Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

  Cuthbert had been very shocked.

  He disapproved of raffles, in the same way as he disapproved of theatres and dancing-places and playing cards and strong drink. He was intensely angry about it.

  For her own part Ann could not see anything very sinful in a one-and-sixpenny raffle, but all her life she had been taught that Cuthbert knew better than she did, so she was quite willing to abide by his all-superior judgement. All the same she did not feel that she could explain to Miss Thomas that she was unable to buy any more raffle tickets because Cuthbert said that raffles were wicked. Ann was not brave enough for that.

  She gave some halting explanation and she salved her own conscience by saying that, although she would give the money to the charity, she would not accept the actual ticket. She would just pay the price.

  ‘Then,’ said Miss Thomas, ‘I will keep the tickets and just hand you over the prize if you win anything.’

  Under that arrangement they continued. Ann had not got the heart to refuse to contribute to Miss Thomas’s raffles over which she always waxed so eloquent, but at the same time she always scuffled over it, because of that guilty conscience that assailed her on the subject.

  She could not help it, but she suffered from the Cuthbert Complex, and, although she herself knew that raffles were not sinful, because he had said that they were she could not hope to escape from the recurring obsession.

  So nowadays the twice-monthly lunch out with Miss Thomas had ceased to be the thing of joy which it had once appeared.

  Afterwards, at two o’clock to be precise, you returned to the office, you typed out contracts, or you took down more letters, or you filled in the petty cash and the account books, all dreadfully dull jobs and sickeningly monotonous.

  She wondered sometimes what other occupations were like, really thrilling ones, like working in a flower shop or a beauty parlour, or being a mannequin; then she would banish all those dreams, remembering that they were very unsuitable to a plain woman of thirty-five with life and youth lying behind her.

  At four you made the tea. Every third day it came to your turn to supply the biscuits ‒ shortcakes if you did not want to be extravagant, Bourbons if you did. Sometimes you took in a cup to Mr. Robert ‒ little Gelding always did Mr. John’s, she knew how many lumps of sugar he had, and the milk to the very drop; she prided herself on these details.

  At five-thirty the day ended.

  Mr. John would come out of the office first, grabbing at hat and stick and attaché case, and rushing across the outer office. ‘Good night, Miss Clements. Good afternoon, Miss Thomas. Gelding …’ Through the door and down the stairs and out into the street, obviously glad that work was finished.

  Mr. Robert next, more sombre and slow, always decorous. ‘Good afternoon,’ gravely, with a calculated coolness. ‘You can leave those contracts until to-morrow, Miss Clements. Has the Clarke one gone out?’ and then, ‘Good afternoon,’ again, and out into the street.

  After that the ramming on of typewriter tops, the crashing down and fixing of tin lids. Papers pushed into drawers, things put away tidily in readiness for the morrow, all the little details, and finally the last chatter in the cloakroom and the burst out into the street. Lovely fresh coolness of it in spring and summer; sparkle and chill in winter. You welcomed it.

  That was life at the office.

  It went on and on as it had gone on and on for years, as it would go on and on, Ann felt, long after she was dead. It was a phase that she had been sucked into by the giant machinery of life. An intricate pattern of living, and always dismally the same. You could not escape it. Change was not. Things happened to time, to order, in much the same manner …

  ‘If only something different would come!’ she thought.

  III

  The evenings were alike too.

  She spent them sitting tiredly in Mrs. Puddock’s bed-sitter, or in walking round Onslow Square. She very seldom went out and about. She had never sought entertainments, for her family had always insisted that anything in the nature of such amusement was wicked. Ann was a creature of old shibboleths and warnings; she was the child of inhibition. She had allotted her week into separate little duties, and although she hated the monotony of them, and they irked, she still stuck to them meticulously. She did not see how else she could manage. After all, things had to be done, and if you stuck to your schedule they got done, and if you did not they were left undone. She had got to be exact. The pattern of living had got Ann, wholly and entirely. It was inescapable.

  Monday night she washed out her stockings and her hankies, and her crêpe-de-Chine collars and cuffs which she always wore on her office frock. There were lots of little things to be washed, and she went through them all on a Monday evening.

  On Tuesday she ironed them surreptitiously with her electric iron. Mrs. Puddock did not approve of electric irons, and she had very definite laws concerning them. Ann had tried to argue, but she had been defeated. She had instead taken (very wrongly, she knew) to the secret application of the iron. She always worked at it in fear and trembling lest Mrs. Puddock should catch her, though usually after supper the good lady was rather past investigation of any nature and was verging on the comatose. But Ann, hurrying through the ironing and putting the iron on the window-sill to cool ‒ she was always terrified that one day it would fall down and kill a passer-by ‒ was in a state of panic. She hated putting the iron on the window, but knew of no other way to cool it, and the young man at the shop had been most emphatic about the use of cold water in such a circumstance. Ann was secretly afraid of her iron, and it caused her a good deal of consternation, what with the voltage trouble, and the cooling-down process, and the terror of fusing and of Mrs. Puddock’s immediate discovery of all that had been going on.

  Wednesday night she mended.

  Ann loved sewing, and it took her the whole evening to make those neat little darns and patches on which she prided herself.

  Thursday was given over to manicure, for she was particular about her hands. Alternate Thursdays she washed her hair, and sometimes if time permitted she cleaned her face with cream, which she felt would have met with Cuthbert’s strong disapproval had he only known of it. But Cuthbert did not know. She had never dared to admit the simple truth that she was the possessor of one of those sensitive skins to which the wholly virtuous soap-and-water is merely irritating.

  Friday nights she wrote her letters, keeping them in a little bundle in her desk, neatly bound round with an elastic band, until they could be attended to. It was never a large mail, but she prided herself on her faithful correspondence with old servants and vague cousins. Ann was dutiful in the extreme to all who she felt had a call upon her time and attention.

  Saturdays were supposed to be free days, yet for all that they seemed to get themselves filled up, cluttered by little duties of no real consequence, yet requiring attention.

  Sunday was the day when she went down to Balham and lunched with Cuthbert and Eleanor and her goddaughter. They ate cold lunch because it was the Lord’s day, and it would have been wicked to ask the maid to cook a meal, which certainly was some manner of work. They ate cold mutton alternately with cold beef. They ate roast potatoes in winter because they could be pushed inside the oven to cook themselves and therefore could not be considered to be any manner of work. In the summer time it was just a salad. Afterwards there was served stewed fruit and custard.

  Ann loathed cold mutton nearly as much as she loathed cold beef. She had no stomach left for roast potatoes, which she had had thrust upon her every Sunday of her life, and she hated chilly stewed fruit and that insipid pool of custard in a glass dish. Those horrible shrivelled prunes, or the pink strings of rhubarb! Stewed apple in a sickly pale green mess!

  Eleanor had no imagination.

  They talked Cuthbert, and Cuthbert’s sermon. Sometimes Ann wondered how she stood it. If they didn’t talk Cuthbert they talked Gloria ‒ who was pert and precocious ‒ which was almost worse. She could do no w
rong in her parents’ eyes, this enfant terrible of a flapper.

  During the afternoon Cuthbert took the Sunday School, save on the third Sunday in the month, when it became a children’s service and was held actually in the church instead of in the parish hall. Whilst he worked thus, Eleanor slept on the drawing-room sofa. Ann only wished that she could claim the joys of oblivion, but she was expected to play with Gloria all through her childhood, and now, when Gloria was eighteen, they were supposed to have what Eleanor described as ‘a nice talk together’.

  Tea at five provided a meat dish for Cuthbert, who needed sustenance, as he had Evensong ahead of him. But Ann always left before Evensong. She always supped at Mrs. Puddock’s and afterwards in the summer she would sit by the open window in the half light, and listen to the people returning across Onslow Square, their day of gladness over.

  She would hear young lovers, with slow steps, soft whispers and the faint sound of kisses in the darkness. She would listen wonderingly. Ann, who was thirty-five, who had never had a lover, who would never have a lover now. Something precious that she had missed in life. Something tender and delicious which had passed her by. For the pattern had absorbed her; the mechanical adjustment of living which had caught her into its toils and which drove her round and round with dynamo-like force. Throb, throb, throb! It beat on and on, remorselessly, and now she could never hope to escape from it.

  In the winter she sat on a hassock before the gas fire, which roasted you in front and left you to freeze at the back. She hugged her knees and thought of Christmas, and of trees hung with tinsel and toys, and of little children laughing as they danced round them. They were the dream children of a rather sweet imagination.

  For there were dreams still left even to a spinster of thirty-five, who had never had very much from life, but who had been spun on and on in the weary monotonous pattern of just living. But I believe that some of those dreams were bitter-sweet.

  Chapter 2

  I

  But this particular morning it was mid-April.

  Ann decided that she would walk down Church Street and on into the King’s Road, and that she would catch the number eleven ’bus outside the Westminster Bank there. Sometimes they would stop for you, and sometimes they wouldn’t, but more often than not they would.

  The first green was on the trees, and in the gardens there were crocuses and daffodils, and a tree not as yet green was pale pink with blossom. It was one of those mornings which you felt would be full of lovely happenings, and somehow, as she crossed the Fulham Road, the idea of the Mediterranean occurred to her. It was absurd that the idea of the Mediterranean should occur to anybody in the Fulham Road, but it did. It may have been the sight of the policeman on point duty, or the old curiosity shop opposite with its bundles of dusty old books, and its quaint china ornaments, or more likely ‒ much more likely ‒ the flower shop on the corner. In the flower shop there were bunches of cream freesias, and great white arums and dark red roses.

  Ann thought, ‘And I’ve never been further than Worthing. And what is more, I am never likely to go further than Worthing,’ and again she dreamt of the blue of that almost tideless sea, and the smell of Africa, hot and sandy and aromatic, and the flowers of Southern Spain, heliotropes and verbenas under the oleanders.

  And all this in the Fulham Road!

  She went down Church Street, and she saw all the lovely houses in Mulberry Walk, and wished that she were rich enough to live there. She saw the more stately houses of Mallord Street which thrilled her. There was always the chance of seeing the real Christopher Robin in Mallord Street, and she came round the corner by the bank with a jerk.

  What was the good of thinking of the Mediterranean when it was April in England? What was the good when your salary was three pounds ten shillings a week, and ten shillings went on insurance against the future? For old age threatened her as it threatened every other lone woman who was not provided for. Cuthbert had been very helpful over the insurance policy, and it ensured three pounds a week when she was sixty, or in preference two thousand pounds down. Cuthbert had said that it was Ann’s duty to take the two thousand down, and to leave it all to Gloria. After all Gloria would want prospects as much as anybody else. So Ann was saving diligently for Gloria’s future, and very dull work she found it.

  She timidly hailed the approaching eleven ’bus.

  She was always a little timid, for she disliked it so much if they would not stop, but went on unheeding. She felt so silly left with her umbrella up, pointing into space. The ’bus stopped, and she climbed gratefully into it.

  It was one of those spring days when the conductor was facetious. He was chatty. As he clipped the tickets he whistled.

  ‘Looks like a bit of decent weather, miss,’ he volunteered.

  Ann said yes.

  She had no wish to be offhand, but she knew that Cuthbert did not approve of her speaking to conductors.

  At Sloane Square a running gentleman caught the ’bus only by a fraction.

  ‘Nah then, nah then,’ said the conductor as he helped him inside, ‘do you want to bust yerself up?’

  In confusion Ann saw that the running gentleman was Mr. Robert. She felt very embarrassed, for one’s employers present a knotty problem out of hours. She did not want to appear pushing or over familiar, and she certainly did not want to seem icy and reserved. She only hoped that he would not get off at Charing Cross and embarrass her further by walking to the office with her.

  As they bowled up Whitehall she turned the problem over in her mind, and decided that the thing to do was to let him get off first, that was if he were getting off at all.

  Mr. Robert did get off at Charing Cross. He did not hurry himself about it, but allowed three fat girls and a flower woman with an armful of tulips to get off first. The result was that at the last moment, just before the ’bus was starting again, Ann had to spring up and rush for the step.

  ‘Nah then, nah then,’ said the facetious conductor again, clanging his bell, ‘why can’t you get along while we was a-stoppin’, instead of ’angin’ about until we was a-startin’? What’s the idee?’

  All confusion, a much embarrassed Ann jumped to the pavement, and practically into a little knot of people who were busy staring at the ‘own unaided efforts’ of a pavement artist as vouched for on a flag which he had inscribed with coloured chalks.

  Ann went along up the Strand.

  It was a warm and perfect morning, and it would have been delicious in the country. She thought of the buttercups, and the close dark buds of lilac against the new vivid green. Again she thought of the Mediterranean, and her mind was recalled to it by the sight of a poster outside Charing Cross station. The Riviera. A ruined temple, draped in bougainvillea, a cypress in the background. A poster that made Ann think.

  Ahead was Mr. Robert walking in leisurely fashion, stopping to light a cigarette in a doorway ‒ for there was a light wind blowing ‒ or to study a spring display of shirtings. Ann turned up a side street to avoid him. He was very early this morning; she did not know when he had been so early. It was certainly most inconvenient of him to have been travelling on the same ’bus as herself.

  In the side street the sun was brilliant; a newsboy was screaming out the latest sweepstake news, and he rushed past her, nearly knocking her down. Ann would have loved to dawdle, to linger out here in the yellowness and the pleasant warmth, and never to go inside the office at all. The office always struck her as being gloomy and dark, although in reality the secretaries’ room was almost due south. It was the surrounding leads and chimney-pots which seemed to close it in.

  A nurse fluttered into St. Peter’s Hospital; a Covent Garden porter, whistling a cheery tune, shouldered a basket of oranges. Again she thought of the Mediterranean. Funny, but she could not get it out of her mind this morning. Orange trees and lemons growing alongside one another. The clinging perfume of stocks; warmth, blueness, an atmosphere that was different. Queer how she could not help thinking of it.r />
  She turned in at the office door.

  II

  Brockman was fussing in the enquiry office; he did not notice her as she passed, for his back was to her as he opened the small attaché case which he always carried with him. He brought his own lunch, his wife packing it, for by that means it only cost him half what it would otherwise have done, and he could be sure of getting reliable food. Brockman was particular about food, seeing that it represented his sole remaining interest in life.

  He did not drink or smoke, and twenty-eight years of marriage with Mrs. Brockman had stemmed his ardour in the lists of love. But, as he told his associates, he might be getting on in years and one thing and another, but thank God he had still got a good stomach left.

  The good stomach stood him in good stead.

  Ann went through the swing doors, and started up the stairs. Instantly she was aware of a strange atmosphere hanging about the place. At the first sound of her foot on the hair cord leading to the first floor, Miss Thomas and little Gelding had darted out of the room above. They were clinging to the banisters and gesticulating.

  ‘Hurry, hurry,’ they called.

  Ann thought that there must have been an accident, or a fire, or something unusual. She hurried as well as she was able and arrived breathlessly on the top stair.

  ‘You can’t think what’s happened,’ said Miss Thomas. But little Gelding, always over enthusiastic, screamed: ‘You’ve won three hundred pounds! Just think of it! You’ve won three hundred pounds!’