Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

  She had hated the disloyalty which allowed her to realize it, and yet she could not choke it down. She said, ‘I wish you would not talk like this. I don’t suppose I have ever proved anything for myself. I’ve been a sort of a chameleon.’

  ‘Life is full of chameleons.’

  ‘That doesn’t make them any more original.’

  From B deck came the sound of the ship’s band, diligently assisted by the young man who helped in the post office. From the side came whispered caressings in deck chairs.

  ‘I’m plumb crazy about you.’

  ‘Get along, do.’

  ‘You know what I feel. You know what I want?’

  ‘I know what you aren’t going to get.’

  Other voices, girls in conversation together.

  ‘Oh, my dear, I’m having a simply marvellous time. A most marvellous time. Two boys tried to kiss me to-night. Two boys. Won’t the tennis club at home seem awful after this? The office hops too, they’ll be agony! Oh, it’s marvellous.’

  Oliver said to Ann, ‘Shall we dance?’

  III

  Ann had no time to refuse, for Oliver accepted it as the natural thing. She had never danced since her youth. Then her mother, less narrow than her father, and decidedly obstinate, had insisted on escorting the child into the local town on a bicycle, to Miss White’s dancing class. She remembered bicycling through the snow, her slippers in a neat little bag that her mother had embroidered, dangling from the handle-bars. And once on the way Ann had broken a suspender, and had been terrified in the cloak-room when she had tried to pin it up with a safety pin. It had snapped again in the reel steps ‒ abominable steps they were too ‒ and now Ann could only connect dancing with a broken suspender, and the reel steps, and the instructions ‘Behind and out, behind and hop,’ of Miss White standing up before her little flock.

  Ann had danced nothing but the old-fashioned waltz, and the schottische and the reel steps and the positions! Yet for all that she had a sense of rhythm. Music was a pulse within her, a pulse that set her moving. It was more than just a tune; it was a pattern of sound in space. Something that the wind and the rain and all Nature had. She was dismayed to think how much she wanted to dance, and how against all nice standards it was.

  ‘I … I haven’t danced these new dances at all,’ she said in a little frightened voice.

  ‘Oh, they’re easy, you’ll just drop into them.’ He put an arm about her, and drew her to the deck.

  After that Ann did not know what happened; she did not care much. Forgotten the shingling and the dancing, and the sin of it all. It was an adorable sensation. The lovely, rather tragic tune of ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, the appeal of it, the ship rolling just slightly so that every little while one’s feet slipped away. Gay lanterns. A laughing, merry crowd. The urge for movement. It was all intangible. She knew nothing of dancing, only some vague intuition taught her to allow her body to follow his, pliant and yielding.

  ‘Splendid,’ he said approvingly.

  A new entity stirred in Ann, a new knowledge, a new world which opened up before her, a world dominated by music, by movement as an expression of that music. She would have liked to go on for ever, but she could not.

  The tune died down. The feet were silenced. The deck chairs on either side were filled again, and the ship pressed through the separate tides on either side.

  ‘Well, I have to write some letters,’ said Oliver.

  ‘And I must go to bed.’

  She was thinking, ‘When I get to Marseilles I’ll get an evening frock. I’ll get something worthy of it. I’m sick of semi affairs, and of good serviceable lace that doesn’t crush in packing.’ The stir of life was within her.

  Before she went down to her cabin she crept on to D deck. She knew it would be deserted. She passed the barber’s shop, shrouded and veiled for the night; she went along the alleyway where a steward was whistling brightly as he cleaned the shoes. Beyond was the after end of D deck. It was very still.

  She stood against the taffrail, leaning her head to a wooden stanchion which supported her. Something had happened to her; something that was unreal. The old woman in the Alameda had awakened some realization of the curfew to youth already tolling within her. Youth that had not yet gone so far as to be entirely out of her reach. She could still touch it with her finger tips. Then to have had her hair shingled; left behind in Gibraltar, that very hair that she had cared for and brushed so repeatedly, now blown into somebody’s dustbin in a Spanish courtyard. Men talking to her, highly improperly Cuthbert would have said, and she was still uneasy as to whether Cuthbert was not right.

  She had realized that there were other ways of thinking, less definite and more tolerant ways, and that they were the lines along which she had always wanted to think.

  She stood there very still indeed.

  An old lady who had come on this cruise to please a daughter who had ‘got on’ in life, and had ‘got ideas’ that were above their position, came on to D deck.

  ‘Looking at the sea, my dear?’ she asked kindly.

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Funny, that is one of the things I can’t do. Never could. Not even off the end of the pier. It always turned me up. Liver, you know.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ann gravely.

  It was a very grave matter.

  Chapter 3

  I

  When the ship was passing the Balearic Isles, Ann was indulging in daydreams as to the frocks she would buy at Marseilles. Her things were much too hot, they were unbearable, and they were also far too serviceable. She must have been mad to suppose that she could have stuck out three whole weeks of tweeds in the Mediterranean. Why, she would have melted! Now, in the hot sunshine, with the blue water being swept away from the ship’s side, and the almost bewildering blue above, the only garment of them all that looked to be even wearable was the scarf; blue, pink and mauve in a maze of colour.

  And she had nothing suitable to wear the scarf with.

  She’d buy a white frock, much older women were wearing white, and some of the clothes on board were queer enough. She did not need to worry on the side of peculiarity.

  At Marseilles, she promised herself, she would go shopping. It would take some courage in a strange country, and she was convinced that her French would not meet the strain. Miss Brown, the stewardess, informed her that everybody spoke English, but then Miss Brown had said that Gibraltar was so English, whereas now Ann knew it wasn’t. It wasn’t English at all. Miss Brown gave lucid details when she brought in the apple in the morning. You took a taxi at the docks, and drove to Fifinelle; the stewardess said that was where most of the ladies shopped. Ann promised herself a silk frock, which she could wear with her scarf, and a linen frock, and a small hat ‒ something more suitable for the newly-shingled head, and for deck wear. At the moment nothing fitted her. Her hair blew about, it was most trying. She must have some strapped shoes, she told herself, everyone had those. It was queer that in England she had thought they looked the height of fastness, yet here she was contemplating buying a pair for herself. She thought it must be the sun. In the brightness of this sunshine, which had lost all the thinness and the paleness of England, things looked so different, colours were not the same.

  It was just as the moonlight made the nights different. Each night since they had left Gibraltar, she had danced in the enchantment of the moon. She had experienced great difficulty in writing a laborious letter to Cuthbert, because she had not dared to tell him the truth. The truth which was, ‘I am finding my real self at last. I thought I was growing old, I thought youth had been left behind, and instead new things are developing within me.’ So she sent Cuthbert different postcards which she had bought in Gibraltar ‒ views of the Neutral Territory, which he would not understand; Europa Point; Rosia Bay; Mediterranean Steps. She sent postcards which she had bought in the barber’s shop, of the Lounge, and B deck, and the boat deck, and the games deck of S.S. Allando. She sent postcards of S.S. Allando in profile so to
speak, with her three funnels against a deep blue sky.

  Ethel had commented on those funnels at table.

  ‘The last ship we travelled in had nice red ones with white rings,’ she had said. ‘I think I liked those better.’

  Fergus had groaned inwardly.

  It was a little trying when people chose their cruises by the colour of the funnels, with entire disregard for the efficiency of the line.

  On a postcard one was not supposed to say much, nothing that mattered anyway, and that was something. So Ann posted numerous cards in the letter-box of C deck marked, ‘To be cleared at Marseilles,’ and she felt that she had done her duty.

  II

  Marseilles is a city of tumult.

  It is more essentially docks than other dockyards, it is a riot of cobbled streets, and over it all broods the golden Madonna who keeps guard over the goings and comings of the sailors. Fergus told Ann all about the golden Madonna the night before the ship drew alongside the mole, but somehow Ann had not thought that Marseilles would be like this. It was breathlessly hot, with the town rising in tier upon tier of houses, and the mountains rising behind. She had not supposed that it would be so noisy, or so bustling, or so entirely commercial.

  ‘Just like Leeds,’ said a nice old lady who had been born in Leeds and swore by it, ‘only I bet the shops aren’t half so good. They are honest in Leeds, and I wouldna say so much for these here Frenchies.’

  That was not the sort of shopping that Ann intended to do, also she was in no mood for golden Madonnas, for now she was thinking of frocks and still more frocks.

  The heat had increased considerably, and she had discarded the woolly vest that her mother had always insisted on. (‘You’ve got a weak chest, dear, promise me you’ll always wear wool next to your skin,’ her mother had begged, and Ann had promised.) But now wool was unbearable. It had to go. She really did not care how indecent it might be; indecency and comfort, she felt, were even better than this extreme discomfort of a frightful decency.

  The new blood flowed in her veins and filled her like a warm fire. For to the woman over thirty who hears for the first time the call of youth, it is an urgent call. She knows that the years are piling up against her, but she has still a handful of precious months. To Ann they were weeks, three weeks, for assuredly youth would end at Tilbury when the wonder cruise terminated.

  After that ‒ she dare not think of it; a drabness, a dullness, a sinking back into the greyness of Mrs. Puddock’s bed-sitter, into the office routine. She did not care now if she spent every penny on this cruise, or at least a great many of her pennies, she would have the memory, and she must get cool!

  The purser obligingly changed her money into francs. In francs it looked a great deal more. She took up the little wad of notes, and she thought that surely she would not need a whole two thousand of them. She counted them out on the desk, and tried to get their arrangement into her head, then boldly, like a condemned man about to walk the plank, she marched down the gangway. Halfway down she was overtaken by Miss Bright. Miss Bright was a little lady well past middle age, who was in the habit of introducing herself as ‘Bright by name and Bright by nature’. She had spoken to Ann several times, nothing more than ‘Good morning’ it is true, but she now buttonholed her.

  She was wearing a strange costume about her small tubby person, a navy blue skirt and a blue print blouse of a style one would never have expected her to be able to buy in modern times. About the bosom of the blouse were pinned all manner of pendant belongings. Miss Bright’s gold watch, which had belonged to her mother, who had conveniently provided her daughter with the same initials. The watch dangled, its dial to the print blouse; its C.F.B., scrolled and so ornamented as to be undecipherable, blazoned to the outside world; it hung from a gold chain which ended in a golden bow artfully designed to conceal a pin. Beside the watch was a gun-metal disc with a button in the middle, and from this disc hung Miss Bright’s pince-nez. You pressed the button, and out flew yards of gun-metal chain. You pressed it again and the chain miraculously recalled itself, winding up inside the disc and drawing the pince-nez taut, despite the fact that quite often the button had been pressed accidentally, and the glasses had been perched on Miss Bright’s nose. On her head was a panama hat. Some of her family had lived abroad and this was a relic of that time; she had brought it at the instigation of her sister Emily, who had been quite sure that it would come in useful. It had come in useful. At Gibraltar it had blown off into the sea, and one of the sailors, endeavouring to reach it with his boat-hook, had overbalanced and had fallen in. Unfortunately the wetting had not irretrievably damaged it. Miss Bright insisted that nothing spoilt a real panama, and to prove her words was wearing it to-day. Perhaps it was a little more salt-stained, a little more shapeless, but it remained now spiked by the serviceable hat-pin to Miss Bright’s grey bun of hair.

  ‘Excuse me,’ beamed Miss Bright, ‘but if you are going ashore, might I come with you? Just up to the town, you know? Just up to the town?’

  Ann did not want her but she could not think of any good excuse by which to avoid her. It is rather difficult when you are accosted on the gangway. There seems to be nothing left to say. So they went down together, with the master-at-arms standing at the bottom in his beautiful and spotless white drill, and with his knowing, roving eye from under his cap. He had once driven a ’bus, and very hot work he had found it. This was much easier, though hot enough at times in the Mediterranean, and with some of the young ladies you got on these cruises … Funny, but you got so many of that sort of young lady!

  ‘We sail at eight, Madam,’ he warned them.

  Miss Bright sniggered. Fancy his thinking they would be away until then, all that time!

  ‘I was only going to have a look at the place,’ she told Ann as they climbed into a taxi.

  ‘I’m going to buy some clothes. Fifinelle is the shop.’

  ‘How interesting! French frocks! I do envy you.’

  Now it was obvious that she intended coming too. At heart Ann was not sorry, for her courage was beginning to fail her a little. Marseilles was not like Gibraltar, where she believed

  she might have managed. The difference was apparent by the way the taxi started over the cobbles, flinging the occupants each into the other’s arms. Small boys ran by the side, screaming demands in atrocious French, and equally abominable English. They offered themselves as guides; they clamoured for pence.

  ‘Oh dear, isn’t it cosmopolitan?’ purred the delighted Miss Bright. ‘I’m quite glad I’ve got you with me. You make me feel so safe. My mother always said girls should go about

  together.’

  Now Miss Bright’s need for caution must have ceased many years ago. She seemed however to believe that her virginity was in grave danger of attack, and she was taking every care. Ann did not know whether to laugh or to cry over her.

  Marseilles was not what she had expected. It was noisy, it seemed dangerous, cars rushing this way and that, chattering milk wagons. Little tabacs where people argued and fought; the whole city seemed to be confused and angry.

  ‘I am glad you are with me,’ she said to Miss Bright, ‘I hate driving about a strange place alone, and I have quite dreaded going into this shop alone, but cooler clothes I simply must have. The stewardess assures me that they all speak English.’

  ‘I’ll come too.’

  The taxi was driven as only French taxis can be driven. They spun round corners on one wheel, they missed other vehicles by the merest fraction of an inch. They climbed hills, zooming up them like an inebriated aeroplane; they boomed over crossings at grotesque speeds. Eventually they pulled up with a most disconcerting rattle outside the shop. The jerk of stopping was so unexpected, that both Ann and Miss Bright were again flung forward, and collided violently with the vase of dusty paper carnations with which the taxi was adorned. For the first time Ann noticed the advertisements for the prevention of mal de mar, and other strange but useful pharmaceutical accessories whi
ch hung about the cab. A little disgruntled they alighted.

  ‘I wait, oui?’ enquired the taxi driver.

  Ann was torn between the need for economy which had distressed her all her life until now, and the horror that no other means of locomotion might be available, and then she would be marooned. For never, never would they be able to find their way back alone. Marseilles was a positive labyrinth of streets and turnings, a wilderness of docks, all much alike, more streets, lots of hills, and then the commercial centre of the shops. She had noticed green gardens with trees under which amazing French nurses flirted with more amazing French poilus and matelots. Open air cafés ‒ she knew what Cuthbert would think of them ‒ and secretly she would have liked to partake of refreshment in them.

  ‘You may wait,’ she said impressively.

  ‘Oh dear now, isn’t that extravagant?’ said Miss Bright. They went inside together.

  III

  When the stewardess had suggested Fifinelle’s, she had mentioned it primarily because they spoke English there, and secondly because all the young ladies shopped at Fifinelle’s. It was essentially a young ladies’ shop.

  Ann saw it as very modern, rather a daring place, with its black glass portico, and the revolving door of cut steel. It glittered in the light; it twinkled wickedly and invitingly. Only two windows were to be seen, and they were disappointingly small. In one a single under-garment was displayed. It was an entoutcas, it announced, scanty in the extreme, perfectly cut. A chemise which ended in adorable knickers. Peach crêpe-de-Chine, with here or there an embroidered violet. It was, Ann, considered, a most immodest garment; she would have been quite frightened to have worn it. Why, in such an affair anything ‒ or everything ‒ might happen. It was obvious that this was the type of underwear destined for ladies of easy virtue. She did hope their frocks were not like that.