Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

  They walked back from the restaurant arm in arm. Ann could not believe that to-morrow she would be at Tilbury; that she would not be in England at all later, but would have set out on the great adventure.

  It was too marvellous.

  They walked along contentedly, then Miss Thomas said, ‘I have got a little souvenir for you too, only a bottle of eau de Cologne, but it’s a very ladylike perfume, and it’s nice if you are feeling sick.’

  ‘How lovely of you!’ said Ann. Really, they were all too good, very much too good. Last of all Mr. Robert, she was almost afraid that he might have bought a gift for her, but he hadn’t.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said, ‘and a pleasant voyage.’

  She was passing down Henrietta Street for the last time for a month. She was going out into the world. And now she felt a twinge of regret as the door of the office shut fast behind her, and Brockman locked it. It was as though she were shutting out an epoch.

  She walked down Bedford Street and along the Strand. It would never seem so beautiful, she felt. Trafalgar Square at the end and the evening light on the still pools of water. The stone grown dark with smoke and grime, and through the Admiralty Arch a glimpse of trees growing green.

  She took the ’bus home, and somehow it seemed that there was a queer peace about South Kensington. It was a new peace, something that she had never discovered there before. She wondered if it were always like this on the eve of a journey.

  She turned into the house and went up the stairs. The room still bore traces of her packing, it was all turmoil and confusion, and Mrs. Puddock (mercifully not in one of her moods) was hovering on the stairs.

  ‘I made you a buck rarebit. I thought it’d be a treat, and you going to these nasty foreign parts.’

  Ann did not like to tell her that everything on the liner would be English, people had always told her how wonderfully they fed you on board ship, and she was rather looking forward to that part of it. It would be nice not to have to consider price, would be lovely to have chicken every day, and no Thursday and Fridays when it had to be a glass of milk and a bun if you were really ‘stony’.

  On the supper tray there was a last appeal from Cuthbert. He had been most persistent in his appeals to her, and had apparently not yet given up hope of persuading her to abandon the adventure. His last appeal was more truly Cuthbert than any of the others had been. In it he had let himself go. He could not understand her. He had tried, but either he was very stupid which he did not think was possible, or she was behaving in very odd fashion. Undoubtedly that was what he believed. He was, to put it frankly, quite disgusted.

  The whole family were disgusted, and in particular it was extremely hard on poor little Gloria. Ann seemed to have forgotten that poor little Gloria was her godchild, and as such she had a right to participate in anything that was Ann’s. It was all typical.

  Even now, Ann felt that in spite of Cuthbert’s rooted antipathy to gadding about, if she offered to take poor little Gloria with her, the suggestion would not meet with disapproval. She hated to think that her brother was a hypocrite, but she had been forced to that conclusion.

  She went to bed early, and as she curled up between the familiar blankets, and listened to the noises which she knew by heart, she dreamed daydreams. The old noises, the clipping together of the tree branches in Onslow Gardens, and the traffic passing.

  She thought, ‘What will have happened to me before I sleep here again?’ It was an old game that she had played with herself ever since she was a child. Anything might have happened. Certainly she would bring back with her memories, fragrant memories of the most beautiful places in Europe. She prayed that there might be no regrets.

  The next morning Ann Clements started on the wonder cruise.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 1

  I

  The Allando lay at anchor in the middle of the stream at Tilbury. She looked very much larger than Ann had expected, and she was confused by the crowd all anxious to get on board. ‘Passports this way.’ ‘This way for the tender.’ ‘Postcards of the ship.’ ‘Telegrams. Telegrams.’

  She had never expected that there would be so many people or so much bustle, and she proffered her passport to an official timidly enough. The photograph inside was very bad. She was almost afraid that he might not recognize her from it, and that even now she might be turned back within the very sight of the ship itself. But apparently he did recognize her. He slapped the passport together with a bang, and pushed it across to her in company with an embarkation ticket.

  Ann, fumbling with a bag, a cabin ticket, a passport and now an embarkation ticket, became more embarrassed than ever. It was very bewildering, not a bit like going to Worthing. There were telegraph boys proffering forms ‒ as if she had anyone to telegraph to! ‒ boys with postcards of the ship, others with magazines, some selling fruit. One little lad was so persistent that she bought a postcard, borrowed his pencil to address it with, and sent it to Cuthbert.

  He would probably take it as an insult.

  Ahead under a big archway, she saw the tender drawn up alongside. The hour had come. She approached it a little nervously, not quite so sure that she was enjoying herself now. She was still clinging to the embarkation ticket, and the passport and the more important-looking itinerary with the cabin number on it. She stepped into the tender, and viewed the Allando herself anchored in mid-stream.

  There seemed to be a great many people about, and what was so disturbing was that they did not appear to be her sort of people. Some old ladies with a strange hand luggage, many baskets and bags, and umbrellas and parasols. Young men who in London she would have supposed were cultivating art. Very modern girls, all lipsticks and berets and fixed stares. One thing she had thought was that she would meet ‘nice’ people, gentlefolk, that cultivated and refined class to which she herself belonged. But these people were different, they were extremely mixed.

  Cruising had come within the purse of everybody, and everybody had taken to cruising in an amazing manner. Perhaps, she told herself, they were not so different as rather surprising. She hoped it was only that their appearances were against them.

  The tender, filling up, sounded a siren, and slowly began to chug her way out to mid-stream. As the Allando came nearer she grew very much larger. Within Ann’s heart there came the first faint yearning to turn and to run back home. At this particular moment she would have given a good deal for the solemn mounting of the stairs to Mrs. Puddock’s bed-sitter. She would have given a lot for the office, and the mantelshelf littered with little Gelding’s make-up. She felt sick with fright.

  If it had not been for Cuthbert, she would have returned then and there and have sacrificed the money. What was money compared to acute misery, anyway? But he would have been so delighted and so cocky about it, and she could not have borne that. He had predicted failure and disappointment, and very well satisfied he would have been that failure and disappointment had come about. He was like that.

  She filed up the gangway and in at the door at the side of the ship. A steward ‒ she thought he was an officer ‒ looked at her ticket.

  ‘This way, madam.’

  Then she knew that he was not an officer, and she followed him timidly. She would never find her way alone, never, never. She was sure of that. She tried to etch into her mind some manner of the way they were travelling. She tried to remember the blue lights marking ladies, and the red lights marking gentlemen. She felt that it was a vulgar method, but what else could she do? Nothing else broke the monotony of cabins, cabins, and still more cabins!

  This one,’ said the steward.

  It was all beautiful, small of course, with a port flung wide, and a little brass bedstead standing under it. She had never thought of a ship having a bedstead, nor had Cuthbert, because he had been most emphatic about the immorality of a single woman sleeping in a bunk! The trunk stood there in readiness, the cord removed and rolled into a bundle, and laid carefully on the top. There was an efficienc
y about it all that left her gasping.

  In the wash-bowl there was a bouquet of flowers, she could see the deep red glow of carnations through the tissue paper wrapping. She felt herself turning red. Never before had such a thing happened to her, and while she was amazed at the sheer wonder of it, she felt a sharp pang of recollection that they could not possibly be for her. They must have been delivered here in error. They were quite obviously somebody else’s.

  She went outside to look at the number of the cabin. Yes, it was cabin 241, just as it had said on the ticket, just as was written on the flowers. There had not been a mistake. Gingerly she approached the bunch and lifted them, and instantly there came the delicious perfume of cloves and carnations. A little card dropped to the floor, and she picked it up. On it was written:

  Bon Voyage, from all at the office.

  It made the tears come.

  She stood there blinking at the full crimson heads, and marvelling at the exquisite smell of them.

  Then it was that the stewardess arrived, very efficient, very starched, very important.

  She consulted the passenger list that she carried. ‘Miss Clements? Yes, that’s right! Now in the morning do you like an apple or a cup of tea?’

  Ann, who had never had either before, said rather vaguely, ‘Oh, an apple, I think.’

  The stewardess (her name was Brown according to the instructions printed and put up in the cabin) realized that Ann was new to travel, for she said, ‘You had better see the chief steward and arrange about your seat in the dining-saloon. There will be lifeboat drill at five o’clock, you’ll hear the bell go and you will find the instructions on the card.’

  All of which left Ann cold with horror.

  The joy of the carnations faded in a sick fear of the chief steward, and the dreadful significance of a station at lifeboat drill. She had all the shy person’s horror of making herself conspicuous, and had already sighted a horrible photograph of a gentleman, involved in all the intricacies of becoming equipped with a life-saving apparatus. And furthermore, investigation produced a complicated arrangement of cork and strings ‒ she would never be able to put it on, she was sure, and even if she did get into it she would never get out again, and she would loathe to be inspected in it. She felt lonely, rather terribly lonely, as she sank down on the bed. Of course she ought never to have attempted the trip really, twenty years in a country rectory and fifteen years in a London office, plus South Kensington and Balham, were not conducive to making friends.

  Then she remembered the chief steward, and the necessity for booking a place in the saloon and finding a table, and also for locating the nearest place of retirement to the saloon, where, if needs be, she could be comfortably and privately sick. The thought of sickness had not come to her until now, but suddenly she was not quite so happy about it.

  She went out to find the dining-saloon, which with difficulty was located. It was magnificent, a great deal finer than the Lyons’ where she was wont to go on special occasions. She was also much disturbed at having to approach so obviously important a person as the chief steward. He was, however, in command of a plan of the room, and he showed her a table close to the door (very useful in emergencies) and she marked it down in her own mind so that she might recognize it when dinner time came.

  ‘I think you will be happy there,’ he said, ‘and you sit where you like for the first lunch.’

  As lunch was being served she thought that she might as well have it now. Anyway she would never dare to enter the saloon again. She sat down and ordered a meal.

  It was the loveliest meal that she had ever had, save that it was entirely spoilt by the memory of stations at lifeboat drill, which must inevitably follow later. Which were starboard and port side anyway? And how could you locate your lifeboat when as far as she could see each was identical with the last? She objected to going about dressed up, and more especially when you were dressed up like that.

  She did full justice to the meal, and afterwards she followed an ornate staircase ‒ it was queer having staircases ‒ into the lounge above. The lounge had marble pillars and bowls of pink tulips in it. There were magazines and newspapers lying about, and the chairs were the most comfortable she had ever sat in. It was like a magnificent hotel, not like a ship at all. And in this it disappointed her. She had wanted a ship; she had wanted the wind-blown wildness of it, a prow cutting its way through the waves, masts, rigging in a dark lace against the sky. In a way she had wanted it to be uncomfortable, because she had associated discomfort with the sea, and this she felt was far too much like a Park Lane hotel.

  She watched the people with trepidation. She was afraid of them. She longed desperately to speak to them, yet she was frightened to death that they would speak to her.

  As she sat there she realized that she was part and parcel of this scheme; she, who had never been used to anything save the rather solid discomfort of the rectory at home, and the bedsitter complexities of Mrs. Puddock’s establishment in South Kensington. She had started on this strange adventure, and it was worth while.

  She glanced out of the porthole and she saw suddenly that the grey outline of Tilbury was moving. They had already weighed the anchor, or whatever the correct term might be. They were passing down the river on the first stage of the wonder cruise towards the wide ocean which lay beyond.

  She felt inside her the delirious sensation of joy that she had not experienced since she was a child, and the feverish excitement of some anticipated pleasure suddenly fulfilled in its promise. Now she had really started! Nothing could make them put back again, nothing in the world; not even Cuthbert or Eleanor or Gloria, nor the sudden illness of both Miss Thomas and little Gelding, and the urgent need of Mr. Robert.

  Nothing whatsoever.

  She had disconnected herself from England. She had cut it off from her. There wasn’t anything that represented normal routine left. No postman at eight. No morning newspaper. No convenient telegraph forms. No milkman in the morning. No putting out the cat at night!

  She gave a cry of pleasure.

  A man sitting a little away from her turned at the sound and looked at her curiously.

  ‘Well, upon my soul!’ said he.

  It was Oliver Banks.

  II

  Although he was practically a stranger to her, and they had certainly met under peculiar ‒ Cuthbert would have called them promiscuous ‒ circumstances, she found that she was overjoyed to see him. She was quite surprised at herself.

  ‘Fancy you being here!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘I wanted a cruise, and quite frankly you put the idea into my head.’

  Later she thought, ‘Heavens, he followed me! How awful! But at the time she was so enchanted by the sight of a friendly face that she never thought anything of the sort.

  ‘It’s nice to see you,’ she said.

  ‘How are you liking it? Is it what you expected?’

  ‘It’s much more magnificent. It is so gorgeous that it rather frightens me. I ‒ I hadn’t thought of it being like this. I am afraid I shall be awfully out of it.’

  She was remembering the tweeds and the two-and-eleven-penny plimsolls that she had bought on Eleanor’s advice as being just the things for wearing on deck. So far nobody was wearing plimsolls. Most of them had those white shoes with brown strappings which she had thought to be fast and conspicuous. The plimsolls would be far more conspicuous, she felt. It is odd how one’s standards change.

  ‘I don’t believe I have brought the right clothes,’ she commented.

  ‘Nobody ever does the first time. It is the easiest thing in the world to shop in Marseilles! You just nip ashore, and get some more, that’s all.’

  Ann couldn’t see herself nipping ashore and doing anything of the sort. In the first place her French was limited, very much limited. Dr. Ahn’s First French Course had never been completed. She had stuck at page sixty-seven. The le mien, la mienne page.

  ‘There’s another thing,’ she said, glad to confid
e her difficulties in someone, ‘there is this lifeboat drill. I don’t know how I put the thing on.’

  ‘I’ll help.’

  She voiced the thought that had lurked like a ghost in the back of her mind for a while. ‘I suppose I’m bound to turn up? I can’t dodge it?’

  ‘People frequently do. It isn’t wise. Nor is it very fair on the Commander in case of an accident. But people do hide.’

  ‘I suppose they’ll look for me in my cabin?’

  ‘Obviously. You could say you were sick.’

  She thought very hurriedly of the only other place where she could hide, under the pretence of sickness, and she felt herself reddening.

  ‘I think I’d better turn up,’ she said.

  ‘You won’t find it so dreadful really. Everybody is very friendly, and they all take it in good part. It is rather fun.’

  Ann, who by reason of an isolated and introspective life was not a good ‘mixer’, wasn’t so sure about the fun part of the business.

  ‘I shall feel better when it is over,’ she admitted.

  All the same when eventually the bells went clanging through the ship, and she proceeded to her cabin for her life-saving apparatus, she did not fancy it at all. She was assailed with sheer panic. The bell went on insistently. She picked up the bundle by the strings, and went out into the alleyway. Nobody was there. Had there been other people, she could at least have seen what they looked like; as it was she felt more dismally afraid than before.

  She did not know what to do. If she stayed here, with the awful apparatus dangling from her hand, she felt sure that she would be discovered by some steward or official, who would hustle her along to what she now depicted to herself as a veritable shambles. She could not face it. She did not know what to do.

  Then she saw opposite, like an oasis in her desert of doubt, the most blue light above a doorway. This at least offered sanctuary. She dithered for a moment, then the sound of a bell and of footsteps sent her hurrying inside.