Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

  The room was hot, for already they could feel the warmth of Southern Spain. Ann’s hair behaved as it did in heat waves in England. It stuck to her head, and she had to keep pushing it back. ‘Long hair,’ she thought as she surveyed the neatly cropped heads of her fellows, ‘is not all a blessing. I wish I’d had it cut off ages ago, only Cuthbert was so violently opposed.’

  She ventured a few remarks. ‘She’s not a bad old trout,’ thought Fergus, and gave her a closer observation. He wasn’t sure that she was an ‘old trout’ after all; it was just the clothes that she wore, and the way she put them on, and the lack of make-up.

  ‘You can’t think,’ said Ann, ‘how I am looking forward to to-morrow. I’ve never been out of England before, and it is going to be wonderful.’

  Before Fergus could reply, Ethel leaned forward and said languidly, ‘But it’s only Gib.! Nobody could get up a thrill over Gib.’

  He felt that he ought to say something to help Ann. ‘I’ve been to Gib. a good many times,’ he commented, ‘and I always think that it is a place with a personality. It always thrills me.’

  Ann gave him a glance which said gratefully, ‘Thank you so much. I felt it would be.’

  He thought, ‘She is really rather nice.’ …

  VI

  Early next morning Ann felt the ship slowing down. She moved no longer with the same urgency, rising and straining, her beams complaining, her decks groaning a little. Looking out of the porthole as she dressed, Ann saw the land on the far side. It was bluer than any hills in England, and it rose in acute peaks. She was looking for the first time on Africa, which until now had been only associated with the hymn,

  Where Afric’s sunny fountains

  Roll down their golden sand.

  No sunny fountains, no golden sand … just blueness, unending blueness …

  She dressed quickly, for now she was fired with the keen desire to see what lay on the land, and she hurried on deck. Land lay on either side, and ahead of them she saw the gloomy hulk of that rock which is Gibraltar. She saw the light of early morning, rose and amber on the hyacinth points of the fountainless, sandless Afric, and on the opposite side the little white city of Tarifa, curled like a necklace of pearls into the dip of dark hills.

  A few people were clustered together under the bridge, viewing the approaching land with approval, but for the main part the ship was occupied with bath and breakfast.

  ‘I don’t think much of it,’ said an old lady peevishly; ‘travel is not what I thought. Not so gay. Why, it might be anywhere.’

  ‘There are places round Sheffield that could knock it into a cocked hat,’ said an obvious North-countryman.

  ‘Oh, you come from the provinces?’ suggested someone with the superiority of Bayswater.

  ‘No, I don’t. I come from Manchester, and Manchester’s a fine city.’

  Ann burned with indignation, for how could you compare Sheffield or Manchester with Africa? She went down to her food, hurrying through it, depressed by the sight of travellers who had lost their enthusiasms and who intended to remain comfortably below until the anchor dropped. She would not have missed this precious moment. The hot sun rising and piercing through the mist which lay like a grey blanket over the top of the rock. Golden shafts of light piercing down into the sea beneath, like so many golden spears. There was just a little wind, probably of their own making, and it fanned her face. She felt the flush of exhilaration; this was so far from home, something new, something so different. And here there was no Cuthbert.

  A thousand miles stretched between her and convention, and all the difficulties and throes. A thousand miles between her and a powder-speckled mantelshelf, an office where typewriters jangled and jarred, a bed-sitter where Mrs. Puddock indulged in her moods. She was approaching a new land, and she would go ashore. She wanted to be alone. She would probably cry at the sheer beauty of the dream come true. She felt that she would enjoy that cry enormously, and that she would not be able to indulge it so comfortably if someone were with her. She had that beautiful feeling that you get when you are in the middle of a very sad but fascinating book, which you are convinced will reduce you to pleasurable tears.

  There she stood in the bows, staring at the approaching land.

  ‘It’ll be a good hour before we drop anchor,’ said a man beside her; ‘it’s a goodish way off yet.’

  He was looking through glasses, which his wife had bought for the opera (not that they ever went to the opera, but they were useful from the upper circle at a musical comedy). ‘Would you like a peep?’ he asked.

  Ann peeped. In her excitement she had forgotten that he was a complete stranger. They talked animatedly.

  But were they really strangers? They had all seemed to be very formidable strangers when first she had come on board, and she had been frightened to death of them. But now they were no longer like that. They were fellow voyagers. There was a difference. Whereas at first she had felt that it would be fast and forward to speak to any one of them, she now believed that it was uncivil not to speak. With a smile for each, she found herself a new being. ‘Something is happening to me,’ she said, ‘something is changing me. It just shows what travel will do.’

  She went down to her cabin to get her hat. How her hair had blown about her face! Again she wished that it was close-cropped like her fellows. She ought to have had it cut. She wished she had been brave about it; it made you look years younger. Suddenly she wanted to look years younger. She wanted that blessed youth which slips away so quickly. Fine sand running through your fingers, something you cannot hope to keep.

  ‘If I’m brave enough I’ll get my hair cut one of these days,’ she told herself. Courage. That was what you wanted. Courage carried you far. She rushed back on deck. They did not seem to have progressed an inch. Ann had yet to learn that it takes a ship a long time to make harbour.

  VII

  At last they had steamed up the bay to their anchorage. The officials had come on board, the tenders were coming out from the Commercial Mole. Ann, bewildered, half drunk with the thrill of it, leaned on the taffrail and watched. There were little fruit boats rowed by dark-skinned lads; she looked at the glow of oranges and of green grapes, and figs darkly bruised one against the other.

  ‘For all the world like Berwick Street market,’ said a clever young man.

  She turned on him angrily. ‘It’s not a bit like Berwick Street market. How could it be?’

  ‘Only my little joke.’

  ‘A silly little joke,’ she commented. She wasn’t going to listen to people joking about the lovely new land. It was the land of new promise to her.

  And now she was in the first tender, sitting against the side, and watching people swarming down the gangway. They were moving away from the big comfortable sides of the great liner. The people around her were mostly familiar by sight, although she did not believe that she would ever know their names. Names were difficult on a cruise; people were just people. You did not label them. Ann had discovered from her stewardess that Gibraltar was not a dangerous place. British money was in circulation, and it was quite English ‒ she would be safe there.

  Unfortunately, before Ann had gone a hundred yards from the Commercial Mole she had discovered that it was not so English as she had supposed, and that she was doubtful about the safety of it.

  In the little street she was met by an array of odd-looking, rickety little carriages.

  ‘Carozzi?’ called a darkly smiling driver.

  There were remarkable horses, and cadaverous coachmen all armed with enormous whips. They called to her, they hailed her as a long-lost friend.

  ‘Hey, Mees. Rosia Bay. Europa Point. I take you.’

  She tried to pass them by without deigning a reply, but a more persistent jehu stirred her tenderly with a long whip.

  ‘I take you. Rosia Bay. Europa Point. See-a the sights.’

  She said, ‘No, thank you,’ and hurried onwards, her cheeks flushed a little. They had reminded her of th
e four-wheelers you saw outside Worthing station years ago when they had first gone there. A dingy array.

  She came to the Water Port gate, and here, rounding the corner, she found herself face to face with a Moor. She had not expected this in the so-English Gibraltar. A Moor, who walked in stately fashion, his eyes seeking those of no woman; his long clean robes sweeping the ground. He walked so proudly, with that grim majesty of mien which is wholly Moorish, and she saw behind him the kaleidoscopic glimpse of the markets and the women selling flowers. It wasn’t at all English. It was ‘India’s coral strand’ and ‘Afric’s sunny fountains’ and ‘spicy breezes’ all rolled into one.

  Ann never knew how she braved the dangers of Main Street on that bright morning. Women with dark handkerchiefs tied over their heads sat on the kerbs or on the cathedral steps. They were selling baskets of flowers, freesias, roses and lilies. Their scent came to her as she walked. There were donkeys with laden panniers. Little foreign shops from which came the aromatic scent of sandalwood and cedar and incense all in one. From the windows there fluttered Persian rugs and Spanish shawls, embroideries, laces, and leatherwork in one mingling collection. The Indians standing at their shop doors each seemed to recognize her as an old friend.

  ‘Good morning, Madam.’

  ‘This way, Mees.’

  ‘Step inside. Have a look round. No need to buy.’

  One after the other, and she with quickening tread and heightening colour tried not to listen. It was disturbing, the insistence of the tradespeople desirous to do business, and not a bit English; she could not think what on earth the stewardess had been talking about.

  It was hot too. She ought not to have worn a tweed coat and skirt, and her hair was heavy on her neck. She told herself if, later in the cruise, it was going to be hotter than this, she really would have it cut off, and not care what Cuthbert said about it. It would be too late to say much then anyway! She took off her coat and carried it. It was far hotter than Worthing even in a heat wave. Sticky hot! ‘A lemonade,’ she thought, ‘would be lovely, but where dare I get one?’ She decided that she daren’t.

  She came out of the South Port gate into a strange peace. And she knew now that she was standing in the new land, the land that had been the torch with which to fire her imagination. The burial ground of the heroes of Trafalgar lay on her left; she saw the trees as they bent together in green communion. In the grass, among the tangle of verdure, crimson geraniums ran riot; a pepper tree blew its fragile branches, and a little monkey climbed out of the boughs and clambered higher for safety. She said before she could stay herself, ‘Oh!’ for it was an amazing sight. She had never before seen a monkey save on a hurdy-gurdy, or at the Zoo, where she had taken Gloria when she was younger.

  She went on ahead into the Alameda, and for a little while she walked and actually wept for the beauty of it all. She smelt the exquisite smell of flowers blend together in a divine essence. She walked in the grateful shadow of the trees clustering side by side. She rose higher and saw the brilliant blue of the bay, all the bluer for being seen through the dark tracery of branches bent together. Already carozzis were galloping past, packed with people from the ship, dashing for Rosia Bay (where there is nothing to see) or for Europa Point (which is practically the same place and where there is still less to see). Those dreadful people who would probably compare lovely, lazy Gibraltar with Northern England.

  She climbed higher still.

  She reached a road and she saw another woman on that road. She was old and withered, wrinkled like some summer apple stored over long into the spring. She was an old Spaniard in a tired black frock, which hung limply like a shroud over her half-dead body, which was veritably all bones. A small black shawl hooded her head, and she clutched the ends together with brown hands horribly reminiscent of bird claws. Ann had sat down on the low wall to pant. She really would have to do something about these tweeds, and her long hair, and her woolly underclothes. This was unbearable!

  There was no one else in the white road, deep with dust, with cacti lifting fleshly arms on either side, and some burning red with flowers. Ann wondered if some horrible situation was about to develop. She would have gone back into the Alameda, save that she had all the Englishwoman’s reserve; she did not want to do anything at all outré. Habit had made Ann dreadfully afraid of the outré. She stepped down from the wall and walked forward determined to take no notice. The woman, approaching, adopted a fawning attitude, and held out her hand.

  ‘Malo piccaninny,’ she whined.

  Ann tried to steel her heart.

  ‘Malo, malo piccaninny.’

  It wasn’t any use. She tried not to meet the old eyes of the woman who had nearly finished with life; eyes sunk back into two pits on either side of her beak-like nose. She was like a vulture, a vulture living on flesh. Somehow Ann felt that if she did not do something about it, she would be consumed by this old woman; drawn up and out of herself, and there would be no staying it.

  She fumbled in her bag and felt inside the purse for some coppers. For a moment there burnt a light like a savage flame in the eyes of the woman who had nearly finished with life. It was the flame of a burning and besetting greed. A little shamedly Ann held out her hand with the money jingling together.

  ‘Here you are,’ she said.

  ‘Grazzi, Señora, grazzi’; then she broke into a mumbled English. ‘All happiness, Señora, make much of life while you are still young. Look at me!’

  She indicated the gaunt face with the folds of the shawl about it, emphasizing the holes and the hollows. The gums in which only a few yellowed teeth remained. The shrivelled skin, the colour of a decaying apple. The wisps of greyed hair. Her gesture was dramatic.

  ‘Look at me!’

  Suddenly Ann felt in vigorous contrast her own firm flesh, her brownish fair hair, her even teeth. She turned sickly and she hurried away, the little pebbles and the hot dust of the road flying under her feet. She heard the old woman laughing bitterly. A poor old woman, who had nothing left, not even that outer appearance, the husk.

  In the shelter of the Alameda, Ann felt her knees shaking. She sat down on a rock seat, and whether it was the beauty of the place or the shock she did not know, but suddenly she was glad that the incident had happened. She had grown so used to being old; well, of an age! She had never been actually young, but always like this; reliable, friendly, romanceless, eventless. She supposed she had always envied those glamorous young people who had had youth, the joy of that time, and she had grown to believe that most certainly now, when she was past thirty, she had not any right to that precious heritage. She wasn’t young. She was almost middle-aged; soon she would be like the old hag on the upper road. Not exactly, of course, because climate and poverty had withered that old woman more entirely, but disfiguring old age would eventually descend on Ann. She took a little glass out of her bag and glanced at the reflection. The lovely languid heat of the Alameda received her. She saw the reflection of a mild-eyed placid woman, with a low brow and thick folds of hair drawn back into a bun on the nape of her neck. She thought, ‘I’ve got to get that shingled; I’d look years younger, and it is hot, and it makes my head ache.’ It did not matter how distasteful it might be to Cuthbert, she told herself; he was remote and matterless, and the picture of the old hag and her warning was distinct and close.

  The recklessness of the mood did not pass.

  It accompanied Ann, a somewhat new Ann, up the Main Street again. Even here she might have demurred (save that she was so dreadfully hot), but outside the English hairdressing saloon a man was standing who was obviously really English. She inquired the price, and after that there was no escape. Doubts dissolved themselves into nothingness and she found herself sitting in a chair, with her long thick hair in a smother on the floor. Well, she had done it now!

  It seemed that the years fell off her with her hair, and she was almost afraid of the youthful reflection in the glass. The barber clipped and chattered. He told her stories of
the Barbary apes who come down from the Rock and have strange carryings-on in people’s houses. One lady had in fact woken at dawn to find a great and hairy ape there, lying in bed beside her. Children, after watching the apes playing in the gardens, were wont to ask embarrassing questions, usually at the most awkward moments. Ann was extremely worried as to what he would tell her next. The truth of the matter was that the barber was glad of someone to talk to, after ‘Rock Scorps’ and the old clientele of English inhabitants, and he was making the most of it.

  Finally Ann left.

  Ann, who had taken a great step forward, and who was now a little afraid of it. Also her hat felt queerly large; she felt that on the slightest excuse it would spin round, or go rolling off and up the road. She dreaded passing through the narrower part of the Main Street, but it had to be negotiated. She clutched at her hat. It was indeed a passage perilous, and she asked herself why she had ever had it cut off. An ingratiating Indian gentleman in a tightly waisted suit approached her warily.

  ‘You want a nice shawl?’ he suggested.

  Ann, who wanted nothing so much as to get back to her cabin with the hat still on her head, said, ‘No, thank you.’

  He laid a coffee-coloured and detaining hand upon her arm.

  ‘I make a good bargain. I like you,’ he said. ‘Come inside and have a look round.’

  Ann entirely misinterpreted his intentions. Contact was new to her, and entirely alien to her nature. She felt a flood of horror, she felt a rather dreadful quivering inside her. She wrenched herself free and fled. The familiarity of the detaining hand had horrified her. In her progress up the street she had discovered the futility of argument with these people; frigidity was no more helpful. She quickened her steps and went hurriedly onwards.

  Ann in her frantic hurry was nearly run over by a galloping carozzi, full of people from the cruise who had been beguiled into paying a large sum of money to ‘see-a the bull-fight, bull-ring, and brigands’, and were now being conveyed towards La Linea, which, although they did not know it, was entirely peaceful, but where they would be convinced that they had seen ten shillings’ worth of fun. The Gibraltarian had had some previous acquaintance with the credulity of ‘cruisites’.