The Little Ship

by Margaret Mayhew

  ‘Anna! Anna!’ Somebody was shouting at her, breaking into her thoughts. She turned and saw Matt at the top of the steps. He waved. ‘Are you coming? It’s lunch-time.’ The dog bounded off to meet him. ‘Sorry,’ he called, patting the dog. ‘But they sent me to find you.’

  She walked back along the jetty. ‘I look at the water.’

  ‘Be careful you don’t fall in. It’s quite deep there at high tide and the river runs fast.’

  ‘It is dangerous?’

  ‘It can be. Can you swim?’

  She understood easily. Schwimmen. She couldn’t but she didn’t want to admit it. The English would probably think it very strange. ‘Yes, of course.’ She started up the steps. ‘How did you sinken the boat?’

  His face changed and coloured. ‘Oh, it wasn’t here. It was out at sea. I let her capsize. All my fault.’

  ‘Capsize?’

  He tilted his good hand. ‘Go over.’

  ‘Then you must swim when this happens?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes. For rather a long time. The lifeboat picked me up. I was jolly lucky.’ He looked over her shoulder at the river and she watched him. He is perhaps a little afraid of it now, she thought. I am not afraid, but I do not much like it. ‘We ought to get back,’ he said. ‘Father’s carving. You know, cutting up the goose. It’s sink, by the way, not sinken,’ he added as they walked across the lawn. ‘Just thought I ought to tell you.’

  They were all sitting down, waiting for her, except the sailor uncle who was standing at a sideboard, brandishing a big knife and fork. The table was decorated with holly and the candles had been lit. She sat down in her place beside Matt. In front of each person was a cylinder of red crêpe paper frilled at each end. ‘What is this?’ she whispered to him.

  ‘It’s a cracker.’

  Guy, sitting opposite, would be watching for her to make some stupid mistake. ‘It is for what?’

  ‘We pull them at the end.’

  ‘Which end?’

  Matt grinned. ‘Both ends. But I meant the end of the lunch. When we’ve finished eating. We pull them apart and they make a big bang.’

  Another English madness, she thought. The goose was good, though – the best thing she had ever eaten in England – and afterwards there was a steamed plum pudding and little pastry pies filled with sweet and spicy currants. She wasn’t sure what any of it had to do with the Jesus Christ they all believed in and were supposed to be celebrating. His name had not been mentioned once. The uncle, at the head of the table, had not said any kind of kiddush. Now he took hold of the paper cylinder in front of her and thrust it at her. ‘Grab that end, Anna, and give it a jolly good tug. Hard as you can.’ The cylinder split into two pieces with a loud crack that made her jump. The uncle picked up the largest piece and handed it to her. ‘You won. Well done. Good show.’

  They all started pulling the crackers with each other and poor Nereus ran out of the room with his tail down. Anna saw, with astonishment, that they were putting on paper hats shaped like crowns and Matt, beside her, was blowing a tin whistle. ‘Is this a Christmas custom?’ she asked.

  ‘Rather.’

  ‘It is to do with Jesus Christ? The paper crowns?’

  ‘Gosh, no, nothing like that.’ He tore open her part of the cracker. ‘Look, you’ve got a hat, as well, and a present.’ He dropped a silver thimble into her palm. ‘Jolly useful that. And there’s a motto, too.’

  ‘Bitte?’

  ‘Well, actually, it’s a sort of quiz thing. Not really a motto. You have to guess the answer.’ He smoothed out the curl of paper. ‘When is a door not a door?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘When it’s a jar. See – ajar. Ajar means half-open. When it’s two words it’s a jar. Gosh, sorry, that’s too difficult for you.’ He unfurled a roll of green paper that turned into another crown and set it on her head. ‘There you are. Queen Anna!’ They are mad, she decided. Completely mad.

  After the lunch it was time to open the presents. The aunt came to her holding several of the beribboned parcels in her arms. ‘These are all for you, Anna.’

  ‘For me? These?’

  ‘Yes. For you, my dear.’

  ‘I do not expect this.’

  ‘Oh, but you have presents too. Of course you do. Sit down and open them.’

  They had all given her something: the Kapitan and Frau Ransome, the Herr Doktor and Frau Ellis, Lizzie, Matt, and Guy. She unwrapped each one: a manicure set in a leather case from the aunt and uncle, a fountain-pen from Lizzie’s parents, an embroidered handkerchief from Lizzie, lavender bath salts from Matt, and, from Guy, an English-German dictionary small enough to fit in her pocket. They had all done this, even Guy. She sat and stared at the things on her lap. Then she went upstairs and fetched the big golden box of Viennese chocolates that Mama had sent and presented it to her hostess. ‘I am very sorry that I have nothing more to give.’

  Frau Ransome smiled at her. ‘What beautiful chocolates, Anna. But not just for me. You must give some to everybody.’

  She went round, offering the open box and thanking them for their presents. ‘Danke, danke, vielen dank …’

  The uncle stood up and clapped his hands together loudly. ‘Right. Charades now, everyone. We’ll divide into two teams: I’ll be captain of one, Uncle Richard the other. I’ll have Aunt Helen, Matt and Lizzie in my team; Richard, you take Sheila, Guy and Anna. We’ll toss for first to bat.’

  ‘It’s a word game,’ Lizzie told her. ‘Each team has to choose a word of three or more syllables and then act each syllable and then the whole word. The others have to guess what the word is. Uncle William won the toss so we go first.’

  The Kapitan and Frau Ellis, Lizzie and Matt went outside the room and then Lizzie came in again. She knelt down and started licking her fingers and wiping her ears. ‘That’s easy,’ someone shouted. ‘It’s cat.’ Lizzie went out and the Kapitan came in crawling on all fours, like an animal, while Matt prodded him along with a walking-stick. Everybody laughed, except Anna who was shocked. She watched, bewildered, as Lizzie and Matt ran round and round in a circle. When they stopped, Frau Ellis came in and shook Matt’s hand and handed him something invisible. ‘We’ve got it,’ Guy called out. ‘No need to do the whole word. Cat-ass-trophy. It’s catastrophe.’

  Frau Ransome turned to her. ‘Our turn now, Anna. We have to go out of the room and think of a word to act.’

  ‘Please, I cannot do this.’

  ‘It’s just a game, Anna. You don’t have to act properly, or anything. Nobody minds. It’s only a game.’

  It was the stupidest game she had ever seen, with grown-up people behaving like children. ‘I do not wish to play.’

  ‘Then you don’t have to, of course.’

  ‘Yes, she jolly well has to, Mother. We’ll be one short in our team.’

  ‘That hardly matters, Guy. We can manage perfectly well without her.’

  ‘She’s just being a spoilsport.’

  ‘You’re forgetting that Anna isn’t used to our ways.’

  ‘She won’t even try.’

  ‘That will do, Guy.’

  ‘Ask her to play the piano instead, then. See what she says to that.’

  Frau Ransome turned to her. ‘Can you play, Anna?’

  ‘Yes, she can. She can play very well. I’ve heard her.’

  ‘How nice. Perhaps you’ll play for us later, then, dear. That would be lovely.’

  Guy had trapped her. She could not refuse – not after the aunt had been so kind and after all the presents they had given her. Mama would have been very angry if she had not agreed, Grandmama shocked at such ingratitude. After they had finished the rest of the stupid game she sat down at the Bechstein in the drawing-room and played a Strauss polka, Lehar’s ‘Vilja’, and then the Blue Danube because she remembered that the English liked waltzes.

  The old man nods. ‘I should think so. After all they’d done for her. Can’t abide ingratitude. Not at any price. We had a son like that. O
ur only child. Gave him everything, we did. Spent every spare penny on sending him to a decent school, buying him whatever he wanted. Molly doted on him. Couldn’t do wrong in her eyes. Soon as he could he left home. Never settled to anything steady. Job after job, and all dead ends. When I told him what I thought about it he said it was all our fault because we’d tried to push him. We didn’t see him after that. Molly went on sending him money, on the quiet, but I wouldn’t have him in the house.’ He reaches for the matches from the mantelpiece. ‘They got another boat, then? Instead of the one that was lost?’

  ‘Yes, they got another one. A second-hand fishing boat.’

  ‘I’d’ve thought that boy, Guy, would’ve wanted something a bit fancier, by the sound of him.’

  ‘Guy didn’t always get what he wanted.’

  ‘Good job too, if you ask me. Look what it did to our boy.’

  ‘His father bought the boat when he was home on leave the following spring. She’d belonged to a fisherman who used to go out with a trawl net. You could take the centre thwart out and have enough room for five men to stand to haul the net in.’

  He grunts in his gruff way. ‘Sounds a bit like mine. You can do that with her.’

  ‘And she had the same name. Rose of England. The fisherman was very patriotic.’

  ‘I’m like that myself. Best country in the world, this is. I don’t know what that Jewish girl had against it. Nowhere to touch it.’

  ‘She was very homesick. Later on she felt differently.’

  ‘I should think so,’ he repeats. ‘Blooming foreigners. They come over here and start complaining. Demanding this and that. If they don’t like it here they ought to go back to their own country, that’s what I say.’ He lights another match and touches it to the pipe bowl, drawing hard. When it’s going well he looks across at me. ‘Well, what happened next? Did that girl go back to Vienna?’

  ‘Her mother and father visited her in England but they were still afraid to let Anna return.’

  ‘Lucky for her they had the sense, though I don’t suppose she appreciated it.’ He resettles himself comfortably. ‘Go on, then.’

  I pause for a moment, collecting my thoughts and sorting the chronology of events in my mind. ‘Lizzie and Anna didn’t go to Tideways again until the next summer, in August 1935. They all went out sailing then. It was a beautiful day.’

  Chapter Five

  Rose of England moved away from the jetty, making no sound until she found some wind and the water began to slap against her bows. Guy let out the main sheet and put the helm up. The boom swung out and the boat wallowed round sluggishly to head upstream. He’d been bitterly disappointed when he’d first set eyes on her: a fourteen-foot, clinker-built, gaff-rigged, broad-beamed open fishing boat with a straight stern like a Viking ship; solidly built to withstand wind and weather. She had been sadly neglected and was scarred by hard usage: her varnish rubbed to bare wood in places, her rust-red sails patched. And she sailed like a fishing boat, butting her way through the water. Unlike the smaller Bean Goose she had no centreboard to make her go better against the wind; she was meant for negotiating shallow seas and estuaries with treacherous sandbanks. A plodding workhorse. A joke – as far as Guy was concerned. Even her name sounded ridiculous and old-fashioned. It was the sort of thing you’d call a paddle-steamer or some old river barge. He’d so hoped for something with sleek lines, modern and faster and a whole lot racier, but he knew better than to say so and be reprimanded for looking a gift horse in the mouth. ‘Nice old thing,’ Father had said firmly. ‘Good and solid. Matt’ll have a job tipping her over.’

  He and Matt had done a lot of work on her in the Easter holidays, scraping and scrubbing her hull free of weed and sanding off all the old varnish before they revarnished her inside and out. They’d cleared the bow and stern lockers, chucking out an accumulation of empty tobacco tins, broken lamps, glass floats and fouled netting – even the skeletal remains of long-dead fish. They’d sanded and revarnished her long, heavy oars and Guy had repainted the name in white on her bow. He might not be able to take any pride in her lines or her performance but he was blowed if he was going to take out a badly kept boat and add to the humiliation.

  The breeze was freshening and their wake lengthened out behind them. He held Rose on a steady course, letting her run before the wind with the boom broad off. He kept a close eye on the burgee fluttering at the masthead, watching for any wind shift that could cause a standing gybe. Anna, sitting with Lizzie on the centre thwart, was hanging out over the port side, trailing one hand in the water. She was wearing a white dress made of thin stuff, like muslin, and a wide-brimmed straw hat tied on with a red ribbon. All right in a punt, he supposed, but it looked ridiculous in a tub like the Rose. When he’d suggested she should go and change into something more practical, like Lizzie’s flannel shorts and aertex shirt, she’d said she hadn’t got anything like that and wouldn’t wear it if she had.

  ‘Anna, can you sit down properly, please.’

  She turned to make a face at him. ‘So strict, Guy! We are not the Royal Navy.’

  ‘You’re upsetting the balance.’

  ‘Does it matter so much?’

  ‘Yes, it does actually.’

  She pulled herself back in, but unwillingly. If it had been Lizzie she would have done what he told her instantly. Anna, on the other hand, took very little notice of him at all. He hadn’t seen either of them for more than seven months, not since Christmas. Lizzie had grown a bit taller but she was still just a kid, still in awe of him and easy to boss around. Anna, of course, always immediately did the exact opposite of anything he said. She was even more beautiful – he’d seen that at a glance, though he was very careful not to look at her too often. Over the next couple of days he’d discovered that her English was now pretty fluent. He listened to her chatting away to Matt – she was always talking to him – and there were hardly any mistakes. She spoke with an accent and sometimes said things in a foreign way, but it wasn’t bad.

  Rose sailed on steadily up the river, round Black Point and on to Raypits Reach. Guy kept a lookout for a good place for the picnic they’d planned. With the midday sun beating down, they needed to find a spot with some shade and there weren’t many trees around. Matt pointed ahead to a clump at the edge of a field beyond the next bend, which might do if there was somewhere they could land and make the Rose safe.

  ‘Ready to gybe.’

  Lizzie instantly crouched down.

  ‘Anna, get your head down.’

  ‘You said before that we are not to move.’

  ‘Just do as I say, unless you want a crack on the head. Gybe-oh!’ The Rose heeled in stately fashion and Guy and Matt ducked under the boom and changed sides as it swung over. Guy eased the mainsheet as they rounded the bend into the wind. There was a patch of shingle at the foot of the bank by the field and some wooden fencing that looked as though it would serve as a mooring. Approaching the spot, he let go of the sails and drifted gently against the shore, side-on. He’d got it smack on right, which pleased him though it went unnoticed by either of the girls. Matt was over the side in a jiffy, splashing in up to his knees, and grabbing hold of the forestay.

  ‘OK, you two girls can get out now.’

  ‘But it is water, Guy.’

  ‘Of course it’s water, Anna. This is a river. There’s no jetty so you’ll have to damn well get your feet wet.’ Lizzie was already taking off her socks and her brown leather sandals but Anna was making yet another face; he was sick of her faces. He watched her unbuckle her flimsy red shoes and slither reluctantly over the side of the boat. He waited for the moaning when she landed in the mud.

  ‘Ugh! What is this?’

  ‘Mud,’ he said, pleased at her discomfort. ‘Don’t you have it in Austria?’ It was beastly, squelchy, slimy stuff and he didn’t much like the feel of it himself. ‘It won’t kill you.’ She waded ashore, her white muslin skirts bunched up high in one hand, the red shoes clutched in the other. He let
down the sails and took off the rudder and got out himself, carrying the picnic basket and rug. Then he and Matt hauled the boat up onto the shingle and made the painter fast round the fence with a bowline. Anna and Lizzie were splashing around in the shallows, trying to wash the mud off their feet – Anna still grizzling, of course. They walked across to the clump of trees. It wasn’t as good a spot as he’d thought. The ground had been well trampled by cattle who had also left several cowpats. There were flies buzzing around. Anna held her nose.

  ‘This is horrible. We cannot stay here.’

  He dumped the picnic hamper down. ‘It’s shady.’

  ‘It is also smelly. And we cannot eat with these flies.’

  He knew she was right which didn’t make it any better. He was angry with himself for picking such a rotten place and furious with her for kicking up a fuss. She was a guest, after all, not family. She should jolly well say nothing. That would have been the decent, English sort of thing to do. But, of course, a foreigner wouldn’t have a clue about that. He started to open the hamper, tugging at the leather straps. ‘Well, we’re here now and it’s too late to move. You’ll just have to put up with it.’

  She pointed to a single oak tree standing at the very far end of the field. ‘We could go there. It is much nicer.’

  ‘It’s miles away.’

  ‘I do not mind. Do you, Lizzie? Do you, Matt? It will be away from the flies and cows’ messes.’

  He slammed the hamper lid down. ‘All right, you carry all this if you’re so keen.’