Chrissie's Children

by Irene Carr

  Jefferies had translated the outburst as she spoke and finished with her now. The officer behind the desk – it was no more than a trestle table covered with a blanket – stared as the tears ran down her face then looked down at the file in front of him. Then he said something in a low voice and Jefferies matched his quiet tone so Chrissie barely heard the words. ‘He says there has been enough killing. Take your children and go.’

  The officer was scribbling on a sheet of paper. He signed it with a flourish, banged a rubber stamp on its foot and stood to hand it to Jefferies. He passed it to Chrissie. ‘An order for their release.’ As she took it the officer bellowed and a soldier entered, listened to the orders barked at him by the officer and saluted, then held the door open.

  Chrissie said, ‘Thank you.’ The officer gave a stiff little bow and she walked out followed by Jefferies. Fifteen minutes later she held Matt and Helen in her arms.

  It was on a Wednesday that Sophie, now in Brighton, received a telegram from her father saying: MOTHER MATT AND HELEN DUE HOME FRIDAY. She travelled north that night by sleeper, arriving on Thursday morning. She decided to visit her father in the yard before going home, but as she walked down Church Street, blonde hair blowing in the wind, she turned aside to look in on Margaret Hackett, Peter’s mother. The house was quiet as she walked along the passage and she concluded the upstairs neighbours were at work. She tapped at the kitchen door, then called, ‘Mrs Hackett?’ She received no reply. Suddenly uneasy, she turned the handle, pushed the door open and paused again to call, ‘Mrs Hackett?’ Then she was still, hardly breathing.

  A small fire, burned down to ash and embers, glowed in the black- leaded grate and reflected from the brass fender and the fire irons on the hearth. Peter’s mother sat near it in her armchair. Her hands, holding her knitting, lay in her lap and her head bent forward as if she dozed. She was very small, seemed to have shrunk in on herself, and she was very still. Sophie held tight to the door for a full minute in the silence of the empty house. She could hear, distantly, the hammer and clangour from Ballantyne’s yard where the men were at work again.

  Finally she moved slowly to kneel by the old woman and touch her hand, feeling for a pulse and looking up into her face. The hand was cold and the eyes stared at her unseeing. When the doctor came he said she had been dead for several hours.

  Chrissie and Helen whiled away the journey home with plans for a wedding. When they stepped down from the train they were met by Jack – and Sophie, in black. By her side was a short and sturdy boy of nine or ten in a new suit of navy blue jacket and shorts. There was a joyful reunion and later, in the house, Sophie took her mother aside and explained, ‘The little lad is Billy Hackett, Peter’s half-brother. I found his mother dead.’

  Chrissie said softly, ‘Oh, Sophie!’ She knew this was her daughter’s first experience of death. She listened to Sophie’s account of her doings, how she had contacted some distant relatives in Yorkshire by telegram. ‘They replied saying they left it to me. “We parted for good when she married again!” I suppose that was when she married Billy’s father. Well, I’ve organised the funeral, but then there’s Billy. Peter will look after him when he gets home but that won’t be for a week or more.’

  Chrissie said, ‘Peter can’t care for him while he is at sea. That won’t do . . .’

  After the funeral Sophie paid the rent on Peter’s home for two weeks ahead. Billy went to live with Chrissie and the pair of them saw Sophie off at the station, on her way back to Brighton on a day of storm. Chrissie asked Sophie as the guard’s whistle shrilled, ‘Where is Peter now?’

  ‘He’s on board a ship called the Florrie Dawe. She was reported as passing through the Straits of Gibraltar over a week ago.’ Sophie grinned wrily. ‘So he’s somewhere between there and here!’ They looked up to the roof of the station where the rain pounded, listened to the howl of the wind outside. Sophie said, ‘I hope he’s all right.’

  Peter had seen bad weather in the Bay of Biscay and coming through the Channel but now, in the North Sea, it was growing worse. The seas pounded the Florrie Dawe and the wind piled them in over her bow. She butted into the big, green seas all that day and into the night. In the early hours of the morning the second mate called all hands out of the fo’c’sle. Peter, in oilskins and sou’wester, stumbled after Harry Latimer and shouted above the storm, ‘What is it?’

  As he spoke the ship rolled. She had rolled for days now but never so badly as this and now she did not recover. They clawed their way out of the fo’c’sle to find the deck tilted so that they looked over one bulwark at the dark and cloud-wracked sky, and over the other down into the raging sea. Harry shouted, ‘Her steering’s gone and she’s broadside to wind and sea! We’ve got to rig some sort of steering or she’s finished!’

  Peter fought his way aft along the canted deck with Harry and the others, sometimes up to their waists in water as the seas broke over the Florrie Dawe. He saw that the sea had smashed in the covers of numbers one and two holds. Harry pointed and shouted, ‘She’s filling up!’ With every sea that burst inboard the ship was taking in tons of water. They fought to save her, working on the exposed stern, trying to rig chains from winches to the swinging, useless rudder. The Florrie Dawe was a single screw ship and so could not be manoeuvred by her engines. The steering had to be restored.

  However, the sea was too strong and the ship was too old. Every time Peter looked up from his labour he could see she lay lower in the sea, had listed further.

  ‘Abandon ship!’ The cry came down from the bridge, passed from mouth to mouth, shouted against the wind. Peter traversed the deck, that now stood like a cliff, clinging to a safety line in order to reach the superstructure amidships and the boats there. He helped to launch one of them and saw the men crammed into her pull away. He started working at a davit trying to lower another into the sea that was only a few feet below him. Then the churned-white surface boiled up towards him and over him. As it closed over his head he knew the Florrie Dawe was sinking and she was taking him with her.

  Sophie cried out and started up in her bed in the Brighton hotel. The sheets were torn off her by her wild thrashing, her blonde hair was tangled and sweat stood on her brow. She was frightened, shaking, but did not know why, could not remember the dream that had wracked her. Her window was open and a breeze blew out the curtains so they fluttered like pale wings in the darkness. She wondered if that had woken her. She got out of bed and closed the window then stood with her brow against the coolness of the glass, staring out at the sea. She wondered where Peter was and shivered, feared for him.

  He surfaced gasping, borne up by the air in his oilskins. Something smashed against his shoulder and he yelled in pain, then realised it was a floating oar. He seized it and held to it at arm’s length. That gave him some support while he kicked off his seaboots and shrugged out of the oilskins. He saw the Florrie Dawe standing on her head, only her stern and the propeller showing above the sea. He struck out desperately, striving to avoid being sucked down as the ship dived under. He glimpsed a boat – the one he had tried to lower at the end? He did not know, but made for it. He was close when he saw another man clinging to a hatch cover and recognised Harry Latimer. As he passed he shouted, ‘Hold on, Harry!’ The face Harry turned to him was pale in the night, open mouthed and with staring eyes. Peter knew Harry would not last long in this sea.

  He reached the boat and found it empty when he clambered in over the stern. He shipped the oars and rowed the boat, bouncing and pitching, towards Harry. Twice he lost him in the night as Harry and the boat were tossed on the huge seas, now up on a high crest then down in a dark valley. He closed on him at last, held out an oar for him to grab and then hauled the exhausted man aboard.

  He made Harry take an oar and try to pull, partly to help in keeping the boat’s head to sea but mainly to keep Harry alive: if he had been left to fall asleep in the bottom of the boat he would never have woken. They were still pulling wearily at the oars when the d
awn came and brought with it a big, new freighter. She stopped to make a lee as she drifted down on them, then took them aboard. They collapsed when they were hauled up to her deck.

  Michael Beaumont looked up from the telegram sent by Chrissie Ballantyne, exasperated. ‘I know it’s not your fault, Sophie, but this is a business. I contract to supply a band and singers, a standard of entertainment. If I don’t do that, if one of my singers is always missing, then people won’t want to pay me. Now you’re good, darling, very good, but that’s no use if you’re always away! I would be better off with somebody who is around all the time! So make your mind up. This tour round the South Coast finishes in another couple of weeks but then we’re contracted for a winter season of four months up north. Do you want to work for me? Because if you do, you’ll stay with me now. After all, this . . .’ and he waved the buff form ‘. . . says: “Peter safe in hospital Newcastle. Ship sunk.” It doesn’t say he is at death’s door. He could be out of hospital by the time you get up there.’

  ‘And maybe he won’t.’ Sophie was still shaken from seeing the newspaper reports of the loss of the Florrie Dawe with only a few survivors. She took the telegram from him. ‘I see your point of view – and thank you for the time I’ve had with you and the boys. I’m sorry.’

  Beaumont sighed. ‘So am I. That Peter must be quite a man. Good luck, Sophie.’

  She blushed then and wept after she left him, tears for lost opportunities. She had not shown him the other telegram from Solly Rosenberg, telling her he had got her an audition the next day with Leslie Taylor, who had a big London band that broadcast across the country. Sophie sent two telegrams herself: one to her mother to say she was returning home, the other to Solly, telling him she had left Michael Beaumont and she would not be able to attend the audition for the Leslie Taylor band.

  Chrissie drove to Newcastle in the Ford, met Sophie there and told her, ‘I’ve been to see Peter twice, took him some books and fruit.’ It was the first time Chrissie had met Peter, and she had gone to the hospital with some foreboding, wondering about this ‘friend’ – as Sophie insisted on calling him – who eked out a meagre living by prize fighting. She found him a likeable, open-faced young man, ready to smile when he had got over the first shock of her introduction: ‘Hello! I’m Chrissie Ballantyne, Sophie’s mother.’ Now Chrissie went on, ‘He’s had a bad time but he’s getting over it. I think he may well be out in a few days.’

  Sophie said brightly, ‘Oh, I’m sure he’s fine.’

  Chrissie did not ask why, if that was the case, Sophie had travelled over three hundred miles to see Peter. She drove her daughter to the hospital, dropped her at the door and said, ‘I’ll go and park. See you inside in five minutes.’

  Her tact was wasted. Sophie found Peter in a ward with nineteen other men who watched her with interest and approval as she tap-tapped, blonde and slender and long legged, between the beds to where Peter lay. They both said, ‘Hello,’ conscious of the spectators. Sophie sat on a straight-backed chair some two feet from the bed and asked, ‘How are you?’

  Peter grinned at her. ‘They had to hang me up for a bit to dry out but I’m all right now.’ Then he became serious. ‘Thank you for all you did. Mrs Ballantyne told me about my mother, how you looked after things – and took care of Billy.’

  Sophie, embarrassed, said, ‘He’s a good little lad. I’m just sorry you came home to such bad news.’

  They talked on politely until Chrissie appeared. She smiled around her at the other patients, who were as admiring of her as they had been of Sophie. Chrissie had thought that as a woman turned forty she was too old to blush, but she was wrong.

  She came in on a strained pause in the conversation, which Sophie broke: ‘He says he’s going back to sea as soon as he’s fit. Tell him he’s mad.’

  Peter said flatly, ‘I’ve no chance of a job ashore. I’ve been through all that. I bought some books out of my pay from that first voyage. They went down with the Florrie Dawe but I’ll buy some more. Harry Latimer, a shipmate of mine, told me I might be able to pass my certificates for mate and work my way up. I’d be somebody. So as soon as I can get a ship I’ll be off.’

  Sophie challenged, ‘What about Billy?’

  Peter was unmoved. ‘I’ll find somebody to look after him while I’m away. He’ll be better off that way than he would with me at home and on the dole.’

  Sophie appealed, ‘Mother?’

  But Chrissie shook her head. ‘I could never keep your father ashore when he wanted to go, but I don’t like the idea of Billy being passed around from one home to another. There’s a garage behind the hotel with a little flat over it. Both are empty. You can have the flat for when you come home and I can find some light work for you until you’re ready to go back to sea. And when you’re away Billy can stay with us.’ She did not think Peter would stick at a job in the hotel for long, but it would give him an occupation until he was ready to go to sea again and a home for him and his brother.

  Peter said stiffly, ‘I don’t want charity.’

  Sophie exclaimed, ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Don’t be such a pompous—’ She was stopped by her mother’s hand gripping her arm.

  Chrissie said icily, ‘I don’t waste my time on young men who are well able to look after themselves. I’m thinking of the boy.’

  Peter was silent a while, thinking it over. Then he said grudgingly, ‘All right, so long as I can pay you a fair rent for the flat – and I’ll pay you for putting up Billy while I’m at sea.’

  Chrissie agreed because it was what she had expected. ‘Of course.’

  Peter looked from her to Sophie and said, ‘I’m lucky to have such good friends. Thank you.’

  Driving home in the Ford, Chrissie said, ‘I’ll bring you through again tomorrow.’

  ‘No.’ The corners of Sophie’s mouth were down. ‘I know he’s safe. That’s enough. I can’t live wondering where he is and whether he’s all right.’ She remembered the old woman waiting on the quay for the ship to come in. The wall was still between her and Peter. They had put it up together over six months ago when he sailed on the Chatterton. Sophie had proposed, ‘Friends?’ and he had replied that they couldn’t be anything else. Sophie had gone to the hospital today hoping the wall lay in ruins – but it still stood.

  Chrissie wondered . . . She said, ‘He’s a determined young man, means to get on.’ She had seen him looking at Sophie and thought she knew the cause of that determination.

  Now Sophie said ruefully, ‘So do I, but I’ve been making things hard for myself.’ She told her mother how she had given up her job with the Beaumont Band. ‘That was one big chance thrown away. And Solly handed me another and I’ve missed that.’ She explained how she had failed to go for the audition with the Leslie Taylor band.

  Chrissie was silent for a while, eyes on the road as they passed the old windmill at Fulwell and drove on into the town. The doubt that she had harboured for some time, that she might have been wrong in her opposition to Sophie trying to make a living as a singer, now hardened into near certainty. The fear that Sophie might turn out like her own mother, Vesta Nightingale, was no longer there. ‘I was going back to the hotel anyway. I’ll leave the car there and walk across to the station with you. There’s a train in about ten minutes that will connect with the London express at Durham.’

  So the next morning Sophie stood outside the brand new palais that was plastered with big posters announcing ‘The Leslie Taylor Band’. She wore a new costume she had bought just ten minutes before for close on five pounds. She told herself, ‘All or nothing, lass.’ She had rehearsed what she would say but she went over it again one last time: the apology for not turning up for the audition, the request to be given another chance and: ‘I don’t think you’ll regret it, Mr Taylor. Ask Michael Beaumont.’

  Then she walked in with a long-legged, swinging stride, her head up and smiling.

  25

  April 1939

  ‘You’re looking bonny,’ said Ja
ck Ballantyne, stooping to kiss his wife. His hand caressed her shoulder through the green silk of her day dress and she read the message in his eyes and laughed breathlessly. She sat at the foot of the long table and now he straightened to stand tall above her, then strode to take his seat at the head of the table and smile at her.

  Chrissie thought of it afterwards as a breathing space, that Easter Sunday lunch when she was able to gather all of her family around her. There was a chill stillness in the air but bright sunshine poured through the tall windows of the Ballantyne Hotel and laid contrasting strips of light and shade across the carpeted floor of the dining-room. It reflected, dazzling, from the glasses and silver on the table and cast light like a blessing on the people seated along each side of it.

  Jack was happy because the Ballantyne yard was busy. A week ago the headlines of the Foreign pages of the newspapers had shouted of the scandal in France. Angélique, the widow of Jean-François, had, with the lawyer Dupuis and two of his clerks, been charged with forging what purported to be Jean-François’ will leaving all to her. Dupuis had confessed and admitted that he and Angélique had been lovers. Jack had already spoken to Benoit, Jean-François’ manager, who was leading the management team now running the French company and they wanted to talk to him about buying another ship. They, like Randolph Tourville, were preparing for a war.

  Chrissie was glad for Jack and the yard but hid her own fears of the threat of war. She saw Matt, who seemed to add more muscle to his tall frame every day, in conversation with his father. Matt was working in the yard now but he had joined the Territorials, and told his parents with certainty, ‘Hitler and Mussolini will have to be stopped. I’ve seen what they did in Spain.’