In the ballroom the food was served on china plates. There was news. Some of the men said they thought England had been invaded. A man who knew about boats managed to get to the upper decks: I remember him coming back and saying it was now sunset and we were north of Ireland. Some of the people on the boat said they were happy to be heading for Canada. Sofia looked up at me. ‘Where’s daddy?’ she asked.
‘He is not far from home,’ I said. ‘Shall we say a prayer for him?’ And so we did – sitting there, the crowd of men moving around us – we said four Hail Marys and under our breaths we sang songs Sofia liked.
‘Is this our holidays?’ she said, and I said yes, it’s like our holidays, and I said keep your singing quiet because these men don’t know us.
She was a lovely singer. Her hair was cut and I wanted so much for it to be long like it used to be and to brush it a hundred times. Sofia was a real singer. When she started a song everybody would listen, but there on that boat, on the Arandora Star, she sang very quietly to herself and me, and I told her one day she could be a singer on the radio. ‘I’ve moved us to a cabin on the lower deck,’ said Enrico. He said we could be together.
‘Is it far to where we’re going?’ I asked him.
‘Five days,’ he said.
In the cabin we tucked Sofia into her blankets and sat together on the bottom bunk. Enrico stood up and stroked Sofia and I can hear him saying, ‘I’m your friend.’ Then he sang to her in a way I’ll never forget. His voice was made to brush away the world’s troubles.
‘She’s asleep,’ he said.
*
I woke in the same clothes. There was a terrible thud and I jumped up. It was dark but I saw Enrico wasn’t there. I screamed his name then Mario’s name, the door of the cabin was open and the lights were out in the corridor. Sofia was sitting up in her bunk so I stroked her head and kissed her and told her everything was all right. Her eyes were sparkling and she looked so calm. My little girl. She just stared, just stared out in the dark.
I ran into the corridor and a group of officers were walking along with guns. ‘Who are you?’ one of them said, then they took me by the arms and wrestled me onto the stairs and up to the next deck. ‘My child!’ I shouted, and one of the officers on the deck said, ‘Why is this woman here? Why do we have a woman here? There has been an explosion. Where did you find this woman?’
I shouted at them that my child was down there.
‘Hold her,’ one of them said.
‘In the cabin!’ I screamed. ‘In the cabin!’
At first silence then shouting from all over the ship and people beginning to run. Smoke belches from the corridor onto the deck and the soldiers take me up more stairs and I am screaming. They bring me round to the front where there is barbed wire and you can see the ship is going to one side. I’m screaming and saying, ‘Take me back! I have a child with me. Please I beg you. Oh God in heaven I beg you my child is below!’ The men let go of me and run towards each other and words are exchanged. They have forgotten about me so I run back, but it’s hard to find the door, oh Mario, God bless us, and the smoke comes and people are running now in the corridors I can’t see which way. There is so much glass on the floor and it is cutting my feet but I can’t feel anything running down the corridors. Maybe Enrico is there, oh please Enrico where are you?
Not this way! I can’t see. This is not the right way oh my God where is this leading? I fall against the metal pipes and the ship lists. I don’t know how long I have been running and screaming in the corridors. Oh my God what is happening? I knock on the doors and push them in but the cabins are empty and some have people rushing out.
I thought Enrico would come. I thought he would come out of one of the corridors and have Sofia in his arms. I run onto the deck where many people crowd and an Englishman is shouting orders from the top of a platform. There are noises from a siren. ‘My baby is lost!’ I scream at some of the men passing, but they only pause for a second to look at my face, then run on. There are men up above me throwing rafts down into the water and already the boat is very low and rolling to one side. Some of the Italian men are praying on the deck on their knees. People are throwing suitcases from the upper decks and now oh my God there are people jumping into the water. It is nothing but dark out there and my child is … oh my God the waves you can see them closer. I try to stop people but they are all struggling with life-jackets or just running.
A man with a rifle tells me to jump. I can’t see. I can’t see. Oh please show me the way below, I’ll just lift her out and we’ll get into that boat, oh please. I see a man being knocked into the water by a raft coming from overhead. I grip the railing and sweet Jesus don’t make this happen. There are bodies floating down there. The ship rolls further and I see a lifeboat out there and everyone splashing into the water so I let go of the railing and fall in.
I can’t breathe. I’m under the water and then oh God of mercy is this the stairs and the corridor, am I near the cabin, is it at the end there? My mouth is full of water and the salt, oh mercy is this the corridor? I can see a light on, is that my little girl in there, oh please come out we’ve got to hurry. There’s nice things down in the café for you and if you sit up there we can hear you singing Sofia, you’ve lovely hair. Oh Lord be merciful, only give us a minute oh Mario come oh Enrico what is happening come quickly it’s terrible why have you gone? And then I’m on top of the water and can see fire on the waves and stuff everywhere. Holy Mary Mother of God the water is burning and the people spread out on it have nowhere to go. The ship is rolling over on its side and you can see hundreds of people falling from the decks.
My girl is there. Please I beg you my wee girl.
A noise comes from the ship and the ship creaks and breaks and slides away and is gone. I saw it with my own eyes. The waves rolled over it as if it had never been there leaving nothing but a terrible mess with people swimming and shouting in the darkness and nobody to save anybody.
Covered in oil, I was dragged into a lifeboat. The people were shivering there in their pyjamas. ‘It’s a woman,’ said an English soldier. ‘She’s a woman. How did you get into this pickle, love?’ I was sobbing and screaming then and my eyes were blinded with the oil and many of the men spoke in German. They held on to me in the boat but I couldn’t bear to live and cried for I don’t know how long and then I remember just staring out as the daylight came. I knew it then and I know it now as I’m telling you that this day was the end of me. There was nothing I could do. It may have been three hours that passed after that or a hundred years: I remember rockets going over the boat and then arms pulling me up onto a metal ladder.
‘We have a woman here, sir.’
‘I tried to go back for her,’ I said.
‘Sorry, miss?’
‘I went back for her but it was dark and nobody came.’
‘Just drink this, miss.’
Every word echoes in my head as I remember. I tasted hot rum and I drank it down as if it were poison and drinking it I didn’t know where to put myself. ‘Steady on, miss,’ said the man. ‘Don’t burn yourself now.’
I was freezing as they put blankets round me and I don’t remember saying another thing. It was the end. You wouldn’t have thought there was a sea passing under us – a war on, a world going round, people happy to be alive, people dead. I remember nothing but the terrible blackness, the disbelief, and the sound of the waves.
*
They say I was silent for two weeks. I had no papers: no passport, no medical card, nothing. All the survivors were brought back to Greenock on board a destroyer. I later heard that some of the men went back to the Isle of Man, and others were pressed onto another ship, the Dunera, which took them on a journey to Australia that lasted fifty-five days.
They put me into Mearnskirk Emergency Hospital. My memory is far from clear. I sat in the hospital bed with my hands bandaged and of course people came and went but I have no memory of conversations or any procedures, only the coming and go
ing of strangers in the ward. Surely I was waking from a horrible nightmare, a story where I found myself in a succession of rooms and vans and boats and strange clothes. I could see crowds and smashed glass and could feel the heat. Only with the passing of the days did I come to realise it was not a dream: in some swift sequence of events, only days ago, I hadn’t thought, I hadn’t checked, I hadn’t paused, I had smuggled my only child onto the Arandora Star.
A doctor and some sort of official were beside the bed. ‘The boat was torpedoed,’ the official said.
I asked him how many.
‘We think one torpedo,’ the man said. I was crying again but no one remarked on it. ‘The boat went down completely in twentyfive minutes.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘How many were left there?’
‘We have a list.’
‘How many?’
‘Dead? We can’t be absolutely certain at this stage.’
‘Italians,’ I said. I remember the wooden chairs scraping on the floor.
‘More than four hundred,’ he said. ‘I suspect the list is not very accurate at present. The embarkation process was muddled.’
‘Four hundred men,’ I said.
‘Mrs Tambini,’ the gentleman continued, ‘we know you disappeared from the Rushen camp. Why were you on that boat?’
‘I can’t remember,’ I said.
‘But you travelled some distance to be on that ship, and presumably at considerable effort. Would you care to tell me who helped you?’
‘I have no memory of it, and I don’t know.’
He said this was a very serious matter. This is a time of war. ‘Who took you onto that boat?’
I asked him if I could see the list.
‘It is incomplete,’ he said, ‘the list of survivors. There is no guarantee we haven’t missed people. This is a list of those who came off the rescue vessel at Greenock. There are names missing – your own, for instance – because we had no idea how to identify you. There were no women on that ship. I mean, it was intended that there be no women there.’
I told him I understood what he was saying.
He said something about the newspapers and something about panic among the Italians and the courage of the officers and the fall of France. They had typed the list in alphabetical order: I remember staring for what seemed like an eternity at the blank space between the names of two men, Guglielmo Sugoni and Roberto Taraborelli. Sofia Tambini was missing. Of course, they never had her name, but I thought her name would be on this list if she had survived. They would have taken her into a lifeboat and asked for her name. The white space glared at me and I cried into the bandages on my fists.
‘What name are you looking for madam?’ The man said it over and over. ‘It is very important you tell us.’
‘Nothing. Nothing.’ All I said was ‘nothing’.
‘This is very serious,’ he said. I went back through the pages. Andrea Benedetti, Sergio Colpi, Leonardo D’Annuncio.
Again. I read it again.
‘Nothing. Nothing,’ I said, beyond tears.
Enrico Colangelo was missing.
‘Please calm down, Mrs Tambini,’ said the doctor.
‘I want to die,’ I said.
‘Please calm down. You are safe now.’
‘I want to die.’
‘This is not the time,’ said the doctor turning to the official. ‘We will come back to this.’ I don’t remember what else they said; they talked among themselves.
‘You must get some rest, Mrs Tambini,’ said the man. ‘This is very mysterious and we will speak again.’
‘Try to sleep,’ said the doctor.
Sitting in the dayroom at the Mearnskirk Hospital I saw people outside the window in a queue for the mobile library van. The sun was out and there was an awful glow in the fields. I watched the people coming with their books and wondered if there could be any peace to be found in stories. I was in mourning in my brown chair by the window at Mearnskirk: I was dead in myself. What had happened had happened in a blur of accident and disguise, and there was no way back now, none of the hope and none of the love, and nothing to save me from the guilt I have carried with me all the days of my life.
They began releasing interned people that September. I was never sent to another camp; I just gathered myself at the hospital, and I never saw the man from the Home Office again. One day Mario came. We sat in that room by the window and I told him everything. I stared at the carpet and said all I could say and even to me the words coming out were like those of someone mad or confused. ‘No,’ he said. He just repeated the word no, a hundred times. My poor Mario had to be taken shouting from the ward by the attendants, his face contorted with the horror, my beloved, quiet, hard-working Mario, the man who once took my arm as we walked as young people along the city wall at Lucca, all the blue hills and dignity around us.
‘Terrible things happen in war. The cruelty of the German U- boats will always be on our minds. They took away many innocent lives. But there is nothing to be gained in pursuing the matter to our own graves.’ These words of Father Monaghan of St Andrew’s are etched on my mind. He said, ‘Your place is with your husband. That is what he wants.’ Mario was terrifying in his forgiveness. After a time he came for me and we returned to Rothesay and put ourselves in the trust of Father Monaghan. On the way over to Bute, Mario and I said almost nothing across the miles.
He asked me who else knew.
‘Only Frances Bone.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She will never forgive us.’
‘Me,’ I said. ‘She will never forgive me, and that is how it should be.’
Mario spoke to her and told her that I did it because I was frightened. I told him I should not have involved Mrs Bone.
‘It is at an end,’ said Mario.
Down at the seafront my husband had already begun to prepare the café for business. He found himself again in his work, the days progressed, and slowly the old customers returned to the shop. Mrs Bone set down the memory of Sofia Tambini with all the tragedies of the war. Her own husband died in Normandy. We have not spoken since.
Three small cotton dresses.
Four pairs of white pants.
One pair of boots for a child.
A mirror.
A hairbrush.
Socks.
A child’s winter coat and knitted hat.
Three packets of hose.
One embroidered black blouse.
One pair of ladies’ pumps.
A satin blouse with a small collar.
A brown fitted suit.
A man’s grooming kit.
A man’s green gabardine suit.
A red waistcoat.
A panty girdle.
Men’s drawers.
A boxed jigsaw puzzle of Edinburgh Haymarket.
Three tin mugs.
Two bottles of wine.
Assorted musical scores with inscriptions.
Letters.
Tins of tea.
Chocolate.
10
Mirror
CHILD STAR’S SECRET ORDEAL
Exclusive by Showbiz Editor
Scottish singing sensation Maria Tambini is back in her home town of Rothesay today after checking out of the London clinic where she has been battling with the long-term effects of the slimmers’ disease anorexia nervosa.
The 21-year-old songbird rocketed to stardom at the age of 13 when she won Hughie Green’s talent show Opportunity Knocks and has already appeared at the Palladium and starred in her own TV show.
But now Maria, four feet nine inches tall and just five stone in weight, this weekend faces the agony of knowing her career may be over.
Looking pitifully thin and sick, the girl who once sang with Liza Minnelli emerged from the All Saints’ Clinic in Kennington, South London, yesterday, and was driven away by her uncle. She was understood to be heading for her family home on the Isle of Bute in Scotland to recover and take stock.
Tambini’s ordeal starte
d at a young age when the pressures of fame and looking good began to tell on her. Last year she spent time in a psychiatric clinic after her weight dropped to a pathetic four stone during her preparations for a summer season at Torquay.
Showbusiness insider Steve Wins comments: ‘Maria is a much-loved British performer but her loud, stage-school style of talent is going out of fashion. She’s really a product of the 1970s light-entertainment world and the end-of-pier variety shows. Her problems are perhaps a sign that it is now time for her to call it quits. She’s been ill for a long time now and the pressures of fame have just been too much.’
Dr Alan Yule of Guy’s Hospital in London said anorexia was an increasing problem among young girls. ‘We find that many young people show a propensity for this illness when they consider themselves to have little control over their lives,’ he said yesterday. ‘By controlling their own body-weight, they are in fact achieving, albeit destructively, a feeling of superiority and well-being. There are more and more cases of this. People just stop eating.’
Marion Gaskell, a top London agent who manages Maria’s career, denies that the pressures of showbusiness have had any connection with her client’s condition. ‘Maria is a very wonderful performer and we have been monitoring her health carefully over the last while. She has been suffering from tiredness and has agreed to cancel some shows only at our insistence. We are positive she will be back on form soon and we very much look forward to that.’
An event that shocked the music industry two years ago was the death of American singer Karen Carpenter, who finally succumbed to the killer disease at the age of 32. She had been starving herself for many years. Stephanie Mallard, who shot to fame at the age of eight in the West End production of Annie, said today she was glad she got out of the industry so soon. ‘It gets to you after a while,’ she said, ‘and I feel so sorry for Maria. She’s an amazing singer, but when you start as a kid you’ve got so much to prove all the time you begin to wonder if you’ll ever be allowed to be just a normal person instead of a personality.’
Personality Page 22