Between Two Seas (3 page)

I pick up the bag, gently close the door, and begin to creep down the staircase. But Mrs Forbes must have been awake and waiting for me, because as soon as the floorboards creak, she emerges from her rooms. She’s wrapped in a faded pink dressing gown and has her hair twisted into rags. I can’t repress a small smile.

‘Goodbye, my dear,’ she whispers, offering an embrace. I put my bag down and hug her tightly. She smells of tallow and cabbage.

‘Thank you again for everything you’ve done for me. I’ll write to let you know that I’ve arrived safely,’ I offer as we let one another go. To my surprise, she hangs her head and doesn’t reply. I am confused for a moment and then I understand. She can’t read, and she’s ashamed.

I’m grateful to my mother, who though she couldn’t afford to send me to school, passed on to me as much of her own fine education as shortage of time and money allowed.

‘I shall send you a picture, dear Mrs Forbes,’ I promise instead. Her face brightens.

‘That would be a kindness, bless you,’ she says. ‘And here’s a little something for your journey,’ she adds, pushing a parcel neatly wrapped in brown paper into my hands. Then, without giving me a chance to look at it, she hugs me again.

‘Off you go then. I wish you good fortune, and I hope you find your father,’ she says briskly, and gives me a little push. There are tears in her eyes.

I want to tell her I’ll miss her, but the words won’t come. I pick up my bag again, and go to the front door. I linger a moment, looking back at her, and then step out into the street.

There are quite a number of people in town, even at this early hour. Everyone seems to be in a hurry. I cross the road, picking my way between the piles of horse droppings, and narrowly avoid a laden cart drawn by two scrawny-looking horses. Their load is fish by the smell of it.

It takes me only a few minutes to walk along Cleethorpes Road, past the Albert Memorial, to the docks, the route I have walked so many times before. I can’t quite believe that this is the last time I’ll walk it. I ought to feel sad, but my fear of the journey blots out all other feelings.

On board the
Ebba
the crew is busy readying her for the trip. Captain Larsen hails me as I approach. A younger man with the same sandy hair as the captain helps me climb onto the boat and takes my bag. He is a skinny, slight young man with an unremarkable face.

‘I am Jens,’ he says. He seems friendly. ‘I show you the cabin,’ he tells me, in strongly-accented English. ‘You need to stay there until we are coming out of the harbour—not get in the way.’

So there and then I look back at Grimsby, and bid England a hasty and silent farewell. All my memories are here on these shores, but my hopes for the future lie across the North Sea.

I follow Jens across the sloping wooden deck to a small hatch, and watch him climb down a ladder. Wrapping my skirt tightly about my ankles, I struggle down after him.

I have never been aboard a boat before. I had no idea how dark and cramped it would be below deck. Or how strong the stench of fish and slop buckets would be. The prospect of sharing this space with four men for several days and nights appears suddenly indecent. I blush to think I proposed it. The sleeping quarters are merely low bunks tucked into odd spaces around the living area, which in itself consists only of a table with benches.

Jens shows me that he has hung a blanket before my bunk, so that I have some degree of privacy. He has hung another blanket across the corner where the slop bucket serves for a lavatory. But a blanket offers no protection from sounds or smells.

‘I need to help now.’ Jens points up on deck and then disappears up the ladder again. By the sound of it they are losing no time in casting off from the quay. Ropes grate against the side of the ship and thud as they land on the deck. As the men thunder about above me, calling to each other in Danish, I sit down and open the package Mrs Forbes gave me. There’s a seed cake and some home-baked biscuits inside. She’s kind. I shall save them. I’m too nervous to swallow even a mouthful this morning.

The boat sways as we leave the quayside. I feel strange almost at once: light-headed. As we leave the harbour and head out to sea, I have a shock. I was entirely unprepared for the effect of the motion of the boat. It is a bright, clear day with a brisk wind, not stormy. But as the boat begins to plunge in the swell, my head begins to ache. It becomes more difficult to sit up. It doesn’t take long before I crawl into my cramped bunk and curl up. The relief is only temporary.

I’m shivering and suffering cold sweats. At every lurch or roll the boat makes, my mouth fills with saliva as fast as I can swallow it. My stomach begins to heave. I hear Jens quietly placing a bucket by my bunk. I’m vilely ill. Time passes in a haze of endurance and sickness. I notice at one point that the bucket has been swilled clean with seawater. Jens makes no comment. I’m too ill and too embarrassed to thank him, but I shall never, ever forget his kindness.

The men come in and out of the cabin, sometimes to sleep, sometimes to slice bread, fry fish, and smoke their pipes. The smell is unbearable. At night I drift in and out of sleep, but never for long.

When daylight comes, the boat seems to move less. Jens tells me we’ve arrived at the fishing grounds, that the nets are now out, and invites me on deck. At first I decline, not daring to rise from my bunk.

‘The fresh air will help,’ he insists.

It takes courage to leave the bunk. The walk across the swaying cabin and the climb up the ladder are almost my undoing. Once on deck, however, the clean sea air revives me. It helps to see the waves as well as feel them. With Jens’s help I find a seat on some coils of rope just before the main mast. Captain Larsen greets me with a cheerful ‘Good morning!’ and then returns to checking his nets. Jens is attentive, however. He goes below, and then returns a few minutes later with a mug of tea and food for me. I refuse the fish hurriedly, but accept the rest. As I sit nibbling the bread and sipping the tea, I’m surprised how much better I feel.

Occasionally I catch a baleful stare from the first mate, Johannes. He’s as shrivelled as a prune and has a sour face. I can hear him muttering to himself.

Worse than this are the stares of the man Torben. He’s unkempt and filthy, with broken front teeth. I feel his eyes on me and it makes me uncomfortable. It’s not dislike he shows, more a penetrating curiosity. He comes over and tries to speak to me. The only English words I can catch are ‘fish’ and ‘gin’. I shake my head at him and turn away. I can’t bear the stench of spirits and unwashed body that hangs around him like a cloud.

It’s cold in the sea breeze, so after a while I go back down to my bunk. Torben is standing in the middle of the cabin watching me. The living quarters are very cramped but Torben makes no effort to move out of my way at all. I have to push past him in my rush to lie down before sickness overcomes me again.

The air in the cabin is fetid and stinking. As soon as I’m thoroughly warm again, I decide to go back outside. I check that Torben is not in the cabin before I crawl out of my bunk. To my horror, he is at the top of the ladder as I climb up. He takes hold of me round the waist to help me up. I pull away from him and go to my place on deck. Only a moment later, I make the mistake of looking in his direction. It gives him the opportunity to leer at me. Repulsive. He makes me feel unclean.

I try to put him out of my mind and concentrate on breathing the bracing air. To distract myself, I think about my father. I wonder how easy it will be to find him. Whether he will be pleased to see me.

My mother often spoke of him. When I was little, he was always my favourite bedtime story. I know that he returned to Denmark before I was born. My grandfather, who was one of the Mablethorpe gentry, didn’t approve of him as a prospective husband. But he and my mother promised to love one another always. He went back to Skagen to earn enough money to come and take her away.

This, of course, was before my grandfather disowned her. By the time her condition was discovered, my father was long gone.

It’s a terrible thing to be with child when you’re not married. You could say I ruined her life. Poor mother. I’ll never let that happen to me.

My mother always told me what a good man my father was. I learned, while still very young, not to ask
why
he never returned as he’d promised. Such a question would signal the end of our happy story time, and drive the smiles from my mother’s face.

I hope my existence won’t come as an unpleasant shock to him; I prefer to think that he’ll be happy to know me and to help me. But I wonder how he will explain why he never came back.

T
he wind has increased considerably while I have been sitting on deck. Dark, ominous clouds are rolling across the sky towards us. All four men are busy, working silently, glancing at the sky. I’m chilled to the bone and beginning to feel seasick once more. I urgently need to lie down. I stumble along the deck towards the hatch, clinging to the steering house in order to keep my balance.

When I’m at the bottom of the ladder, a shadow falls on me. I look up and see boots appear at the top of it. A particularly violent roll forces me to cling to the table halfway across the cabin to my bunk. And it’s here that Torben catches me, his arms tight about my chest, squeezing my ribs, his breath on my cheek, stinking of fish and spirits.

I cry out and try to thrust him away. I’m surprised how strong he is. He pulls me round to face him and for a moment I see his filthy, rotten teeth and cracked lips close to me before he clamps his mouth down upon mine so that I cannot make a sound. I twist my head and cry out, but he forces his mouth over mine again, poking his tongue into my mouth like a slimy raw fish. He has my arms pinned tightly to my sides, and I can’t make a sound. But I can move my legs, and I bring my right knee up sharply, and feel it thud into his groin. It was an instinctive move and for a moment it seems to have worked. He releases me and bends over with a groan. But as I start to back away, retching with disgust, he straightens up. Now his face is contorted with pain and rage, his lips curling back from his brown teeth. A wave of terror washes over me. He grabs me by the hair, yanking me towards him, and this time I scream, as loudly as I can.

‘Help!’ I yell. ‘Help me, please!’

He twists my hair in his fingers, and slams me against the cabin wall. There is a singing in my ears. His free hand is on my breast, squeezing and pinching me painfully through the fabric of my gown. I try to scream again, but he pushes his mouth against mine to stop the sound, his teeth bruising my lips.

‘Torben!’

I’m released so suddenly that I fall heavily against the table. Gasping with pain, I look up to see Jens’s furious face glaring into Torben’s. They stand facing each other, fists clenched, each trying to outface the other. It’s Torben who backs off, shuffling across the cabin to the ladder, with a shifty, backward glance. Jens barks an order at him. I don’t know what he is saying, but he’s making him leave and I’m thankful.

Jens turns and offers to help me up, but I can’t bear to be touched at all now and shrink away from him. His freckled face looks sombre as he stands back.

I drag myself to my feet, only to stagger as the boat lurches once more. Ignoring my protests, Jens grasps my arm and helps me to my bunk before I can fall again.

‘What did I do?’ I am asking myself more than Jens. ‘To make him think he could treat me like that?’ In my heart I already know the answer. I’ve come aboard this boat alone. I’m surrounded by men; no longer young enough to be seen as a child, but not yet adult enough to understand the dangers. So now he thinks I’m a whore. They said that about my mother too.

‘He’s disgusting!’ My voice shakes with loathing. I can taste blood on my lip where his teeth cut me.

‘Try to rest,’ Jens tells me. ‘I not let him trouble you again.’

He turns to go, but then hesitates and turns back.

‘Bad storm coming,’ he tells me. ‘Stay here.’

I nod, and lie on the bed racked with sobs. I weep for shame and anger. I weep for myself and my life and I weep for my mother. Eventually my sobs still. Fear takes the place of grief. I thought the motion of the boat had been dramatic during the past few days, but I now realize I was mistaken.

The boat is being flung this way and that, shuddering violently as waves crash against her. The wind has risen to a howl above which I can hear the shouts of the crew only faintly. I wrap my blankets about me, shivering. There’s a particularly loud crash and the boat pauses and shudders violently before pitching forwards and then rolling so steeply that I am flung into the wall next to my bunk.

Bracing myself against the pitching of the vessel, I remember my mother telling me the story of how my father came to her home.

He’d been working on a freight ship in the North Sea and was heading up the Humber estuary for Grimsby when his ship met a storm. The ship was blown off course, to the south, and was wrecked on the coast at Mablethorpe. My mother’s father, my grandfather whom I have never met, found my father crawling out of the sea onto the beach. He was in a dreadful state: sick and injured. My grandfather had him carried up to his own house to be nursed. It was many days before he came out of his fever and began to recover.

But the other crew members were all drowned.

Silently, I begin to pray.

T
he crew is on deck, battling to control the boat in the heaving sea. All the while the wind howls and the boat pitches and shudders. The timbers groan with the strain. A frying pan someone has left out is flung across the cabin, rattling against the wall. Each time the boat crashes into a wave, I hold my breath, thinking this time it must have been a rock, and any minute now I will hear the boat splitting open, and see the water rushing in. And then as we lurch on, I let my breath go in a sigh of relief. But the relief is short-lived. There’s always another wave ready to break upon us.