by Ted Tayler
“Not everyone is glued to their phones on social media, Lydia. Take Gus, for example. His phone is for making calls and sending messages. Your Dad could be another throwback to a bygone age when people talked to one another.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t want to be found,” said Lydia.
“Come on,” said Alex, “we knew it would not be easy. We’ve made progress this morning. Let’s take a break, get a bite to eat, and then ask your friend over there at the Help desk where to find the number for this Greek shipping company.”
An hour later, they returned to the Museum to continue the search.
“Does Gus know what we’re doing with our brief break?” asked Lydia.
“I didn’t tell him our plans,” said Alex. “I remember biting my tongue one day when we were in his car together. I mentioned you were in touch with your birth mother.”
“I bet he was complaining about my dress sense again,” said Lydia.
“Not that day, if I remember right. He was commending your innate spirit and the fierce way in which you present yourself to the world. You always give the impression that no matter what, you’re not taking a backward step.”
“That came from my adoptive father,” said Lydia. “As soon as I started school in Dundee, the bullies picked on the black girl with ginger hair. He taught me to stand my ground, stare them down, and get my retaliation in first if they looked as if they were going to hit me. I suffered a few detentions for fighting, but the bullying got less. The racist comments never stopped, though, even when I was studying in Glasgow. The streets can be tough up there, nothing like the relative peace in the countryside where we both work.”
Alex thought, not for the first time that he was a lucky guy. He couldn’t imagine getting through the trauma of the last three months without Lydia in his corner. She’d kept him going when he was ready to quit. Now, although he wasn’t free of pain in his body, he had the tools to fight that pain without resorting to pills.
This London trip proved he was on the road to recovery. He had left his stick at home, even if the long lunchtime walk they enjoyed was now causing him discomfort.
“Take the weight off that leg,” said Lydia. “Sit yourself down while I find that number.”
“If you can read my mind, I must watch what I’m thinking,” said Alex.
Two minutes later, Lydia returned with a big smile and a slip of paper.
“Got it,” she said. “Will you call them, please? I’m scared of what I might find out.”
As Alex made the call, Lydia kissed him on the cheek and headed for the restrooms.
When she returned, Alex sat holding the phone.
“Sit down,” he whispered.
“What’s up?” asked Lydia.
“Your father continued to work for this Greek shipping company until 2007. He was no ordinary seaman by that time. He had risen to the rank of Chief Mate for the Deck Department.”
“Is that an officer?” asked Lydia.
“Yes, he would be second in command after the Captain, I reckon. Chidozie was Chief Mate and prioritised the security and safe functioning of the vessel and was responsible for the welfare of the crew on board. His responsibilities included the security appliances and the fire prevention equipment. His most important duty was the safe navigation of the ship. Chidozie was an Officer On Watch for the navigational watches between 0400-0800 hrs and 1600-2000 hrs. The Chief Mate constantly oversees the cargo work in the port. It was a responsible position.”
“Why did he leave?” asked Lydia.
Alex took Lydia’s hands in his.
“He didn’t leave. The Greek-owned vessel was carrying thirty-seven crew and a cargo of fruit and vegetables when it got into trouble in a storm. The vessel had left Darwin on the seventh of May and was sailing out of Manila, en route to China. As CB3 Reefer headed across the South China Sea, it floundered, and the crew battled to keep it afloat in terrible storms. Flooding water made conditions slippery underfoot as the crew fought in vain to save the doomed ship. Typhoon Yutu Amang was blowing when the ship sank. The ship's instruments showed that it was sailing into high winds of seventy-two knots or eighty-five miles an hour. The Captain sent a distress call to the Philippine Coast Guard and a general mayday for any vessels in the vicinity to come to their aid. Rescuers in an aircraft and four boats plus divers went to search for survivors. They found a bundle of orange rope and a life jacket. There was no sign of the cargo ship. When they returned to Manila, they received news that a passing freighter had battled violent, rolling waves to reach the spot from where the distress signal originated. They found twelve survivors wearing life jackets and floating in rafts.”
“Was my father among the survivors?” asked Lydia.
“He was,” said Alex, “but the company spokesman told me that after that experience Chidozie never went to sea again. At least, not with their company. The freighter ferried the survivors to Da Nang, Vietnam, where eight of them spent the night in the hospital. The walking wounded, such as your father, were free to travel wherever they wished. After the twenty-third of May 2007, the Greek owners don’t know where your father went.”
“What do we do now?” asked Lydia.
“Let’s get back to the hotel, have a night out in London tonight, and then drive home. We confirmed your father was still alive after that tragedy. Twenty-five crew members lost their lives that day.”
“I agree; we need a fresh approach. Did Chidozie leave Da Nang right away? Perhaps he returned to Yaba, in Nigeria, to his family home. Hark at me. I’m assuming he had a family home. What made him go to sea in the first place? Where has he been between 2007 and today? Where do you want to go for your holidays this year?”
“If I could get back on a motorcycle, I’d choose Route 66. I’ve ticked off most of the European trips that I wanted to make. Given that I would have to travel by car once we got to Lagos, then if we did go, I’m driving. You’re a nightmare on English roads. Heaven knows what they would make of you over there.”
Alex and Lydia returned to Chippenham late on Friday morning. Lydia felt it had been a case of two steps forward and three steps back. Alex convinced her that the opposite applied. They had made progress.
Alex drove to his place on Sunday afternoon. He needed to get things together, ready for his return to work. The CRT night out at the Waggon & Horses had reassured him that Gus and the others were going to be happy to see him. Any awkwardness would go quickly, probably with a quip from Neil Davis.
As he punished himself with an extra dose of physio to make up for the time off in the capital, Alex thought of what lay ahead for Lydia. There were so many possibilities for what happened next to Chidozie Barre. For a man who had been at sea for eighteen years, what career on land would attract him?
Lydia was downhearted when he’d left her today, Alex thought she should realise that there was one more important thing they learned over the past two days. Chi-Chi Barre, the junior rating who stole Eleanor’s heart, had battled his way to a senior Merchant Navy position of a Chief Mate. She needn’t look any further to explain why she was such a tough cookie. In the toughest of environments, her father had climbed almost to the top of the pole.
CHAPTER 1
The life and times of Ursula Wakeley 1935-2013
People instinctively recoiled when she called herself a spinster.
But she used the word intentionally and happily because Ursula Wakeley believed that such people defined spinsters as often weird, difficult, strange beings. She had spent many idle hours in the library in her home town of Mere, defining her version of the modern spinster. One Urban Dictionary entry on spinster redefined the term as a woman who can stand independently and doesn't need a man for her life.
“We are living in the age of the single woman,” Ursula told a younger colleague.
The shallow smile Ursula received was a typical response from the unenlightened.
Ursula believed she shouldn’t get defined by the lack of a husband o
r children. Those people who sneered when she celebrated the fact that she was unmarried and childless, either considered her invisible or despised her.
Ursula was born in 1935, the second child of Gideon and Elspeth Wakeley. Gideon was a God-fearing man who toiled as an agricultural labourer until the day he died. Her father never saw the Harvest Festival at the Methodist Church in late September 1966. He dropped dead in the fields a mile from his home on the first day of the month. He was fifty-six. His widow, Elspeth, was two years his junior, and she needed Ursula at home.
Arthur Wakeley, Assistant Manager at Lloyd’s Bank in the town, told Ursula that there was nothing to discuss. She must give up her job as a librarian and stay at home to care for their mother. Arthur was two years older than Ursula and married to Glenda, a former bank cashier. They lived in the town with their two children.
Ursula protested. Why did it fall on her shoulders? She too had attended the small school in the town, just like her brother. From the age of eleven, they had made the bus trip daily from Mere, a tiny town on the edge of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, to the Gillingham School, across the county border in Dorset. Arthur and Ursula left on the same day in July 1952. Her exam results in the newly introduced O-Levels were two grades higher than anything Arthur had achieved at sixteen. Her brother studied three subjects at A-Level and scraped a bare pass in Maths, History, and Geography.
Ursula would have loved to stay on for two further years like her brother. She even dreamed of going to University, but Gideon and Elspeth were adamant. They needed their youngest daughter to bring in a weekly wage to boost the family budget.
“Arthur will marry, and his banking career will take him away from the town,” said Gideon. “Your place is here with your mother and me until you marry.”
Ursula had started at the library on Barton Lane in September 1952. The fourteen years she spent surrounded by books was the happiest period of her life. She reluctantly handed in her notice within a week of her father’s funeral.
Arthur had indeed married and moved to different towns with the bank. Ursula found it ironic that Glenda Simpkins, her best friend at Gillingham school, was the girl Arthur married. When they walked through the school gates together for the final time, Glenda had raved about the letter she had received that morning. She had a job offer at the bank as a junior clerk.
“I’ll be working with that brother of yours,” she grinned. “He’s going places, and if I can turn his head, I’ll be seeing the country with him. I don’t want to stay in this backwater of a place forever.”
Glenda never travelled far. She had two children in the first four years of marriage and never returned to work after leaving to await the arrival of Matthew. By the time Samantha arrived, Arthur’s career had stalled. He would climb no higher than an Assistant Manager. Rather than move to a manager’s position in Salisbury, Dorchester, or further afield, Glenda discovered they were returning to Mere for Arthur to while away the days until he could retire.
No wonder he was insistent that I quit my job to look after our mother, thought Ursula. He was bitter. Arthur resented the pleasure I got from my job at the library. And he still hadn’t forgiven her for outshining him at school.
Elspeth Wakeley was not the easiest person to live with, but Ursula knuckled down to the task. The years passed, and although at thirty-one she still harboured hopes of a man showing an interest in her, it became apparent that nobody wanted to take on two women.
Caring for an elderly relative can be arduous, and Elspeth made things as difficult as possible. Ursula had never noticed how much of a hypochondriac her mother was until after her father’s death. There was always something. It was a release when Elspeth succumbed to a particularly virulent bout of influenza that gripped the country between October and Christmas 1996. Ursula’s prison sentence was complete.
“Thirty years,” she said to Arthur and Glenda on Boxing Day. “Even the Great Train Robbers never served that long a sentence.”
To Arthur’s great surprise, the sixty-one-year-old Ursula approached the library to explore the possibility of taking up her old position. They were happy to have her back. After all, she was a familiar face and had visited the library at least twice a week since she quit. When the staff had asked after Elspeth, Ursula had told them that this was her place of sanctuary. Somewhere she could escape from her mother, if only for an hour.
Retirement at sixty-five wasn’t compulsory in more enlightened times, and Ursula continued to patrol the bookshelves of her beloved library until she reached seventy-five. She often remarked that she would have done the job for nothing.
Times had changed. Ursula realised that the people who visited the library were nowhere near as well-behaved as those she remembered from her earlier years.
“There are signs everywhere,” she would say. “Why do they bother coming here if they can’t read? Quiet means just that, either don’t talk or whisper. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to reprimand people. As for the unemployed, or the retirees, well, they wander indoors for the warmth, and to read the daily newspaper. They can’t afford to buy one, because they need every penny they have in their pocket the minute the pubs open. I needn’t look at the clock on the wall. I know when it’s eleven o’clock because there’s a queue at the door to get out. It’s worse in the afternoons, they troop back in, smelling of drink, and often something far worse.”
When Ursula retired, she didn’t stop visiting the library. She still popped in whenever she was in town. Old habits are hard to break. Noisy schoolchildren and drunken senior citizens with flatulence continued to feel the sharp edge of her tongue.
Ursula was an avid reader, and the things that occupied her mind while she sat in silence poring over her work wouldn’t have been what most observers would expect.
Wednesday, 16th January 2013
As she relaxed in her father’s chair by the fireside, Ursula let her mind drift back over the benefits of living alone.
There was a special magic in being able to sit in the kitchen in the morning, reading, or waiting for the bread to bake. She could lounge on the sofa checking the headlines on the daily newspaper in the middle of the afternoon if she wished. Knick-knacks surrounded her on an evening such as this. Items that had belonged to her parents, or which Ursula collected on recent holidays abroad.
Ursula knew with absolute certainty that no one could tell her she had too many books, several unnecessary scatter cushions, and that the television was far too loud. Why? Because she lived alone and she loved it. The trick had been to arrange her life the way she wanted it after her mother died.
"I don't see any biological reason women should marry or have children,” she’d told Glenda, her sister-in-law last weekend. “I was reading an article in the library just this week that suggested men and women were never meant to stay together for a long time. They should just procreate and leave. No wonder so many modern marriages fail. Once any children can survive alone, there’s no point continuing the relationship. Look at you and Arthur. You’ve spent the last thirty years hating the sight of one another. Where are you off to tomorrow? Visiting your son, I suppose? Matthew’s fifty-seven, married, with two children and three grandchildren. He doesn’t need you. What did you do after you fell pregnant with him? You stopped work and became a full-time housewife. You loved that job, and you could have gone on to higher positions at that bank. If a young woman today wants to focus on a career, it's simpler to remain single. Look at your Samantha. You never see her from one Christmas to the next. She’s flying around the world on long-haul flights as an air-stewardess. Samantha was sensible enough to realise she didn’t need a man to validate her existence."
Glenda gave the same response as everyone else of her generation. It’s what you did back then.
Being single all these years had given Ursula valuable time to pursue her pet projects, and just be her own person. She was happy that she’d used her time alone to figure out who she was.
> Ursula turned the volume up another notch on the TV. Her nearest neighbours were one hundred yards in either direction; they wouldn’t hear. It’s odd how these things creep up on you as you get older. She could spot a loud whisper in the library when she returned to work after her mother passed.
In the year before she retired, Ursula noticed subtle changes in her hearing. Colleagues would nudge her arm to catch her attention. She would apologise and claim she was engrossed in an article, or the blurb of a new book, and hadn’t heard them speak. A year later, she watched her colleagues’ lips to confirm what she thought they were saying. In the past three years, things had got worse.
Because the bungalow stood on a quiet road, surrounded by trees on three sides, Ursula no longer followed her parents’ custom of drawing every curtain in the house the minute the sun set. Why bother? There was never anyone in the open fields beyond the trees after sundown. The occasional car passed the bungalow on winter evenings, but nobody came calling.
Ursula enjoyed seeing the moon and stars through her bedroom window when she went to bed, and the sun when it woke her in the mornings. It was another mechanism she had adopted to celebrate her single life. If she undressed in the dark before slipping into bed or wandered naked to the bathroom in the morning, who’s business was it but her own?
Ursula had established a strict rota for visitors that matched her daily calendar. Don Hillier arrived on Tuesday and Thursday at ten o’clock. Don was ten years younger than Ursula and hadn’t adjusted to retirement. He needed to keep busy. Ursula paid him to tend to the garden and those annoying little jobs that an ageing property accumulates.
Don had been her handyman for three years but had never once stepped inside the bungalow. His employment was strictly for outdoor maintenance. He offered to fix a dripping tap or move heavy furniture to enable Ursula to spring-clean the place. All offers received a polite, but firm refusal. Ursula insisted she could manage what needed doing. Don held his tongue. Everything stayed as it had been when he arrived to mow the lawn for the first time.
