by Ngaio Marsh
I don’t know what I expected to see when he moved into the light: something out of a glossy magazine I daresay, with a posh twinkle in his eye.
He was of middle height and carried himself like a soldier. When we arrived on deck and I emptied my purse into his hand, he took off his hat and I saw his face. It was grooved and pouched and empurpled. His nose was swollen and netted with veins. He had a three-days’ growth of beard and his eyes were bloodshot. The hand he put out was grimed and tremulous and his clothes were filthy. He looked straight at me and said I’d really given him too much but would I like him to have the extra as a tip? I said yes, of course. ‘That’s awfully kind of you,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight. Thank you so much. Goodnight.’
II
They hadn’t finished coaling. The decks were gritted with coal dust and as I reached my cabin – a disgruntled night steward unlocked it – the racket started. I suppose there had been a halt for some reason, perhaps a change of gangs. The porthole was sealed and the heat indescribable. The bathroom was locked.
I lay, for what was left of the night, bemused by heat and the crash of coals and by strange remembrances of the last two days.
A number of passengers, including the British Israelite, left the ship at Durban and we took on a great many Afrikaners, some travelling to Cape Town and some to England. The South African Dutch may, on the whole, be better to look at and listen to than this group that chance threw in my way for three weeks or so: better than the friends who came to see them off and stood, arrogant, small-eyed, muddily white, down there on the wharf. There is no value, of course, in a fleeting impression except, perhaps, for the light it may shed upon the observer. It never goes beyond the level of irresponsible journalism; snapshot judgement. If I had stayed for a year in Durban instead of forty-eight hours I would no doubt have learned of Afrikaners who contradicted every generalization I felt inclined to make about these people as we watched them that morning from the deck of the Balranald.
They had no bodily grace of feature, movement or behaviour and their voices were unlovely. What had they got that made them so sure of themselves? There were Africans down there visually putting them to shame. What had they got, these Dutch Natalese? Mastery, of course, as one saw. Among the Africans was a group of very small black urchins who laughed and danced on the wharf. Passengers threw coins to them and they shouted and grinned and showed off. One of them, a six-year-old, perhaps, executing a particularly lively prance, evidently overstepped some invisible barrier. An enormous Afrikaner turned on him as if he were vermin and hit at him and the child cringed and fell back. It was the ugliest of sights.
Perhaps this episode set those of us who saw it against the Afrikaners who came aboard. Perhaps it made us resent their arrogance and coarseness. They were the only fellow passengers in half a lifetime of long journeys, against whom I have taken in a big way.
There was a high sea running as we stood out from Durban: enormous blind rollers swelled and heaved themselves under a brilliant sun. The ship floundered up them, seemed to hover and then pitched and shuddered into the chasms between, taking it in green. A seasoned traveller now, I stood on the port side, held tight to the taffrail and exulted in the oncoming hugeness of the seas.
As I watched there rose up, astonishingly, quite close on our port bow, a great ship under full sail.
She towered above a crest and we wallowed in a trough: lordly beyond words she was, glittering, tall and a wonder to behold. She shone and strode the waters, making her own miracle, passed us like a dream and was gone. Nobody had seen her name. I would like to believe she was the barque Pamir, afterwards bought by New Zealand to carry food to Britain during the war. This was one of those moments that one aches to share with somebody: but with whom?
Heavy seas all the way to Cape Town where I was to be met by Uncle Freddie.
He was one of my father’s six younger brothers. When, as I have related, my grandfather died leaving his widow and ten children less comfortably off than they had expected to be, there was a certain rallying round among the connections and this was matched by a determination on the part of the uncles to get out into the world as soon as they could and be at charge to nobody. There seems to have been no thought of university or profession for any of them. The Colonies, it was felt, were the thing. Uncles Arthur and Teddy plumped for Canada where they made and, in due course, lost, a fortune. Uncle Arthur, following in Great-Uncle Julius’s footsteps (he who, it may be remembered, eloped with his niece’s French governess), returned to England for a visit and persuaded the nurse of his own niece to join him in Canada where he married her without bothering to tell any of his relations. His reputation in the family was for headstrong behaviour. My father told me Uncle Arthur could never go to a prep or public school with any of his brothers because, so my father said, he was so jolly bloody-minded. Uncle Teddy also married in Canada and also forgot for some years to mention the fact. Uncle Teddy, it was, who on leaving school bought himself a suit which my grandmother considered loud and, in his absence, gave to the gardener’s boy. When Uncle Teddy returned he encountered the gardener’s boy who had foolishly togged himself up in his windfall. Uncle Teddy made him strip, there and then, and strode up the drive with a face of thunder and the suit over his arm.
During all these avuncular proceedings there were extraordinary involutions of snobbery and anti-snobbery at work. Willie, the boldest and gayest of the uncles, was offered a job by the husband of a cousin. This husband, my father said, was never mentioned without a certain change of voice since he manufactured biscuits. His wife was always called ‘Poor Maude’. The fact that he was enormously rich and subsequently founded a peerage, made him, I gathered, less and not more congenial. However, Uncle Willie laughingly went into the biscuit offices and was in due course invited for the weekend to a large house in the country which he referred to as Cracknel Hall. He did not remain for long on such friendly terms as he discovered that his cousin-by-marriage grossly underpaid his employees. Uncle Willie went without appointment into the holy-of-holies, spoke his mind and was instantly sacked. The Boer War having conveniently broken out, Uncles Willie and Freddie volunteered, were commissioned and appointed to a good cavalry regiment. Dashing photographs were sent home to their family. They both went through the war, heavily engaged throughout and loving it. They did not suffer a day’s sickness or the most superficial wound. When it was all over they decided to remain in South Africa. Uncle Willie, like his brother Reggie, became tubercular, was sent to a sanatorium and there married an English girl who was also a patient: both of them knowing that they had only a short time to live.
Uncle Freddie, nicknamed Criggy, also married and became permanent secretary to the Governor-General’s fund, a job which he still held when I met him in Cape Town.
He was my father’s favourite brother which was odd since he was deeply religious. (’Very sincere about it, though, old Crig. Funny thing.’) When the Balranald berthed at Cape Town and I looked down at the people on the wharf, it was a shock suddenly to see my father. They were as like as two peas. Indeed, judging by old photographs of Granny Marsh as a still young and very pretty widow, sitting among her children on a croquet lawn, her sons all looked much alike. They are handsome, rather arrogant-seeming men with heavy moustaches that obliterate their obstinate mouths and an ‘I’ll see you damned first’ expression in their eyes. Some stand in teapot attitudes: one hand on the back of a sister’s chair, the other in a jacket pocket and the legs modishly crossed at the ankle. Others lounge back in their own chairs wearing knickerbockers and bow ties: elegant, huffy and grand. ‘Conceited-looking lot,’ my father used to say. ‘Wonder if we were, what?’
With Uncle Freddie and his wife and two of their four boys, I visited an eighteenth-century house that had belonged to Koopmans de Wet: a very beautiful house that is kept exactly as it was when the de Wets lived in it. Each room feels as if one of the family must have only just walked out of it
and is somewhere else in the house: sewing, casting-up accounts, counting linen or conning lessons. To visit there is like walking straight off the street into a Vermeer of Delft.
That was the only time I was to meet Uncle Freddie but from then until he died many years later, he wrote quite regularly and always remarked that he had greatly enjoyed getting in ‘a nice lot of hugs and kisses’, which was no more than the truth.
After Cape Town we steamed slowly up the west coast of Africa in enervating, overcast weather. A land breeze brought a sluggish, dank smell from the Gold Coast and a notice went up warning passengers to keep under the awnings as ‘the sun was deceptive’. We stood close inshore and saw Accra and, later, Dakar and a fort that looked as if a film producer had decided to revive Beau Geste.
We had only one other port of call – a few hours, anchored in the roads off Las Palmas where we were supposed to take in fresh water. It proved to be bad and the doctor, who conformed only too accurately to every uncomplimentary and unfair legend one had ever heard about ship’s doctors, roused himself sufficiently to issue an edict that it was unsafe to drink, either boiled or fresh. This resulted in a stampede on the bar which very soon ran out of everything except dreadful port and raspberryade.
Two nights before the end of the voyage a fancy-dress party was held. The weather was stifling. We had taken in a load of bananas which were stowed on deck in open wired bales between layers of their own tinder-dry leaves. I couldn’t but think this a dangerous arrangement when I saw groups of passengers leaning against the bales, smoking. The smell, too, was very strong.
I had put on a scarlet paper carnival suit and feeling rather pleased with myself, had gone up on deck when I ran into a group of three South Africans. They were in a great taking-on. One of their party, a doctor, had become very ill and drifted between delirium and unconsciousness. The ship’s doctor, run to earth in a cabin under circumstances where embarrassment was at a premium, had merely given orders that his brother medico was to be removed to the hospital and had then slammed the door and gone underground.
The friends were both furious and anxious and a little irked, I thought, at having their party upset. Who, they fretfully pointed out, could say what might not happen? He had warned them at the outset of his illness that he was in a bad way. He might die. They had decided to take watches between them. It was rather awkward, they said, because they had arranged…I said I would take a watch. I wasn’t madly wedded to the fancy-dress party and anyway one of them would come and relieve me in an hour.
It was a strange experience. The unknown doctor, who looked dreadful, lay with his eyes not quite shut, turned his head from side to side and sometimes muttered unintelligibly. The stifling little hospital was dirty and unkempt. Surgical instruments flecked with rust lay haphazard in an enamel tray. Used towels had been thrown into a corner. The window was open and I listened to the giant whisper of the sea and distant sounds of revelry. Whoever had undertaken to relieve me evidently forgot to do so. I wished there was something to be done: fluids to be given or perhaps sponging, or ice packs to be administered. I wished the ship’s doctor, in whatever condition, would look in.
I don’t know how long I sat there in my scarlet paper dress. Presently there was no more music, the deck outside the window went dark and the ship settled down for what was left of the night. The patient had become so quiet that in a panic I felt for his pulse. His parched hand closed on mine. I leant forward and rested my forearm on the bed and so remained until at last the man who first spoke to me returned. He said he supposed I must like nursing. It was evident that however bereft the bar might be there were still supplies of alcohol in the Balranald. I said good night and walked en fête and alone down the coconut matting corridors to my cabin. Dawn was already established.
Four hours later I woke to the last day on board the Balranald.
Now the thing about names began. I wonder why these names should have had that particular effect? Was it just the easy magic of proper nouns, so indefatigably explored by poets? ‘Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester’ down to Kipling’s list of fishing craft? Was it because one had so often heard these names and read them and was at last to see the places themselves? Or was it that, for someone with a great predominance of English blood in her veins, the sound of ‘Land’s End’, ‘The Lizard’, ‘Portland Bill’, ‘Beachy Head’ and ‘Sheerness’ roused some atavistic emotion and abruptly established a heritage. Two men passed along the deck.
‘We lie off Dungeness tonight.’
‘I heard someone say we’re to anchor off Gravesend until it gets light.’
My heart rose into my throat.
I went below and finished my packing.
Here, now, was England itself, close at hand, sliding composedly into the frame of my porthole. A lighthouse, the very tip and beginning of England, a breakwater, cliffs modulating into hills that looked as if they were mown like a lawn: a heraldic England in green and white. For a moment I remembered the West Coast of New Zealand as I’d seen it one evening nearly three months ago: remote, bereft of humankind, so old and so lately born out of primordial time. It astonished me to see now how the south coast of England bore an almost unbroken chain of habitation. I knew it must be so but it was surprising, nevertheless.
Already shipboard life was falling to pieces about one’s ears. A radiogram from the Lampreys fluttered into the foreground and spread itself over my field of receptivity like the playbill in the film of Henry V. I had packed everything but my overnight necessities: for all the world, I might have been back on the inter-island ferry. My cupboard-cabin was blank and I don’t remember, although the voyage had been a source of delight, that I felt at all sorry, as I would nowadays, that the Balranald had come to the end of her last ramshackle voyage. To all intents, I was ashore.
We did anchor off Gravesend and were to steam up the Thames at dawn to the docks at Tilbury.
Impossible to sleep. I knelt on my bunk and what I saw must have been much the same kind of thing that would be seen a few years later, during the bombing of London. A fire had broken out among the timber-yards at Gravesend. It made a red wavering hole in the night and I thought I could smell it.
Just before dawn the cabin steward made an isolated gesture. For the first time on the voyage he brought me a cup of tea. He said it would be all right to drink it: the water had been filtered. Since Las Palmas I had half-satisfied my thirst with the last of some Cape Town fruit. I thanked him warmly and had drunk half the tea when I found the rest of the cup was full of a thick, viscid, grey silt. There was no time to worry unduly about this. Light had entered the cabin, the ship was moving. Outside was the Pool of London.
It was still very early in the morning when we berthed at Tilbury. I expected that I would have to wait for at least two hours before anybody appeared but when I looked over the rail, there, among a handful of people on the wharf, was a Lamprey.
III
My childhood dream of London is in some ways clearer in my memory than the events of that first morning: they, indeed, have a dreamlike, wavering quality. Of the long drive through the East End into the City I remember little except, again, names. ‘Limehouse’ and ‘Poplar’, for instance, in those days evoked wonderfully sinister references to opium dens, gas-lamps wreathed in fog and wet stone stairs. The Commercial Road looked drab, broad and bald on that bright summer morning and held no romantic overtones.
I remember being told to look up out of the car window and there was the dome of St Paul’s.
Up the hill to Ludgate
Down the hill of Fleet.
I thought, and the words jingled confusedly in my head. As if in answer there were bells, high in the air, clanging away above the roar of London.
‘That’s St Clement’s Dane.’
There it stood like an island. ‘Oranges and lemons’ they were ringing as if there were no bombs in the future and they would sing it out for another three centuries
or more.
‘We’ll have breakfast somewhere. There’s a new place in Piccadilly we might try.’
The smell of the West End in the early morning. Hot bread. Coffee. Freshly watered pavements. Hairdressing parlours. Roses. Being a Lamprey place of entertainment it was, of course, an extremely grand restaurant. Why was it open at that hour, I wonder? I smell and see it and am surprised by the waist-to-ankle aprons of junior waiters. Eggs and bacon are ordered and then we are driving up a beautiful wide street.
‘Do you know what that is?’
‘Buckingham Palace?’
But it flashes up and is gone and so is the whole of the journey into Buckinghamshire.
I am not at all surprised to find myself being driven up a fine avenue to a Georgian manor house about three times as big and infinitely more impressive than the place that had seemed so grand in New Zealand and which, it may be remembered, had been given up as an economy measure. This is a lovely house. Behind and around it are gentle emerald-green hills, woods, and coppices, all beautifully groomed and tended and looking as if they came out of a medieval chronicle. Nor am I surprised, on alighting, to find everything shuttered and barred with large notices chalked up. ‘Gone away.’ ‘Visiting Omsk and Tomsk.’ ‘Back in September.’ ‘For sale on Easy Terms.’ This is one of the classic Lamprey jokes. They adore false telephone calls, dressing-up, diddling each other on railway stations and at garden parties, charitable bazaars and committee meetings. The head of the family once dressed up as an eccentric clergyman and with his wife – all scarves and beads – drove twenty miles into the country where he wrecked a charitable fête in his mother’s garden. He made scenes about the prices, pocketed the clues in the treasure hunt and screamed out that the chocolate wheel (which I was running) was daylight robbery. Not until he shook his stick in my face did I recognize him. As most of the Lampreys are possessed of a considerable flair for acting and make-up, their on-goings are thought funny by people who normally detest and despise practical jokes.
