A Distant Dream

by Vivienne Dockerty

  Sara and Finbar waved a fond farewell from their doorstep, not wanting to hazard a trip to the quayside, beseeching them to have a pleasant journey – “God Speed, write when you can.” Bridie watched from behind the privacy of a net curtain, saying a little prayer for the health of the poor wee three year old. There was a lot of ocean to travel for the unsuspecting girl.

  It was as Bessie thought when they arrived at the dockside. It was teeming with what she saw to be life’s flotsam and jetsam. It had appeared that a sympathetic captain had offered free passage to England, providing that they didn’t mind travelling with the cattle on board. When the gangway dropped he had been inundated and soldiers had been called to stem the brawling amongst the men.

  Bessie looked sullen, no doubt still feeling the effects of her husband’s chastisement ringing in her ears. He was not about to be thwarted in his plans and had told her so quite strongly, which was quite unusual for the normally placid man. He held Molly’s hand firmly, once they had alighted from the cab, the driver placing their luggage in front of a small packet ship, moored between a grain ship and a barge carrying a large herd of sheep. Soldiers stood, dressed in the uniform of Her Majesty, nervously guarding the vessels in case another riot broke out.

  “Look, the Bessie Belle, Clarence said excitedly, pointing out the name of the ship that they were about to board on their voyage across the water to Plymouth. “How providential; it’s a sign, an omen, the Bessie Belle. Well would you believe it?”

  A sombrely dressed man, standing with his wife and three children nearby, looked over and smiled at Clarence’s levity, then relapsed into a certain gloom which could be seen on the faces of many of the waiting people. Seagulls circled overhead, screeching loudly as they swooped to sit on the grain ship’s railings, then flying off again as sailors ran along the deck carrying long poled shovels.

  “Have you got the tickets?” Bessie asked, on seeing an official looking person, who after walking down the Bessie Belle gangplank had stopped to talk to a man nearby, who was fumbling in his jacket pocket.

  “Yes, in the carpet bag, all documents, certificates, tickets, all here safely. We’ll be away soon, looking at the tide and the way the wind is blowing.”

  He held out his tickets, which were scrutinised in detail by the official, then he was told to climb up the gangplank and wait for instructions.

  “Want Maggie,” said a forlorn little voice at the side of Clarence, tears beginning to fall as Molly stared up at the ship, which must have looked like a big brown monster to her.

  “And yer will do one day,” he lied, picking her up along with his bag, and walking forward, as they followed a crew man who had loaded their trunks on each of his shoulders and was walking ahead. “But today we’re going for a sail in the Bessie Belle.”

  The sound of chattering and excited babbling could be heard from the quayside, as the passengers were directed to descend the ladder to the deck below. Clarence looked back as seven young girls and one more mature looking one, rattled up the gangplank noisily.

  “Wait at the top, girls”, the one who seemed to be in charge shouted. “Best behaviour or you’ll be thrown in the brig by the captain.”

  Clarence grinned at her sauciness, then followed the others into the gloom below. The Bessie Belle had been pressed into service as a passenger ship, after its owner, a wealthy shipping agent, had decided it would be more lucrative to carry people than the bales of wool that he normally had carried to the mills of Lancashire. Thus, the hold had been converted by attaching rough planking around its walls. If the voyagers felt dismay as their feet landed at the bottom of the wooden ladder, because of the rancid odour that still lingered, they didn’t show it. Soon, when the hold was fit to bursting with humanity, the sound of the anchor being lifted met their ears. They were silent as the ship slipped its harbour moorings and headed out into the choppy waters of the Garavogue River. It was as if the passengers were holding their collective breath. Then one by one a comment was made, a conversation started, a wrap of sandwiches crackled or there was the sound of a bottle stop being opened.

  Bessie, having been given a basket of food by Sara, with enough to last the family a couple of days if they didn’t make pigs of themselves, brought out some bread, a lump of cheese, a bag of biscuits and a stone bottle filled with a homemade lemon drink. She laid it on a white table square, in the bit of space created on the planking by putting Molly on Clarence’s knee. The feast was eyed by one of the girls, who Bessie assumed, from the similar dark grey dresses that all of the seven nearby were wearing, came from an orphanage. She smiled and opening up the paper bag that held the biscuits, she offered one to her.

  “No” said a sharp voice nearby, making Bessie jump, as if the person thought she was about to poison the young girl.

  “She mustn’t, I am sure you wouldn’t have enough to spare for the others.”

  “Sorry,” Bessie mouthed to the youngster and put the biscuits back in her bag. They could wait for a while until they were out onto the ocean.

  “I’ll go up on deck now that we’ve cleared the harbour,” Clarence said, staring sympathetically at a woman who had just been sick and was clearing up the mess as best she could. “Somebody has to keep an eye to Molly, so I’ll smoke my pipe then come back down again.”

  Others followed his example, no doubt waiting for the smell of sick to disappear.

  “Are yer bound for Adelaide?” He asked a man who appeared to be in his mid-thirties and was staring out across the ocean, seemingly weighted down with the troubles of the world on his narrow shoulders.

  “That I am,” he replied. “And you?” Clarence nodded, about to light his pipe, but a playful wind kept blowing his matches out so the man cupped his hands around the next match and Clarence was able to start his pipe.

  “George Comayne,” the man took Clarence’s free hand in his and shook it. “Recently from Westport, but my wife and I have decided to seek a better life for us and our children.”

  “Clarence Filbey. Me wife and I have a little girl called Molly. We had a farm, been in our family for generations, but what with the landlord wanting us to start rearing the sheep and increasing our rents for the privilege of it, we decided to leave these shores for a new life.”

  George nodded in agreement.

  “Aye, that was what caused me and the wife to look for pastures new. I had a little school not far away from St. Mary’s, in one of the rows of cottages. Just a single classroom where I taught the sons of a few farmers and one or two of the better off from the village, but last year as you know, times were hard especially after that terrible winter. It wasn’t worth opening my door to the few who attended in the end.”

  “They’ll be plenty of work fer yer in the new country then,” said Clarence, wishing that his farming parents had, had the foresight to give him a little education too. “I can just about sign me name meself, it’s my Bessie who’s got the brains.”

  “We’ve a lot of water to travel to Australia, Clarence. I am sure I could help you with a bit of learning if you’d like me to.” George looked pleased. Perhaps he could charge a few shillings for his tutoring; there must be plenty of people that were emigrating who couldn’t read or write.

  “Aye, mebbe yer could, though I warn yer I’m a slow learner, but it’ll give us both something to do when there’s nothing but the ocean to feast our eyes upon.”

  Chapter Three

  The two men stayed talking, until Clarence suddenly remembered that he had left Bessie with the promise that he would be back as soon as he had smoked his pipe. He didn’t want to antagonize her further as she was still annoyed about the fact that they were to travel in steerage with the “hoi polloi.”

  It wasn’t as if she had come from a grandiose family. She was only the daughter of a village slater after all, although her father had scraped the money together to send her to a hedgerow school. She enjoyed rubbing shoulders with Sara, who had a good living with her money lending husband and
one of Sara’s daughters had married a solicitor, which in Bessie’s opinion had brought the family up a notch or two. She appeared content when he arrived to take his place on the planking beside her, though the noise below was deafening, people having relaxed now that the journey was underway. Molly seemed to have been taken under the wing of the young girl whom Bessie had offered the biscuit to. They were playing some kind of game on the floor with a cotton reel and Bessie had been chatting with the older girl in charge, telling her a little of her life on the farm.

  “A bit happier?” he asked, squeezing her arm in a friendly fashion, hoping that her frown would turn into a smile. “Would yer like to go up top whilst I keep an eye to Molly, though she looks as if she’s enjoyin’ herself with the young one there?”

  “I could do with the air,” she replied, not letting him off the hook just yet, as he still had a bit more suffering to do, considering he had been most unsympathetic towards her, especially as she knew he could afford to pay for cabin class on the ship that would take them to Adelaide. “Come with me, Filbey. Hannah can keep an eye to Molly and I’ll reward her later with a biscuit.”

  *

  She leant over to ask permission from the young woman whom she had begun to call Maura and who it seemed had the spurious title of Matron to the youngsters in her charge. It appeared that Maura and another girl were guardians of the orphans until they got to Adelaide, where they would be handed over to the authorities and set to work.

  “It’s the best decision,” Clarence said, as the couple stood on deck looking over to the tiny fishing village, then across to the islands in Killala Bay. He had played on those islands with his now dead brothers and his cousins from Sligo, when they had come to stay at the farm in their holidays. “It would have been the divil of a future, livin’ hand to mouth, tryin’ to find the extra rent for his mightiness. They’ll turn the land over to grazin’,now they’ve got rid of me.”

  “Aye Sara was sayin’.” Sara had given her ten pounds, one pound for every Christmas present for the next ten years, but Bessie wasn’t going to tell him so!

  “Those young girls, they’re from an orphanage in Crossmolina. Maura, who’s their guardian, was tellin’ me. She and another woman with a group from Foxford are to take them all to an office in Adelaide, where they’ll be given jobs as servant girls. Poor girls are only eleven or twelve, tis a long way for them to travel.”

  “Better than no jobs at all, Bessie. Will Maura be looking for a job when she gets there too?”

  “I think so. She didn’t say, though she did say she liked working with children in the orphanage. I didn’t tell her we got Molly from an orphanage; she can think I had a late baby.”

  Clarence nodded in agreement.

  “I was talkin’ to a man from Westport. See, he’s over there, with his wife and youngsters. He was sayin’ he’s a teacher, but the ten pupils attending his school two year ago dropped down to one, so he had close the place down in the end. He couldn’t find work in the area, I suppose educatin’ is the last thing on people’s minds when they’re tryin’ to keep body and soul together. He’s travellin’ to Adelaide as a carpenter. He has his indentures, trained for his skill as a young man when his parents were on their uppers, but he hopes one day to start his teachin’, even if its tutorin’ from home.”

  “God Bless him.”

  Bessie felt weepy. There were so many tales of people down on their luck but willing to pick themselves up by their boot straps. She hoped that their sacrifice of home and country would come right for them all in the end.

  “At least we’ll be goin’ on a decent ship,” Clarence said. “Finbar was tellin’ me of the coffin ships that some of the landlords had clubbed together for to send their workers across to Canada. They were lured with promises of land, free accommodation and money, a paltry sum, but as much as a labourer’s wages for the next five years. The ships they hired were leaky tubs, not even fit to transport cattle in and they were herded on with barely a place to rest themselves. They were made to pay a great amount for the little food and water that was tipped down the hold once a day, buckets were provided for a lavatory and there were dirty old blankets to wrap themselves in. Was it any wonder that fights broke out, dysentery and disease spread rapidly and there was hardly a soul who wasn’t dead when they got there?”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”

  Bessie crossed herself and without another word left him alone with his thoughts. He didn’t tell her that Finbar had given him thirty pounds, which he could give back when he became a millionaire!

  They were passing the entrance to Clew Bay, when he decided that he would return to the deck below, eat a little of the pie Sara had also put in the basket, then rest if he could as many of the passengers, including the girls from the orphanage, had swamped the upper deck, pointing out the coast in the distance where Westport and Newport lay. George Colmayne and his family would probably be finding it hard not to shed a tear.

  It was six o’ clock before they made the southern coast of Ireland. By this time it was raining hard as they sailed into St. George’s Channel, there to steer along the coast of Wales across from Cardigan Bay. They would travel through the night, passing the mouth of the Bristol Channel and making landfall by the middle of the day.

  The passengers were trapped once the hatch was closed for overnight safety. Some rested if they could, some talked between themselves desultorily, whilst the children who were hemmed into the confined quarters began to make nuisances of themselves. Molly watched, her thumb in her mouth, eyes wide as she looked at a few big boys tearing up and down playing tag with one another. Bessie’s lips became even tighter as she witnessed the noisy scene. Once again, the thought of sharing her life with a mass of ill-bred people for the next six months, gave her the shivers and she felt like jumping ship. What a meanie she was married to. She knew that Filbey had stashed a load of money, as she had found it one day when he’d been over getting supplies from Ballina. There had to be more money than he had confessed to, from the days when his cattle had sold well at the market and from when his wheat had fetched a decent price. It wasn’t as if they’d led an opulent life and there was still the rent to the landowner to pay.

  She had searched through the trunk which he kept on the floor in the room where Grandad Filbey had slept all those years before. It was full of yellowing papers; ownership of goods, certificates of marriages and deaths appertaining to his ancestors. She had spent some time reading of the lives that had gone before them while sitting on the dirty lumpy mattress, which they had later given as a farewell gift to Maggie, their servant girl. She had moved the trunk, after she had got up to return despondently to her duties and noticed a crack in the floorboard, which upon investigation proved to be the hiding place she had been searching for. There it had been, all of her husband’s worldly wealth sitting in a leather pouch under her nose in a small compartment. He must have put it there quite recently, of that she was sure.

  *

  It was misty on that November morning, when the Bessie Belle nosed her way into Plymouth Docks and anchored along the seawall. Her passengers had been up on deck since the hatch had been removed at cock crow, wanting to be one of the first to see the emigrant ship that they would be travelling on. There it was, the Umpherston, a 470 ton, teak built barque, moored in front of a low built building with an overhanging roof.

  Bessie’s heart sank, probably in common with a lot of other folk when they saw the mass of people down below; standing, scurrying, dodging horse-drawn vehicles, the broughams and hansom cabs, dray-carts, stevedores, sailors and well-wishers. All with business that day on the busy dockside. So, this was it then, six months of trying to survive alongside the would-be inhabitants of a foreign land in a hand to mouth existence. What was more, she thought,her heart sinking heavily, they were never going to pass this way again in her lifetime.

  “Come on Bessie, chin up, grab your bag and Molly and we’ll find our way to the ticket office. The trunk
s should be loaded on the Umpherston shortly.” Clarence led them down the gangplank, whistling cheerfully, whilst Bessie, her shoulders slumped dejectedly and her mouth turned down, followed behind with Molly.

  They were among the first to join the queue from the Bessie Belle. The line stretched from the door of the office to the two officials behind the counter, who were scrutinising each embarkation order that every passenger had to provide. Some were turned away which caused a lot of shouting, some passed the others in the queue looking solemn, others bright and cheery, but by the time the Filbeys reached the counter themselves, Bessie was feeling so wretched she felt like having a cry.

  “Not much room now, Govner,” the official was saying to her husband, after Clarence had handed over the document and was about to count out the cash for their quarters. “Mid-ships is full, seems that the Commissioners have issued too many married couple orders. Your wife could travel with the single women and you with the men.”

  They looked at each other in disbelief. Travel apart for the whole of the journey! A whole five or six months, depending on the weather, living apart. Bessie felt faint, whether it was from what she had just heard, or because it was hot in the stuffy room. She leant against Clarence for support.

  “We’ll have a cabin.” What had he just said? We’ll have a cabin?

  She looked at her husband in astonishment as he began to dole out sovereigns from the leather pouch she’d seen under the floorboard. Her legs went weak and she would have fallen, if it wasn’t for the man who was standing behind.

  “Two ships came in from Cork and Dublin before yours did,” the official said by way of explanation as he gave back change, after charging Clarence twenty five pounds each for a second class cabin. “Must be the thought of all that fine weather in Australia.” He smiled at his little joke, as he stamped the embarkation order and handed it back with a grin.

  If she could have kissed Clarence there and then, she would have done! Bessie was so elated at the thought of not having to share a berth with the masses that her heels sprouted wings and she walked on air, clutching him by the arm in an effort to show how pleased she was. Molly looked up at the couple, wondering why on earth the woman was acting so happily; she had hardly ever seen her smile. In their flush of intoxication, neither realised that her name had not been recorded; there was no Molly Filbey written on the Ship’s Register, nor was there likely to be.