‘Ted – what are you doing? The train’s leaving…’
‘I’m coming with you,’ I said as the guard banged the door shut and blew his whistle. ‘It’s all right, don’t panic, I shall come back on the next train.’
She laughed out loud as the train lurched into motion. ‘What about your ticket?’
‘I’ll throw myself on the guard’s mercy. Anything,’ I declared, capturing and kissing her hand, ‘just to be with you a little longer.’
Blushing at that, she started to giggle. ‘You can’t come home with me – Mother would have a fit.’
‘I’ve told you, I’m going as far as Newton and catching the next train back. After which,’ I added with mock anguish, ‘I shall most likely pine away until I see you again.’
‘Six weeks…’
The rhythmic clacking of the wheels was like time itself, measuring out the allotted span. Alone in the dimly-lit carriage, we were serious suddenly, and wordless.
Gazing into those grey-green eyes was like looking down into the sea, a dizzying, hypnotic moment in which a fall is almost inevitable unless you pull away. I bent and gently touched my lips to hers; as she sighed I drew her into my arms. She was as innocent as I imagined, kissing like a twelve-year-old with lips firmly closed. But that, for me, was just as exciting as an eager, open-mouthed response.
Patience, I said to myself as she broke away with a little gasp. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkling as she pulled back to look at me. With an unfathomable expression she laid a finger against my lips before turning to draw the blind at the window.
‘Now,’ she said shyly, resuming her seat, ‘you may kiss me again…’
It was probably just as well that we gained some company at the next station.
21
Inexperienced but not prudish, Eleanor was fun-loving, generous, clear-sighted and loyal, and I doubt she could have lied to save her life. I knew she was for me.
Even so, it was not an easy courtship. I think her parents – particularly her mother – did not quite know how to deal with the situation. No doubt they’d made enquiries of Thomas Jones and knew I earned enough to set up home and keep a wife. But it seemed too impulsive, too hasty, not the way things were done in their world. They lived their lives according to the changing of the seasons; as farmers, they’d had the same neighbours for generations. On the other hand, a seafarer’s friends and neighbours were Board of Trade acquaintances – a large but shifting band of people, known and met from time to time on different ships. Family was a constant, but the time available to keep up with them was short. Finding a wife, making a family – that was the difficulty. No wonder seafarers ashore had a reputation for being impulsive.
Eleanor and I met in the first week of September. We spent two afternoons together in October – including the trip to the theatre – and three in November. It could not have been more different from my time with Dorothea.
Speaking in general terms, I’m sure the most committed of lovers have moments of hesitation, of needing time alone to think. We had too much solitude. We had time to burn. Time was our enemy, keeping us apart when my ship was riding the Atlantic storms, walking hand in hand with propriety during the few days we were in port.
Nothing could be casual. Eleanor couldn’t play hard to get – which is what her mother felt was right and modest in a young woman – she had to acknowledge that she wanted to be with me by coming to Liverpool when the ship was in, or by inviting me to Woodhead Farm whenever possible. Although she was 24 years old, meetings were difficult to arrange without her parents’ consent. Nevertheless, we did manage one remarkable afternoon in Warrington towards the end of November. She’d gone there to shop, and I – well, I just happened to be alighting from the Liverpool train as hers drew in from Newton. That apparently casual meeting had taken some working out with the aid of a Bradshaw; how we laughed about it, feeling like conspirators in some railway-centred plot. It made our closeness closer.
Sharing my umbrella, her arm tucked in mine, the intimacy of our walk through grey and drizzly streets was somehow heightened by the glow of lamplight from doorways and shop windows. Pausing here and there along the way, we entered a churchyard, pretending to view the rows of black and weeping memorials. In the shelter of a deeply carved doorway, hidden by the umbrella, we turned to each other and embraced. Her lips tasted of the rain at first, cool and glassy, before longings fuelled by solitude ignited and passion flared. For a moment – again, so briefly – I had a glimpse of the woman beneath the surface and wanted all of her. I drew her closer, the umbrella dipped, and suddenly rain was tapping me on the shoulder to remind me of where we were.
As breathless laughter caught us both I raised the makeshift canopy, embracing her with one arm while she pressed her lips again to mine.
Clinging to each other, attempting to be sober while dizzy with love and desire was like climbing the shrouds in the teeth of a gale. ‘It’s no good,’ I said at last, and emotion had me somewhere between laughter and heartbreak. ‘You’ll have to marry me, Ellie…’
I had thought of it: in fact in terms of being together I’d thought of little else. But I hadn’t planned it. Not like that, flat and practical, a salve to this burning. I’d imagined buying her a ring – perhaps in New York – and begging her to accept it as a token of my love.
But life catches you out.
‘Will I, indeed?’ she exclaimed, eyebrows raised, laughing up at me. ‘Is that what I must look forward to, Ted Smith, a bit of no-nonsense courtship followed by a no-nonsense wedding?’ She tapped me lightly on the chest. ‘I could have that any day of the week from the lads in the village. I thought you were different.’
She made to walk away, but I caught her arm. ‘Ellie – Eleanor – please. I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘What did you mean, then?’
Hamstrung by the damned umbrella, I cast it aside and tried to embrace her. ‘No,’ she said, fending me off. ‘I want you to tell me what you meant.’
What did I mean? What could I say? I’m in hell living like this, hardly ever seeing you, when what I want is to be with you all the time, from the moment my ship docks to the moment it leaves again. I want to take you to bed and not stir for three days, I want to take you to New York, I want…
Standing there in the rain, feeling like a small boy, I said, ‘I wanted to buy you a ring. I wanted to tell you how much I love you… I wanted to ask you to be my wife.’
There was a silence in which she gazed at me, her eyes, more grey than green that day, brimming with sudden emotion. ‘You could still ask. It doesn’t matter about the ring.’
‘Then let me hold you,’ I begged softly, reaching out to take her hand. ‘I need you to give me courage.’
Slowly, I drew her towards me. ‘I love you, Eleanor,’ I said as she came into my arms. ‘I want you so much… Marry me, tell me you’ll be my wife…’
‘Yes,’ she whispered against my lips, and the rain dripped a joyful tattoo beside us, while the fickle umbrella turned cartwheels across the graveyard.
~~~
My heart turned as many cartwheels as the dratted umbrella, but Eleanor’s answer was not without its reservations. I would have liked to marry at once; but, as Eleanor gently explained, her parents would never agree to that. And weddings take time to arrange; we would have to wait, at least until spring.
Rather than the full-blown family wedding she envisaged, I’d have been happier midweek with a special licence, a parson, and a couple of witnesses. But that was never going to be. I had to be thankful that when we dropped the bombshell, Eleanor’s father welcomed me as a prospective son-in-law, while her mother could find no serious objections. Mary Jane, I thought, viewed us with envy.
Before I could begin to chafe at the bit, however, my impatience was knocked flat. At the beginning of December, just days after I left on my next trip across the Atlantic, Mr Pennington died unexpectedly, and my engagement to Eleanor became a period of mourni
ng.
One way and another she had worked alongside her father most of her life, from helping with harvest and haymaking in childhood to working in the dairy as an adult. She was devastated by his death.
Having Eleanor’s letter from White Star’s office, as soon as I left the ship I took train for Newton. We met at the farm. Mrs Pennington, displaying a tact and generosity I’d not imagined her capable of, showed us into the drawing room, left us alone and closed the door. Holding Eleanor close, breathing in the scent of her hair, her skin, I tried to stroke away the grievous hurt.
‘He didn’t come in for supper,’ she said, repeating words she’d written to me, words I’d read only that morning. ‘He’d been seeing to a cow that wasn’t milking right, and – well, he just didn’t come in. So Mother sent John to see what was keeping him – supper was on the table – and John came back white as a sheet. He’s gone, he said, but he couldn’t make Mother understand. She kept asking where had he gone, what did John mean…’
‘Shock,’ I murmured, still in the throes of it myself. ‘She couldn’t accept it.’
Eleanor nodded, wiping tears. ‘Still can’t. He was her life.’ She sniffed and I handed her a fresh handkerchief. ‘A heart attack, the doctor reckons. We’d no idea…’
The engagement ring I’d bought in New York, all unknowing, was tucked away in my pocket. I’d planned it as a New Year present, but it was hardly a time for celebration. ‘You remember that day in Warrington?’
As she raised her head I had the reward of a small, watery smile. ‘How could I forget?’
‘Just remember that I love you – that we have each other…’
~~~
Even as I did my best to console her, it seemed other forces were at work. Throughout the winter, keen to help out where I could, I’d often stayed overnight at the farm on my few days ashore. Come spring, the time we’d hoped to be married, Eleanor told me she’d read something in a batch of journals passed on by a neighbour. The story had acted upon her imagination while I was away, casting her into a maelstrom of anxiety on my behalf.
The story, by W.T.Stead, ‘How the Mail Steamer went Down in Mid-Atlantic,’ was melodramatic and even nonsensical in places, but still there was enough in it to set my teeth on edge. Mid-Atlantic was a misnomer though. Western Ocean would have been more correct and Grand Banks more specific. The area is notorious for thick weather, and major collisions distressingly common.
There was also another hazard: fishing boats from St John’s, Newfoundland, small and ill-lit and difficult to spot. I’d had near-misses there. I’d often seen a mast sweep past the bridge – no lights aloft, only the glow of a lamp in the wheelhouse. Heart-stopping until I saw the vessel bobbing safely in our wake.
But of course that old story of Mr Stead’s was meant to illustrate something else entirely. The inadequate provision of lifeboats was a subject which came up every time a ship went down and people lost their lives. Circumstances seemed not to matter. The first question to be asked was always regarding the boats. Were there enough to rescue the ship’s company? The answer, generally speaking, was no. And while the non-mariners threw up their hands in horror at such lack of concern for human life, the seafarers raised their eyes to heaven.
‘It’s part of a campaign,’ I told Eleanor with a huff of disgust. We were sitting together in the farmhouse kitchen, at the end of a long day in which I had been clearing ditches with her brother John. I was cold and tired and the story I’d just read made me angry – largely because Eleanor was so upset. I resisted the urge to screw up the pages and toss them into the fire.
‘Mr Stead thinks by frightening people he’ll get the law changed.’
She stared in amazement. ‘But surely it needs to be changed?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s a debatable point. Even if he succeeds, I shouldn’t think it’ll make much difference in the long run.’
‘Ted, why do you say that? It must make a difference, surely?’
‘Look,’ I sighed, leaning forward to take her hands in mine, ‘you don’t know what it’s like in a storm. Even in the average blow, getting a boat down in an emergency is next to impossible. The davits…’ She stopped me there, not understanding, so I began again, demonstrating with my hands. ‘First of all, the boat must be raised by ropes off the chocks which hold it in place on the deck. The davits are the arms above the boat. They have to be swung out one at a time until the boat is parallel to the ship’s side…’
The boats were big and heavy. I knew from experience that even in good conditions, hauling each boat up and out and level with the deck could take a well-trained crew some 10 or 15 minutes – and that was with the aid of steam winches.
‘There’ll be a gap between the deck and the boat – and a long drop to the water. That fact alone,’ I added weightily, ‘can be daunting. Then, having got our people aboard, we must wait until the waves are right before lowering away, unhooking the falls and letting go – otherwise the boat can be swamped and overturned. And then those same men must tackle the next…’
‘I see.’ She looked dismayed as I sat back. ‘What are you saying, Ted?’
‘Frankly? I’m saying lifeboats are often useless because of the time it takes. In this case,’ I added, brandishing the rolled-up journal, ‘he’s got a collision in which the ship is so badly holed she’s heeling over – and that’s going to be the norm, by the way. Believe me, Ellie, at the height of a storm, trying to create a lee side in order to get the boats down safely is a skill to challenge the most experienced seaman. Yet in this story the passengers are behaving like rabid dogs in their panic to get to the one remaining boat, while he gives no idea of how it’s to be launched, only to say some bully-boys are hacking at the ropes…’
Opening the paper again, I searched for the place. ‘Ah, yes. The ruffians did not know how to lower away, and one of them began to lash at the forward fall with an axe…
‘But in spite of all this, by some miracle the boat is lowered, and our hero survives. And then as a postscript,’ I added, tapping the place, ‘Mr Stead has the gall to say, This is exactly what might take place and what will take place if the liners are sent to sea short of boats.’
With another huff of disgust, I said, ‘We practice drills – yes. But with seamen, not passengers. Try to imagine the reality. How do you persuade panic-stricken people to leave a large, familiar deck for a tiny, storm-tossed boat…?’ I drew breath and shook my head. ‘It’s not the easy answer he thinks it is.
‘Believe me, dearest, lifeboats are an effective way of getting people off a ship in ideal conditions – but ideal conditions in an emergency are so rare as to be almost unheard of. Mr Stead might just as easily campaign for a flat calm…’
Eleanor was by this point looking quite sick. Angry with this Stead character for upsetting my darling, I was even angrier with myself for not knowing how better to allay her anxieties. And, if I’m honest, I was angry because it made me remember the Lizzie Fennel, and the hurricane in which I’d almost lost the ship, the crew and my life.
I sat back then, pulled her close, and told her something of the near disaster I’d experienced all those years ago. Mentally reliving the worst of it, I said, ‘The boat went – it was just hanging, battering the hatch. We had to cut it free, let it go. Don’t you see?’ I finished passionately, ‘in the end, as a seaman, you have to concentrate on saving the ship. Why? Because the ship is the best lifeboat you’ve got!’
~~~
Two days later she clung to me as I was leaving, trying so hard to control her grief, my heart broke for her. ‘Trust me,’ I whispered, ‘believe me when I tell you I know what I’m doing. Darling Eleanor, these steamships are a feather bed compared to sail. Besides, I’ve no intention of throwing my life away – or anyone else’s – just to prove someone like Stead right…’
That trip was one of the worst I can remember. Bad weather, bad memories, and clouds of uncertainty. On top of her father’s death, to be convinced that I
stood in grave danger of my life every time I put to sea, was too much. Loving her, I did not want her to be distressed. Hurting, I was afraid she would change her mind, tell me she could not bear the anguish of marrying someone like me, a man she imagined to be in danger every moment of the day and night.
~~~
Bereaved or not, Eleanor’s family worked every day because they had to. As she often remarked during that long, sad year, cows still had to be milked, animals fed, planting and harvesting had to be organised no matter how exhausting the effort. I saw how they depended on one another, how foolish it was to wish that Eleanor and I could have met and married sooner. Even if I’d tried to take her away to Liverpool, she would have had to come back to help out. They were a team, like any ship’s crew, and, like a crew with a new Master, they were finding things were different.
At 26, John became not just the man of the house, but the farmer, responsible for all decisions pertaining to the running of the farm. His mother meant well, but did not make things easy: she was forever trying to tell him what his father would have done, which was not always helpful. He was aided by some experienced farm workers but he was the boss; the responsibility was his. I felt for him. John was the age I’d been when I first took command of the Lizzie Fennell.
One day when I was visiting, the lad seemed bowed down. We were alone, so I ventured to ask what was wrong. It seemed the men resented him and were dragging their feet over the simplest of tasks.
‘Yes, but they were used to your father,’ I reasoned. ‘Used to his ways. I’m sure they miss him as much as you do.’ Remembering how it was for me as a young shipmaster, dealing often with older men, I said, ‘Why don’t you try asking their advice? Do it their way for a while. Give the old boys chance to get used to you before starting on the new ideas…’
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