Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

  Anna had developed an inferiority complex with her catarrh, therefore it gave her something of a glow when she married Harold, and they settled down in Church House at the top of Church Street. She was over house-proud, and acutely conscious that Church House was a great acquisition. She gloried in its roominess, in the garden primly arranged but wholly satisfying, in the fact that she could give recherché little parties, garden ones in summer, whist drives in the winter.

  She had now, she felt, vindicated herself in the eyes of the townspeople because she had become a married woman. Harold realised that his position was now established in the firm, which would finally become his own at the death of his father-in-law. It was obvious that everybody was completely satisfied.

  Church House was fashionably furnished, it was liberally over-ornamented, there was a good deal of the ribbon work photo frame, and the silver embossed one. Heads of Angels was reproduced on silver trinkets. The drawing-room lamp standard of wrought iron had a tasteful introduction of copper embellishments, a brass bowl for the oil and a fashionable over-frilled yellow silk shade on which two ravishing pink cotton roses were laid. There were many water colours, and some flower prints, a wedding gift from Lady Chessman (Anna’s old school friend, who had then been little Edna Piper). Had any lesser light supplied the flower prints, they would have been banished to the spare room, for the spare rooms of that era were always like the younger daughters of a family of girls, furnished with the cast-offs of others.

  The Walkers attended church solemnly twice on Sunday. Harold would have felt degraded had they not set this example, and only crippling illness could have cancelled this obligation to the town, if not to God. They also attended all the local functions and did well by them. They contributed to subscription lists, not with quite the same ardour as they attended functions, for both were frugally-minded. Wastefulness was a sin; the poverty complex was encouraged.

  Harold totted up Anna’s housekeeping accounts conscientiously every last Saturday in the month, and if twopence were adrift he wanted to know the reason. He would search column after column for it, declaring that the cook was cheating them. In spite of his perpetual smile, he suspected all mankind of cheating, in particular cooks.

  In 1898, their first child was born, a girl! Both had hoped for a son. They felt that a son would be the hallmark of their establishment in the good graces of the town, for everybody had a son first, or should have. A daughter was a very second-rate substitute.

  The child was christened Isabel Edna, with some show. Lady Chessman (whose name was Edna) was her godmother, and attended the ceremony, giving the baby a silver mug that was, as Anna said, much too good for her, and could never possibly be used. But in 1898 so many things could never possibly be used. They mouldered in cupboards or wilted on hooks. One day they’d come in useful, it was said, but the day remained always tomorrow, which never comes.

  On her first Christmas Lady Chessman sent her a silver rattle with an inelegant piece of pale pink coral stuck in it, and a dozen chattering little bells. She was most lavish in her gifts.

  By the time that Isabel had become a law-abiding, praiseworthy little girl of two years old she had a sister.

  Isabel was very much like her father to look at; she had also a bump of responsibility and there was no nonsense about her. In many ways she was quite distressingly virtuous. The disappointment of a second daughter was a little allayed by the fact that Lilian was very pretty.

  ‘Where on earth’s she got it from?’ asked the nurse of the parlour-maid, as they both stared at the bundle in the blanket. Isabel had been a dark child, rather sallow, with milky grey eyes; Lilian had golden curls, a pink and white skin, and bland blue eyes.

  ‘She’ll lose all that there fair hair,’ said the parlour-maid, but Lilian didn’t lose it, she had it all her life.

  The nurse came for a third time to Church House in the September of 1902. Harold had become very much stouter and was a trifle touchy on the subject of daughters. However, his father-in-law had conveniently died just after Lilian’s birth, so that the offices of Amery and Walker were now just Walker (late Amery). A very different proposition! Harold desired it to be Walker and Son. ‘Sons’ were more preferable, but it would be a step in the right direction to have one son. He wanted to make sure of the succession and was bored by a couple of little girls. He had not been born with a true fatherly nature, and he found young children very trying. They always had sticky hands and could be objectionably damp when one most wished to show them off to advantage. He was now a very prosperous solicitor and could not be bothered with infant vicissitudes. But a son would be very different.

  Even the virtuous Isabel galled him; she was sententious whilst Lilian was flippant.

  Joyce was born that September.

  Nobody even made the shallow pretence of being pleased with Joyce. She was another sallow child much like Isabel in appearance, and to add to all else a sickly babe, demanding the maximum effort in upbringing.

  DARLING (Lady Chessman wrote to Anna),

  Don’t tell me that you’ve done it again? The hat-trick! How too shattering! And we all made so sure that this time it would be the little man we wanted. Three girls. However will you get them all married? I hear you get wonderful chances if you ship them out to India; there are hardly any women there, and innumerable handsome officers, with magnificent moustachios and to the manner born. You’ll simply have to try India, won’t you?

  And as a postscript:

  Is Harold quite speechless? The only comfort, if he is, is that it makes life considerably easier for you. Just think what he would say if he were able!

  There were to be no more children, and both parents were dreadfully disappointed.

  ‘I’m sure I can’t think why I only have three, and all girls,’ complained Anna when her catarrh was particularly bad, and she felt irritable. ‘I’m born unfortunate. There’s the vicar’s wife with four sons, praying for a girl, and I have Isabel and Lilian, and then poor little Joyce comes along.’

  However, Harold finally consoled himself somewhat in the belief that one of his girls would ultimately marry a promising young solicitor and by this sensible means they would right the unfortunate mistake of sex, and keep the office in the family.

  Through a sheltered childhood the girls outstripped the nursery at the top of the stairs, and found their ways into Miss Allan’s seminary for the daughters of gentlemen only, a somewhat euphemistic phrase, seeing that some of the girls there had fathers whom Harold and Anna considered to be ‘on the border line’. The dentist, for instance; nobody could call a dentist completely a gentleman; and the vet., who was a good deal worse. Still, it was a choice between Miss Allan’s and the High School, where all the ‘shoppies’ went, which would have been definitely degrading.

  Miss Allan’s school was held in a large red brick house with a tin annexe to it, known as the ‘Lower School’, and built on when times were particularly good. It was run by two sisters, Miss Edith and Miss Alice, neither of whom had any scholastic qualifications whatsoever but were just a couple of old dears who liked children. They had on their staff, Mamselle, a volatile Frenchwoman who spoke execrable English and incidentally patois French (having hailed from Marseilles), but Godsmead was truly British and it had no idea of this. They were a happy, quiet little community who did not quarrel with things, and very few of them spoke anything but Dr. Ahn’s first French course, and that inadequately.

  There was Miss Davis the maths mistress, a weary-eyed young woman, and Miss Martin who took the lower school and saw to the games, chiefly pat-ball on a very limited scale. The whole place was haphazard but supremely ladylike in an era when nobody bothered too much about feminine education (the little darlings would be bound to marry anyway, so why worry?), and the school flourished.

  Isabel worked hard; she had gone there with the idea of learning something (rather a difficult goal at Miss Allan’s) and she was a child who found it difficult to absorb knowledge, being r
ather stupid. However, she plodded hard. Her godmother insisted on paying all her fees and received the termly report with a sense of humour that tried Harold Walker sorely. Sometimes he even rebuked her. Lady Chessman had no idea of what was fitting in the way of a joke. There was the time when Mamselle had to admit that Isabel’s French was atrocious, and Lady Chessman wrote back,

  MY DEAR CHILD,

  Don’t worry what that silly Mamselle says. She’s just an old maid, anyway. French never floored me. Anyway all Frenchmen understand the language of love whatever language is spoken to them, so why worry?

  Naturally little Isabel had no idea what her dear Aunt Edna was talking about.

  Isabel’s perseverance in solid study did not win her many friends. Miss Edith and Miss Alice did not want girls who out-stripped their own very superficial knowledge, which was far too easy for a girl to do. They preferred the ordinary little girl who went there with the idea of learning as little as possible; or, like Lilian, who arrived there with the object of learning nothing at all.

  ‘Lilian’s a darling child, and so pretty,’ they said. ‘Naughty, of course, but such a little dear!’

  Everybody liked Lilian.

  Joyce Walker was stupid. Even the Miss Allans had to admit that little Joycie was a difficult child. She could not grasp lessons and never tried very hard. She would sit blankly at her desk twiddling her long legs round a chair in a most maddening manner, and staring ahead of her at nothing at all. The only time she ever woke up was when it was painting lesson, and she was very clever with this.

  ‘Our little artist,’ nodded Miss Edith, trying to tip the balance of unfavourable reports by dwelling on the point that little Joycie did paint very prettily indeed.

  Isabel was the youngest prefect the Miss Allans had ever had, and possibly the most unpopular, in that she never let anything escape her furtive dark eyes. Short-sighted she might be, but she could always see the faults in others quickly enough. She happened to be the prefect who was taking prep. on that unfortunate night when Lilian (always a dunce at maths) inveigled a grammar school boy in to help her prepare her sums, and hid him behind the blackboard in the corner. The grammar school boy had been wooing Lilian with chocolate cream bars for some time and she thought that he might as well be useful.

  How she had ever got to know him at all none of her outraged family knew, but Lilian managed to do surprising things surprisingly well. Especially where boys were concerned! Isabel in a fit of righteous indignation reported her.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Miss Edith to her sister, ‘why couldn’t that horrid child have shut her eyes to the poor little boy squatting behind the blackboard? Why did she want to bring him along to us like that? Her own sister’s friend too! No loyalty at all. What a disagreeable little girl she is! Now what do we do?’

  The Miss Allans hated to make a fuss but they had to do something. Isabel, bursting with virtue, had told the family at home what was afoot and therefore it could not be glossed over.

  ‘Would you believe it, Mother? Lilian admitted it. Wasn’t it awful? She said that she had asked Archie Jennings to come in and help her with her sums, in a girls’ school too.’

  ‘Oh, Lilian dear, why did you do it?’

  ‘My sums are rotten, Mother.’

  ‘Yes, but to get a little boy in to help!’

  ‘Archie’s awfully good at sums and he said he’d come. Do you know he actually knows what fractions are; he does really. I don’t.’

  Her father was told. Harold Walker thought that it was most irregular. He was so annoyed that he spoke to no one for a week, thereby taking it out on the whole house, but of course he smiled all the time. That grim grimace of his made it almost worse. He was beginning to realise that there was something about Lilian. She wore her hats differently from the others, she had an air about her, he could not analyse the difference but was just conscious of it. She looked lovely, even when she had a cold in her head, and surely that was saying something?

  Boys liked her. Her father had realised that on the only occasion when her young cousin Keith Drummond had come to stay with them, and although he had openly made fun of Isabel, and thought that Joyce was ‘a kid’, he had got on extraordinarily well with Lilian. Keith was a rich boy; his father had died young but not before he had made a lot of money, and he was a cousin several times removed so that there was no nasty hindrance to any warmer relationship, as Anna kept telling Harold.

  ‘Something might come of it,’ she said.

  Nothing came of it then, for Lilian was too young, save that Harold did notice how attractive the girl was and apparently Keith noticed it too.

  When he heard of Lilian having imported masculine help behind the blackboard, he boiled over. He said, ‘To think that a daughter of mine should behave in this brazen manner! What do you suppose the Miss Allans thought?’

  ‘They wanted to laugh,’ said Lilian, no way abashed.

  ‘Isn’t she awful, Mother?’ asked the shocked Isabel.

  Joyce was fiddling with her breakfast at the far end of the table. She felt sick. She was one of those children who are easily upset, and she was feeling upset this morning. In the lower school she had no prep. to do, so none of this interested her. The dear kind Miss Allans took care never to overwork their little girls; lots of bed and good food was their idea; you’re only young once, etc.

  The row blew over, for the Miss Allans saw to that. They did not want any unpleasantness in their school, nothing to give it a bad name in Godsmead, so they hurriedly pretended that it had all been grossly exaggerated, and dear Isabel in trying to do her duty had gone a little far. They urged strongly that a really good boarding school would be an admirable place for Isabel. What about Cheltenham Ladies’ College?

  Harold thought of Cheltenham Ladies’ College in terms of L.S.D. No, said he, certainly not! Isabel would marry, preferably a solicitor. An education costing that much would be a waste of money.

  Oh, if only we could have got rid of her! the Miss Allans told one another.

  But they couldn’t!

  The three girls drifted along together through their school days at Miss Allan’s, growing older through the 1914 war, which broke on them in their early ’teens. They were unalike, save that Isabel was extremely generous of herself in any performance of duty (quite unsparing in fact), Lilian was wildly generous with her possessions, but Joyce’s generosity had another bent. She was always the different one. Her ill-health walked beside her sullenly, she drooped a good deal, she outgrew her strength, life was hard for her to live. The difficulties of today harassed the thought of tomorrow, and oftentimes, in spite of her two sisters, she felt strangely alone.

  But the three girls were to stick together for life.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ISABEL

  In Nineteen-eighteen Joyce was still struggling along at Miss Allan’s, whilst Isabel had left as head girl with a keen sense of responsibility, and Lilian had left in an aura of affection and with no scholastic honours whatsoever.

  Isabel had taken the world war seriously. Her spare time had been devoted to First Aid and the Red Cross classes, and at twenty she was working in the local Convalescent Home for officers as a V.A.D. probationer. Lilian had come as a V.A.D. parlour-maid. Lilian hadn’t taken the war seriously. She thought that it was rather good fun. Her cousin Keith came home on leave and took her out and about; it was tremendously exciting. She had only gone to work at the Home because people were inclined to be critical if a girl did nothing. Sister had preferred Lilian to be a parlour-maid, for she had grown prettier and gayer with the years, and, as Sister said, ‘We can’t have the patients’ heads turned.’ Sister was soberly minded; she had lost a husband in the war, a particularly good-living man of forty known as Stuffy Adams by his regiment; Sister herself had been a married old maid who didn’t hold with flighty young things.

  Isabel worked hard. She was a plain girl with an unfortunate astigmatism and the first trace of her mother’s catarrh developing. But in h
er heart she wasn’t happy. She always did her best, she never shirked a difficult or unpleasant task, yet nobody appreciated her efforts. She nursed a sense of resentment that the people around her should be so carping at her efforts, for after all she only tried to do her duty.

  ‘Just a buttinski,’ said Lilian.

  Even Joyce, little school-girl Joyce, was rude about her eldest sister. ‘Don’t let Isabel find out anything,’ said Joyce, who had smuggled a dirty little bag of satin cushions into her stocking top, knowing that sweets gave her spots and Isabel would disagree with it, ‘or she’ll tell everybody. Just a sneak!’

  The trouble, thought Isabel, was that however carefully a girl behaved, she couldn’t please everybody.

  Isabel came home that November evening of 1918 to find her mother in bed with one of her worst type of catarrh colds. Isabel, always eager to help, had gone upstairs and insisted last thing at night that her mother should have a strong whisky toddy.

  ‘Oh no, dear, I do so hate it,’ said Anna weakly, ‘it always makes my head ache.’

  ‘It’ll do you good. It’s what you need, and I’m here to see that you get it. Don’t fuss,’ said Isabel and marched out of the cluttered bedroom, leaving her unfortunate mother protesting.

  Isabel went down into the dining-room and helped herself out of the tantalus on the sideboard. Her father was sitting in the big easy chair, deep in a book that gave details of the shocking things that were happening in Russia. He complained with vehemence that Queen Victoria wouldn’t have liked it. He thought it a disgraceful thing that those poor Romanoffs had been slaughtered, and the British Empire should have done something about it. The trouble being that the British Empire seemed to be going to pot, said Harold! The whole fault lay in giving the common man the vote in this senseless way, and now the damn fool women too! What could you expect? The British Empire was ruled by a set of hooligans, every Tom, Dick and Harry, or every silly skirt, instead of just having a gentleman’s vote.