played Susanna Pomeroy, the social director of a cruise ship. Her roommate on the USS
Ocean Queen
was the dithery ship's beautician, Esmerelda Nugent, “Nugey,” played by sixty-year-old ZaSu Pitts. The script called for the sort of madcap antics and zany impersonations that Lucy and Ethel, and Margie herself, had engaged in so successfully. I remember lots of heads popping through portholes. To capitalize on Gale Storm's singing career, every third episode featured a big production number, as part of the ship's entertainment.

I loved Gale Storm's impersonations of duchesses and southern belles, the “doubling” acts she carried off so well, but it was the notion of a woman working at sea that left its mark on my imagination. She seemed to go her own way on the ship, getting around authority figures and constantly cooking up mischief with the scatterbrained Nugey. I never thought of her as Susanna, but always as Gale Storm, and to my young mind, it seemed a strange and magnificent coincidence that a woman aboard a ship would be called Gale Storm. In reality, someone at RKO studios thought up the name first, then handed it to the young Texas girl named Josephine Cottle who won their contest to go to Hollywood.

I hadn't thought of Gale Storm for years; yet now, at Dorothy's cluttered kitchen table, I marveled at how the imagination of a young girl subverts what it is given. To me, Gale
Storm and Nugey ran the ship, and were the most important people on it.

“I'm ready, I'm dressed, let's go!” said Dorothy, and we hopped into her car again. It was about two in the afternoon. We swung by the high school so I could use their copier, and were there for over an hour while Dorothy visited with friends and ex-colleagues. She introduced me all around as a writer who was interested in her seagoing life and was going to write about her. Back in the car, Dorothy sang me a song or two and told me more stories, but it was hard by now to keep her on the track of the
Northern Star.
Everything reminded her of something else. I was learning her whole life story. Love, divorce, love, and so on. “Men—they're hopeless, but you've got to love them. Some of them, anyway. Don't you?” She'd ascertained from my ringless left hand that I wasn't married, and no doubt assumed that I was of the same persuasion: divorced and looking.

“I'm more interested in women,” I told her after a minute.

She glanced at me curiously and I wondered if she were trying to understand how a normal-looking woman like me could have made
that
choice. “Still have your teeth?” she asked instead. “That's good. I've had masses of dental work.”

It was getting on four in the afternoon and I still hadn't had lunch. Though we'd finally arrived in town, I began to get the feeling that Dorothy might not let me go so easily. She did some errands, picked up film, dropped off shoes to be repaired. When we finally pulled up in front of the Queens Hotel, I thought she might be getting ready to come in with me. She hinted that its bar had once been a favorite haunt of hers when she'd had an intense affair with a Norwegian sailor.

I had to be firm. I'd chosen the Queens, a big pile of Victorian stone, right at the waterfront, for my return to
Lerwick precisely because I was so worn out with bed-and-breakfasts and youth hostels and all those fascinating, wonderful, talkative Shetlanders. If we went into the bar, we would never come out. I excused myself weakly, saying I had to do more research. It's true, I did have to go back to the library, and I wanted to read the book she'd given me,
Splendid Sisters.
But even more, I just wanted to get a sandwich and a pot of tea, and wash my underwear and socks in a bathroom attached to my room, and later watch something on the BBC, one of those odd shows, about gardening or cooking, that never gets picked up by public television in America.

All the same, when Dorothy and I hugged goodbye, I found myself sorry to part from her. It was like stepping off a carousel. My legs wobbled and I missed the whirl. I clutched my papers and waved as she drove off; then I walked to the reception desk.

“A room,” I said expansively to the clerk. “With a view of the harbor.”

“Certainly. Your name please?”

“Storm,” I answered, knowing that meant I'd have to pay with cash. “Miss G. Storm.”

“Just yourself, Miss Storm?”

“Just myself.”

T
HE NEXT
morning, lounging luxuriously in bed, with the drapes open to a view of Lerwick Harbor, I opened
Splendid Sisters.
There were a number of chapters about the history of the owners and engineers of the Shaw Savill line, and about building the two ships, the
Northern Star
and the
Southern Cross.
But then came a chapter on the women officers, all five, with the revealing title “You Need Stamina.”

The author writes briskly:

Their motives are the normal ones—a desire to travel, to see the world, get away from home, to change jobs and routine, and possibly find a husband. It is a romantic potential, but the work is no sinecure, hours are often long—particularly before sailing and arriving—and shore leave at the various ports not automatic. They all seem to enjoy it.

He then goes on to describe the various duties of the nursing sisters, assistant purserettes, and social hostesses. In this book I found the story of Jeanne Pratt, who must surely be the Jeanne who wrote Dorothy's “Instructions to Hostesses.”

Mrs Crawley was succeeded in
Northern Star
by Miss Jeanne Pratt, whose father worked in Shaw Savill's head office until retiring, and whose mother's family had bred sailors since the days of Drake. By the time she was eight Jeanne announced that at some time in the indefinite future she would go to Norway and take her master's certificate. Even though Reigate, in the heart of Surrey, was the nearest she could get to the sea, she made herself a cabin in the garage loft, furnished it with an uncle's old sea-chest, spent hours drawing and painting sailing-ships, and put up a notice to indicate whether “the captain” was in or out. She did, however, go aboard the
Pamir
and, when she was eleven,
Dominion Monarch,
where, with a number of small boys, she clambered up a mast.

It was several years later before she saw
Dominion Monarch
again, and this time she went to sea in her as a
purserette. She was in
Northern Star
for the maiden voyage. From purserette to hostess was a short step.

How many girls who clambered up masts or drew sailing ships in these maritime countries had to put these dreams behind them either to marry or to take the few seagoing jobs available to them? I thought about my own work on the
Kong Olav.
The captain had been immeasurably far above me, and I'd never thought for an instant that I could do anything like stand on the bridge and pilot the steamer up and down the coast.

Miss Jeanne Pratt's mother's family “had bred sailors since the days of Drake,” and at eight years old, the height of girlish confidence, Jeanne knew her direction in life and saw no obstacles; she had a cabin in the garage loft, a sea chest, and a notice to let people know whether she, the captain, was in or out. But by the time Jeanne actually managed to get aboard a ship, the option of captain was out. When I was a girl, I imagined everything was possible. I read
Pippi Longstocking
and saw Gale Storm as the main character on the USS
Ocean Queen.
But by the time I came to work on the
Kong Olav,
in 1973, I'd forgotten my dreams, or bowed to reality. It was enough to go to sea, and if that meant being a dishwasher, so be it.

In Jeanne's “Instructions,” she stoutly urges her sister hostesses to be proud of their work and not put up with any jibes from the crew and officers.