What Was Rescued Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Jane Bailey

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477823156

  ISBN-10: 1477823158

  Cover design by Emma Rogers

  For John

  and what was rescued

  This book would not have been written without the generosity of

  The Royal Literary Fund

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  EMBARKING

  1

  2

  3

  SINKING

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  RESURFACING

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  FLOTSAM

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  JETSAM

  36

  37

  OCEANS APART

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  WASHED UP

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  RESCUING

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  BEACHCOMBING

  DORA (January 1969)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I remember the night the whales came. That was the first time I didn’t feel her eyes upon me, and I began to feel the consolation of forgetting. They came from nowhere, the whales, gliding alongside us like a friendly convoy. They gave long, satisfied sighs from their blowholes, like old men relaxing, and swam with us in the moonlight as if they had been sent to guide us to safety. I remember the coloured flecks of light in the water. And the stars, I remember the stars: there were more of them than I’ve ever seen since, plastering the sky like sea spray. But I didn’t know that it was eight days we were adrift. Eight days! Our Mam said she’d thought I was dead. They had a memorial service for me in the chapel and everything.

  Apart from that, I couldn’t remember anything much about the boat for years . . . except for his arms, and the sense of safety I had in them. An older boy’s arms and the smell of him, that’s what I remember vividly. Damp wool, salty skin and the musky scent of his hair roots. Mostly I cushioned my cheek on his wet shoulder and he let me cling on, a sodden speechless creature, fished out of the sea like a sprat. Sometimes he rubbed my feet. I don’t know if anyone rubbed his. We were all drenched in our pyjamas and coats; it was hard to think about anything but parched mouths and cold feet.

  That was what stayed with me. And then I did remember that deeply buried thing, when I saw her again, when I caught the look in her eyes. But that was over a decade later . . .

  Yes, I remember the whales – and the cold feet. To this day I can think of no better feeling in all the world than the comfort of warm socks. Except for those arms around me.

  EMBARKING

  1

  ARTHUR

  When Dora found me after all those years, I should have guessed something was being held back. What could have been an extraordinary meeting was, in fact, markedly strained. There was something going on between Pippa and Dora that I didn’t know about, and when I came across them in the living room, they were clearly arguing about something in angry, urgent voices. I flattered myself that they were arguing over me. I thought that maybe Dora’s arrival out of the blue had sparked some jealousy in Pippa. If I’m honest, I was touched. Thrilled, actually. The idea that Dora might want me enough to track me down and that Pippa (who had taken me for granted for some time, I’m afraid) should whip up such a passion to defend her claim on me – well, I can’t deny it made me feel quite proud.

  How wrong I was. If only I’d come upon them just a little earlier, if I’d heard the true content of their heated discussion, I can’t say for certain what I would have done. But lives would have been very different.

  Anyhow, that is not to start at the beginning. We first met in a train compartment. My brother, Philip, and I had boarded the train at Euston, and it was all very exciting because we had no idea where we were going. We knew we were bound for Canada, but the train journey itself was a complete mystery. I think it was this secrecy that added to the sense of adventure. I remember when the big brown envelope arrived to say we had been given places; we were officially forbidden from telling anyone. We weren’t even allowed to tell our school friends or neighbours.

  My mother had been reluctant to let us go. She hadn’t sent us off as evacuees like most of our friends and had been criticized harshly for it, I think. So she felt pleased and vindicated when they all started coming home again, full of horror stories about their host families and disgruntled at having been sent away for a phoney war. But then, of course, in that late summer of 1940 the most terrible bombing raids began over London. We hadn’t seen anything like it before. Dad got us all out building an Anderson shelter. It seemed like fun at first, but it was back-breaking work, and halfway through, a boy I knew in the next street got a direct hit on his house. He was really clever and had just won a place at the grammar school. With ghoulish curiosity, Philip and I went with some other kids to look at the charred remains of the house. There was his lovely leather satchel, its pale contents spilt out on to the back garden like a burst conker. I had wanted one like that badly, but I didn’t dare take it.

  Pretty soon after, Dad started talking about evacuation again. Mum had heard so many stories about children being used as cheap labour and whatnot that she was still very reluctant. Then Dad spotted this advert in the newspaper about ships to Canada – escorted by the Royal Navy itself. I was dead keen. What an adventure for a twelve-year-old boy! Mum kept putting up arguments about Philip being too young, because he was only six, but I insisted I’d look after him. She still took some persuading, but the fact that the Royal Navy would be protecting us swayed her, I think.

  We were in this train carriage bound for we knew not where (Liverpool, as it happened). Miss Prendergast, the woman looking after us, was in the next compartment with five other ‘seavacuees’ in our group, and we were on our own. Then, at Birmingham, two other children joined us. A tall woman in a fur coat, wafting strong perfume, swung open the door to our compartment and inspected us with a frown. Parents weren’t supposed to get on the train. ‘Here you are, darling! Keep your chin up!’ She ushered in the object of her endearment. ‘You needn’t sit next to anyone.’ She looked at us again, as if we might be harbouring a disease. ‘You can sit here in the corn
er by the corridor. This boy will help you with your luggage.’

  I jumped to my feet and lifted the suitcase she had placed on the seat next to her daughter. It was so weighty, I nearly lost it over my head as I heaved it up on to the luggage rack.

  ‘Cheerio, darling!’ The word ‘darling’ seemed very sophisticated to our ears, not being a word our parents used with us, but coming from this lady’s lips it sounded more like an accusation. In fact, for a moment I thought it was addressed to me, and I looked up to respond, but she was gone.

  I tried hard not to stare, but I could hardly take my eyes off the girl. She was about my age; she had dark hair with a glossy fringe, and the most dazzling green eyes. It was her eyes that struck me first, and then her manner, which was self-possessed and confident. She was the complete opposite of the other little girl joining the compartment who, having been hugged and waved off by a loud and weeping Welsh woman, sat sheepishly in the other corner, picking at the buckle of her bag.

  It’s an odd thing to reflect on now, but we didn’t know then that the four of us, in that train compartment, would be the main protagonists in the rest of our lives.

  ‘Well, I suppose we ought to introduce ourselves,’ said the girl with the heavenly eyes. From her corner, diagonally opposite, she looked directly at me, and I could hardly breathe. ‘My name’s Pippa.’

  ‘I’m Arthur,’ I said, ‘and this is my brother, Philip.’

  ‘Philip! That’s the same name as mine, sort of. I’m Philippa, really.’

  Philip looked affronted. ‘It’s a boy’s name. You can’t have my name. It’s not a girl’s name!’

  ‘Yes, but there’s a girl’s version of it. It means “horseman or -woman”. Do you ride?’

  Philip did not ride. Not even with stabilizers. He frowned and looked at me crossly, as if I could undo the fact that there was a girlie version of his name.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘You’re young yet.’ Before I could think of anything to defend Philip – or indeed my own lack of horsemanship – she turned to the other girl, who sat opposite her. I hoped she wouldn’t ask her the same question. ‘And what about you? What’s your name?’

  ‘Dora.’

  ‘Dora. I’m afraid I don’t know what that name means.’

  ‘It means “a gift”,’ said Dora unexpectedly, revealing a strong Welsh accent.

  ‘How pretty!’

  ‘I’m seven,’ she added, encouraged perhaps by the compliment.

  ‘I’m six,’ Philip said, at last on a topic he felt knowledgeable about. ‘But I’ll be seven soon.’

  ‘In eleven months’ time,’ I said drily, which was a bit cruel of me, because I could see it was important to him, but I just wanted to keep the conversation going. ‘Anyone know where we’re heading?’

  Little Dora said, ‘Our Mam says it’s to a ship.’

  Pippa looked at her sympathetically. ‘Are you Welsh?’

  Dora looked startled. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Aha! I have special powers.’

  In that moment, and for many years after, I truly believed that she did. Her glance around the compartment was regal, and her smile, to my eyes, subtle and delicious. She always claimed she had no idea of the effect she had on me that day, but I swear she did. My palms were sweating, I stumbled over words. And if she took me for just a normally awkward boy, Philip made sure she was aware of the changes she caused in me.

  ‘Why are you smiling, Arthur?’

  ‘I’m not. Shut up.’

  ‘Yes, you are. You’ve gone all funny.’

  Philip was six years my junior. Enough of a gap to make me truly resentful of his arrival in my life. Fortunately, Dora drew his attention to the comic he’d brought with him. She went over to sit next to him and began to read out clues to a simple crossword. ‘Three across: “creepy-crawlies”. Must be spiders – or insects. It’s insects, it is.’

  Somewhere between Birmingham and Liverpool, an Irish seaman joined our compartment and sat next to me in the middle seat.

  ‘How do you spell “sex”?’ Philip asked the compartment suddenly. Pippa looked out of the window, as if she hadn’t heard. I was so embarrassed I could have hit him.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  He looked down at his comic, pencil poised. ‘I’ve got the “in” but I can’t get the “sex”.’

  The seaman gave a chuckle. ‘You and me both, lad.’

  I spotted a smirk on Pippa’s face, and I released my own laugh. I’d like to think it wasn’t a cruel laugh, but I remember Philip’s slightly hurt and baffled look, and Dora putting an arm round him. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll help you with it,’ she said. And that made me laugh even more. I hate myself for that now. I can’t help wondering, if things had been different, whether Dora might well have been the one to show my brother all the tender things a man learns from a woman. But that bewildered face haunts me.

  The newcomer came to our rescue. He introduced himself as Seamus and kept up a banter that acted as a welcome sedative for us kids. (He seemed old to us, but on lists I’ve seen since he was only forty-eight.)

  When things quietened down, he stood up and produced a hexagonal box from his overhead luggage. Opening it, he took out a concertina, which he began to play casually. Philip immediately stood up from his window seat opposite me and went to take a closer look. He planted himself in front of Seamus, and Dora went back to her corner seat next to the musician. They were both transfixed.

  ‘How charming!’ Pippa turned her lovely head towards me and caught my gaze. ‘Isn’t it?’

  We listened to four or five tunes, relieved to be free of the need to talk. Dora and Philip plied the man with questions between the tunes, and I felt relaxed and grateful.

  ‘What’s that tune called?’

  ‘That’s “The Galway Shawl”.’

  Philip and Dora repeated the name, and giggled at their efforts.

  ‘Are those real diamonds?’

  Along the rim of the concertina were embedded these cut-glass stones. One or two were missing, and I noticed the cheap metal sockets like the ones in my mother’s ‘diamond’ bracelet. Seamus ran his fingers across the sparkling stones and smiled.

  ‘These?’

  ‘Is it worth thousands of pounds?’

  ‘Ah! This instrument, macushla, is priceless.’

  Dora and Philip were awestruck, and so, I imagined, was Pippa. I tilted my head back on the seat and smiled, pleased with my silent authority.

  ‘Are you very rich, then?’ asked Philip, not entirely sure about ‘priceless’.

  ‘I am a rich man, son.’ He spoke the words slowly and with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Wealthy beyond compare.’

  ‘Have you got a palace?’

  ‘I will have, one day.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Oh . . . Clare, Connemara, Galway. Somewhere near Clare, for sure.’

  ‘Is she your girlfriend?’

  Seamus laughed. He began to play again, softly, like a murmur to himself. ‘She was my first love, you could say. And she will be my last.’

  I think I must have blushed at this, because I had to look away from Pippa and fix my gaze on the man’s hands. The mention of what was on my mind made my jacket feel suddenly too hot. Pippa stared at the concertina too. I wondered if she was thinking the same as I was, but she burst my bubble immediately.

  ‘Well,’ she said, still staring at the instrument, ‘I hope you have it insured.’

  My pompous assumption that I was the only one to notice that the diamonds were paste had been roundly trumped by Pippa with that phrase. I had no idea what insurance was, except that it was a word belonging to a dull file of vocabulary in my head marked ‘grown-up and boring’. We learnt that her family had recently had an expensive painting stolen. It had not been adequately insured, it seemed. Since then, the toing and froing of insurance brokers at her house had become as familiar as the visits of the Friday Fish Man to ours.

  We seemed to chug slow
ly past the backs of some extremely tall terraced houses with line after line of washing smiling in sagging rows from each storey.

  ‘Look how tall they are!’ said Dora.

  Philip leant forward to look out. ‘They’re amazing!’

  ‘Utterly ghastly!’ said Pippa.

  Dora looked at her in awe, and I suspect she misunderstood. I saw her mouth the new word to herself, and then whisper it – ‘Garsley! Utterly garsley!’ – with Pippa’s accent. I tried not to smile.

  And so the journey continued, with me feeling alternately excited and deflated, and all against an impending homesickness beginning to lurch in my stomach, the swiftly receding fields pushing me further and further away from my mother’s arms. Philip and Dora grew closer with each passing town, riveted by the Irishman and his magical concertina. Their shoulders touched as they squashed up together to look at it, and then they sat next to each other, having a go on it and chuckling. I envied their easy physicality.

  Before we arrived, Miss Prendergast popped her head into our compartment. ‘Nearly there now. How are you all in here?’

  ‘It’s dreadfully hot,’ said Pippa.

  ‘Otherwise,’ Dora said politely, ‘we’re utterly garsley, thank you.’

  Seamus chuckled, and Miss Prendergast smiled kindly at Dora. ‘Well, I’m sure we’ll all get on splendidly.’

  I warmed to Dora straight away, but the truth is, I didn’t pay her much attention. I’m sure I would have done, had Pippa not been sitting diagonally opposite me. Pippa was the sort of person who commanded all your attention, and if you let it slip, she grabbed it back without your even noticing.

  It is odd, now, to think that it took a catastrophe to bring our little group together, and the chilling actions of just one person to tear it apart. One of us.

  2

  DORA

  The first time I saw Pippa again was in a pub function room ten years later. Miss Prendergast had organized a survivors’ get-together at the Wayfarer’s Inn in Shepherd’s Bush and had offered to put people up in her London flat if they couldn’t make the journey in a day trip. I was just seventeen and had to plead with Our Mam to let me go and to pay my train fare. If I hadn’t been promised a summer job at the Post Office and agreed to apply for college, I don’t think she would have let me. But I had my way in the end.