The Case of the 'Hail Mary' Celeste

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘I just wanted you to understand,’ said the Dingleman, ‘in case you didn’t, how serious I am.’

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘I always hoped Magdalena would marry me, but she won’t. But that’s not the point. Now that you’ve got a girl, you may feel about her the same way. If you do, that gives us a problem.’

  ‘Ron, I sense you are repeating your threat.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I must tell you . . . you probably don’t think I’m much of an opponent, not someone to be feared, but—’

  ‘No, no, Jack. I do. When you make a living in the ring, you learn to get the measure of a man. I’m never wrong. That’s why I’ve come here tonight. I know what you are capable of, even though I’m not sure you do. We’re in a fix.’ His expression became morose. ‘My boy is very poorly.’

  ‘I must say, it was famous of you for taking him in like you did. I think a lot of people would be very surprised to learn about it.’

  ‘Well, that’s one surprise they won’t enjoy. I don’t want you blabbing.’

  ‘I won’t. I sincerely hope he gets better for Christmas.’

  ‘Even if he does, they say he will be in that iron lung all his life.’

  ‘I’ve heard there will be a vaccine by 1960.’

  ‘I’ve heard that too. But not for people who already have it. Do you remember what it was like to be in a firebox?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘How did you feel?’

  ‘To be honest I didn’t like it at all. I was frightened. Most boys are. But they have to go, don’t they? Because only little boys are small enough.’

  ‘I wonder if that’s how he feels.’

  We finished our beer and he left without saying any more, but leaving me in no doubt that he was earnest about his threat to Jenny.

  THE BOY’S OWN RAILWAY GOSLING ANNUAL

  Vol.VII 1931 Price: 1/-

  Replies to our readers’ letters

  G. I. LAWRENCE, BASILDON—It all depends on how far the flea jumps. The practice you describe first appeared during the siege of Theodosia in the 14th century when the besieging Mongol army catapulted plague-infested corpses over the city walls. Whether the bubonic plague could traverse the entire length of the train by flea jump alone in the space of a typical mainline journey of some six hours is very much open to doubt. Records show not a single instance of this occurring on any British train. There have been cases where drivers have been suddenly overcome by food poisoning. None of these have resulted in derailments of the type you describe, nor of conflagration sweeping away an entire village community.

  THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF RAILWAY GOSLING CADBURY HOLT – ON THE TRAIL OF THE MISSING NUNS!

  I First Make the Acquaintance of Mr Gape

  ‘Pishon!’ he cried, with breath so sodden with gin it made a bird drop dead from a tree on the river bank. ‘Pishon! You mad fool, there is no such river and even if there were what would be the point of spending all that trouble getting there? We have cemeteries just as good here in Port Bismarck!’

  Mr Gape lay slumped on the floor of the pilot-house, his back wedged against the port hatch. The Nellie was a squat, thirty-footer, flat-bottomed boat with an iron hull and a deck that had once been wood but which now was so rotten it glowed like forest mushrooms. The pilot-house was built from timbers so damp you could bore your own finger right through. A tattered awning covered the last six feet of the stern. The boat exuded a reek of decay commingled with the putrescent aroma of rotting vegetables. The engine and boiler were amidships with a tall funnel that could occasionally be coached into coughing some puffs of black smoke into the sky. The only part of the Nellie that inspired confidence was the brass plaque on the pilot-house gable inscribed with the words ‘Isaac J. Abdela of the Abdela & Mitchell shipyards at Brimscombe, Gloucestershire. 1895. May the Lord have Mercy on All Who Sail in This Vessel.’

  ‘You crazy, crazy fool,’ Gape said again and added emphasis to his diagnosis by saluting with a hand that clasped the neck of a gin bottle.

  I answered him as calmly as I was able. ‘I have it on good authority that the river exists and that you are one of the few white men to have knowledge of its whereabouts.’

  Gape stared at me the way a man might examine a five-legged horse. ‘You do not strike me as the sort of chap who desires to end his days in a cannibal’s cooking pot.’

  ‘The fate of my mortal remains concerns me not, so long as my soul is not in the pot with them.’

  ‘Pishon, eh? You want to go to the River Pishon. The fabled lost river of Eden. Just like that! Just load up with stores, fill the boiler and off we go. Just like that!’

  ‘I don’t see any reason why not.’

  ‘That just goes to show what a crazy fool you are, and an ignorant crazy fool to boot.’

  ‘Please do not be tedious. I shall, of course, pay for your services.’

  ‘Pishon! First we’d have to sail up the Sulabunga here for three weeks until she became nothing more than a trickle. Then we’d have to hire some porters to help drag the Nellie over a small volcano and put her down in the Lunga-Lunga, a river better known to you as the Pishon.’

  ‘That sounds like an excellent plan.’

  Mr Gape belched most disgustingly. ‘Well, it might be if it didn’t require us to steam through the territory of the Segembwezi. They are a proud people who do not take kindly to strangers passing through the territory, at least not ones who fail to pay the tribute.’

  ‘Then we shall pay the tribute.’

  ‘That’s a good plan, except that the Segembwezi make the tribute rather high.’

  ‘How high?’

  Mr Gape threw back his head and laughed. I waited patiently. Ordinarily I should have boxed his ears and thrown his loathsome bottle into the river, but all my information told me he was the only man insane enough to undertake a journey beyond the first set of rapids.

  ‘The children of the Segembwezi chase after you,’ said Mr Gape. ‘They cry, “Niama. Niama!” Did you know that? At first you fancy they are asking for beads or a gift, but no, it means “Meat. Meat!”’

  ‘You are not succeeding in frightening me, if that is your purpose.’

  ‘They like to cut off your face and boil it up in your own stomach along with a bit of rice and goat.’

  ‘I’m quite fond of a bit of goat myself.’

  ‘Are you indeed! And what of the delicacy they prize the most, the part they reserve for honoured guests and visiting kings?’

  ‘If you mean brains, I have eaten sheep brains and not suffered.’

  ‘I do not mean brains! I mean that part of a man which it is most unfortunate for a man to lose, for in doing so he loses that which makes him a man.’

  I could contain my disgust no longer. I rushed forward and seized the wretch by the rag he called a shirt and shook him. ‘You are a disgrace! A disgrace to the England that bore you . . . to the noble country that first gave you suck, that fed and clothed and schooled you, and gave you her tender green ways to wander in.’

  He started to fall sideways, forcing me to prop him up.

  ‘Good old Blighty!’ he said and grinned vilely. ‘How jolly lucky I am.’

  ‘Have you no sense of shame? What sort of example is this to show to the Savages? You have a responsibility, Mr Gape, nay, a duty . . .’ My words petered out as it became apparent Mr Gape had become insensate.

  Chapter 10

  SHREWSBURY, CHESTER, BIRKENHEAD & LIVERPOOL

  Week Days—contd.

  Weeping Cross

  1.15p.m.

  Shrewsbury

  1.40p.m.

  Leaton

  1.48p.m.

  Oldwoods Halt

  1.51p.m.

  Baschurch

  1.58p.m.

  Stanwardine Halt

  2.01p.m.

  Haughton Halt

  2.07p.m.

  Rednal and West Felton

  2.13p.m.

  Whittington Low L
evel

  2.19p.m.

  Gobowen

  2.26p.m.

  Weston Rhyn

  2.30p.m.

  Chirk

  2.34p.m.

  Jenny was already waiting for me at the ticket barrier as the clock struck one. A phone call to the stationmaster at Chirk had reassured me that there were two opticians in the town, but only one – Lowell & Chambers – had been in business since the turn of the century. Jenny and I had some debate about this as we climbed the stone steps to the platform. My intention had been to approach the town’s optician with the items from Lost Property and ask if he might know where to find Sister Beatrice. But Jenny felt he might see through our ruse and we would stand a much better chance of gaining the information we sought if we simply approached someone in the street.

  Our train arrived in Weeping Cross twenty minutes late as a result of an accident involving a goods train derailed in a tunnel during the night. By all accounts it had not been a serious accident but all the same one does not like to hear of such things. It is like hearing news of a bereavement in the family. An accident in the darkness of a tunnel is all the more alarming. Few passengers reflect on the courage it takes to drive a train into a tunnel. A man who walks down into his cellar holding a light becomes frozen with fear if his light fails. He dares hardly move, and feels his way gingerly back to the surface. But a train driver entering a tunnel can see nothing. If you have been caught in a room when a gale blows the smoke back down the chimney you will know what it is like in a tunnel. Smoke, ash, sparks and hot cinders blow back into your face and eyes. As a passenger you assume the footplate team are keeping their eyes peeled for danger. In truth, they are most likely both on their hands and knees in the cab, faces covered in wet cloths.

  There is one advantage to the accident taking place in a tunnel: you won’t see it. Out in the open, if a driver sees a train ahead into which he shall shortly collide, there is little he can do. He will of course apply the brakes, and turn off the regulator, but it takes miles to stop a 500-ton train travelling at full pelt. Once having done that he can do no more except save his own skin by leaping clear of the cab. But should he? This is a vexed issue. No point can be served by his remaining, but in jumping he is saving his skin by availing himself of knowledge unavailable to the passengers. In practice most drivers and their firemen, when all else is lost, do jump from the cab, although they very often do not survive the jump, and those that do, perhaps, spend the rest of their lives regretting their decision. For they relive the experience every night in their dreams, having witnessed an event that no man should ever have to behold: two trains in collision. And pity the poor chap at whom the finger of blame will eventually point. Good men who lead lives of diligence, toil and sober hard work. Who dedicate their long days to the service of the railway company and the passengers, and who never acquire a black mark against their names but are ordained by the cruelty of fate to make an error. The sort of simple human error, the very performance of which marks us out as men and not infallible immortals, the sort that in any other walk of life would hardly warrant a mention, becomes a moment on the railways that destroys a man’s life. Men such as Magdalena’s father, who in a moment of befuddlement put the troop train on the wrong line and forgot about it.

  Many of the safety features that we take for granted today came about as a result of crashes. People would be greatly surprised to learn the most important safety feature, implemented after a crash on the Great Western near Reading in 1841, was to put a roof on the carriages.

  Magdalena’s father achieved a certain renown for his error for a few years, but some men achieve a notoriety that outlasts them. Men such as John Benge, whose name is remembered by posterity for his part in derailing the train on which Charles Dickens was travelling in 1865. Benge was the foreman of the track gang given the job of replacing some timber on a bridge and chose to do so in the small window of time between two trains. This was accepted practice, but he made an important mistake: in order to find a suitable period in which to carry out the repair work, he consulted the railway timetable. But the timetable made no mention of the boat train on which Charles Dickens was travelling, because boat trains, like excursions and troop trains, are not listed in its pages. A boat train is dispatched to meet a boat, and boats, depending as they do on the vagaries of tide and the weather, arrive at all sorts of times. When the train in which Dickens was travelling reached the bridge, it wasn’t there. The train plunged into the river. Charles Dickens was not killed but never fully recovered. John Benge is regarded with particular disdain by literary scholars since it is because of him that we will now never know who killed Edwin Drood.

  During the journey we discussed the disappearance of the nuns.

  ‘Wasn’t there some sort of official inquiry?’ said Jenny. ‘They must have found something out.’

  ‘The findings were not made public but the version that was given to me was about something called ergotism. This is a sort of madness brought on by eating grain that has a fungus growing on it. It happened a lot in olden times. The explanation was the nuns must have eaten contaminated Host – made from mouldy rye – and been consumed by madness and all wandered off the train and then they all fell down a mine.’

  ‘Did they look down a mine?’

  ‘There were no mines to look down. Although there was Box Tunnel. But that was the first place they searched. The police and the army. It was the seventeenth of May 1915. The train left Swindon at 7.25 in the morning, and reached Bristol Temple Meads at 8.25.’

  ‘What did the guard say?’

  ‘He disappeared too. There were twenty-three nuns and the guard, all of whom vanished. There were police road blocks and checkpoints throughout the south of England and a watch was kept on all ports and aerodromes, but nothing was ever seen of them.’

  I took out the case file of Cadbury Holt, and spread the items relating to this case on the seat. There were newspaper clippings and letters from foreign countries. The Times front page for 18 May 1915 ran the headline ‘Holy Sisters vanish into thin air, German foul play suspected’. Cadbury had also included a report of a Zeppelin bombing raid on Southend-on-Sea. There was an envelope of photographs showing police and Boy Scouts searching along the railway track; photos of police and soldiers conducting road blocks and checkpoints; soldiers at unidentified ports checking identity papers. One picture stood out: a photo of an unfortunate man surrounded by an angry crowd. Cadbury had scribbled on the back that he was an innocent Ukrainian suspected of being German on account of his accent. The country was awash with rumour that German spies were coming ashore from U-boats disguised as nuns.

  Cadbury’s file contained a number of subdivisions, and in the back was a letter from the Commissar with Responsibility for White Slavery attached to the International Red Cross in Geneva. The text of the letter described a report received from the British consul in Kuching, British North Borneo, about a seafaring vagrant called Hershey Lindt who claimed to have seen one of the nuns in the belly of a tramp steamer aboard which he had been Shanghaied in 1927. It was clear that the consular official gave little credence to the story but reported it for form’s sake. Mr Lindt had been an expatriate American who specialised in the export of elephant-foot umbrella stands in Port Bismarck on the coast of West Africa, fifty miles north of the mouth of the Congo. One night after having drunk too much rum in a particularly seedy dockside bar frequented by cut-throats, pirates and wretches running from the noose, he found himself abducted aboard a tramp steamer in the charge of the notorious Captain Squideye. They were bound for a tiny island off Sumatra called Skull Island where it was said there lived a monster who could only be appeased by being fed from time to time the flesh of a white woman. Mr Lindt claimed to have glimpsed one of the nuns chained up in the belly of the ship and maintained that the stoker told him in hushed tones appropriate for such skullduggery that this nun was the next intended sacrificial victim. Captain Squideye, when questioned some years later, de
nied all knowledge of this whilst at the same time contradicting himself by claiming that they were making a feature film. Mr Lindt eventually jumped ship in Sarawak, northern Borneo.

  Outside the station at Chirk there was only one thoroughfare to investigate. We decided to adopt Jenny’s plan and ask the first person we met. It turned out to be a district nurse who had just finished loading her bicycle’s basket with parcels from the collecting office. Her reaction was unexpected. She stood astride her bicycle and stared at the items I had procured from Mr Jarley, the Bible, rosary and spectacles. Then she said, ‘Would it surprise you to know that Sister Beatrice was not astigmatic?’ There was a moment’s silence, and then she continued, with barely disguised disdain, ‘Yes, I thought as much. Who is it this time? Are you from the press? You don’t look it, you look more like an insurance investigator. We’re quite tired of your sort, you know. You never stop to think about the pain you cause, do you?’

  ‘Madam,’ I said.

  She pointedly turned her handlebars aside and prepared to ride off. ‘Well, you’ll get nothing out of me. Nor anyone else round here, I should imagine. Sorry if you’ve had a wasted journey. I must congratulate you on the audacity of your pantomime. I’ve never seen that one before. Lost Property indeed.’ She cycled off, leaving us both rooted to the spot, lost for words as we watched her cycle away uncertainly, wavering from side to side.

  It began to spit with rain, and without speaking we ambled up the road, following her, towards a bridge over the canal. As we did a motor car past us rather swiftly and careened from side to side as if the driver and passenger were both wrestling with the wheel. The car was a Bentley and halted on the bridge. The passenger-side door flew open. A lady in a fur coat jumped out and appeared to be in some distress. She slammed the door but her coat became caught in the door frame and prevented the mechanism locking. The driver opened his door and climbed out with what seemed to be an exaggeratedly slovenly attitude, designed to infuriate the lady.