Street Kid (14 page)

Once we were under way, however, he relaxed a bit and I was allowed to spend time in the library on my own. It was there, only a couple of days into our voyage, that I found a book containing a list of the passengers on board. I cast my eyes over it idly, looking for our names. The Rippons were there, but nothing under ‘R’ for Richardson.
Then I saw an odd thing: there was an entry for a Mr Jack and a Mrs Freda Riccardos and their twelve-year-old son.

It was strange that I didn’t put two and two together – after all it was clear that Freda had dressed me as a boy and that now I had to be called Sprig, not Judy; but when I saw the words on the page I was simply confused. I couldn’t begin to understand why I’d been logged in as Freda’s son.

It was then that I made a big mistake, and one that was going to cost me dearly. I ran into the lounge, where my father was sitting reading a paper.

‘They’ve made a mistake! They’ve put me down as your son,’ I said to him.

Dad’s reaction was as instant as a snake uncoiling itself to strike. He sprang out of the leather armchair and grabbed my arm so brutally that I gave a little cry. He dragged me out of the lounge and down several flights of stairs to the lower deck. I stumbled several times but didn’t fall. Once inside our cabin, he locked the door and kicked me so hard that I fell, sprawled half on, half off, my bed.

‘As you didn’t obey my orders …’ he slapped me across my face, ‘I’m going to lock you in.’ He shook me by the throat, squeezing my windpipe so I couldn’t breathe. ‘And then you can bleat all you like. No one will hear you.’

Dad let me go then and I instantly curled up into a ball. I waited for more blows, but they’d stopped coming. Then I heard my father opening a drawer and taking something out of it.

What’s he doing now?
I thought in panic.
What’s he getting? What’s he going to do to me?
Then I heard the scratch of his pen on paper and a couple of minutes later he paused.

‘Come here.’ Dad’s voice was steely. The red heat of his earlier temper had eased, but his mood had moved to one
of ice-cold sadism. What I didn’t know then was that this mood would last, unbending, for weeks and that I was to suffer like a moth struggling on a pin throughout the whole voyage.

‘Sign here,’ he said, handing me the pen. Although the words were a blur, I managed to read them, despite a painful hammering in my head.

I will not go out of the cabin.

The cabin door must always be locked.

I can only use the men’s toilets, and only when my father agrees.

I can only go to breakfast and dinner with my father.

I will speak to nobody.

I signed the paper, which my father folded and put away. ‘Lock the door,’ he said coldly as he left the room.

The next day, as I lay on my camp bed, I felt as if the horrid fetid hole that had become my cell was closing in around me. I could hear nothing; I had nothing to look at except blank walls, and the closed-off porthole was somehow the more awful for its being there. I’d rather have had a blank wall than the suggestion of a window onto the outside. What air there was seemed to get thinner by the hour, and the water in the jug was chlorinated and tasted horrible.

I really think I might go mad.

Then, as the day wore on, I became aware of a change in the sea’s motion. It was definitely getting choppier. When Freda and my father came down to dress for dinner, they moved carefully round the cabin, looking as though they were trying to keep their breathing steady.

‘I’m not feeling great, Jack,’ Freda said a bit weakly. ‘Now we’ve entered the Bay of Biscay, they say it mightn’t let up for days.’

The dining room was half empty that evening. I noticed that the waiters had raised flaps on the tables to stop the plates and cutlery slipping off onto the floor. The diner sitting opposite me gave a laugh when salt cellars and glasses slid at speed across the table as the boat plunged down into the trough of a wave. But mostly, people were quiet: the usual chattering enthusiasm for the voyage had waned that evening, and most of the passengers’ faces wore a strange expression, as if they were concentrating hard. I realized that they were willing themselves not to throw up.

By morning, there were ropes tied in the stairwells and along the corridors as makeshift handrails, to stop people from being thrown to the floor. When I left the cabin to go to the toilet, I saw that people had been sick in the passage. I’d heard them retching in the night and some of them obviously hadn’t made it to the bathroom. When I got back, Freda and my father were sitting up in bed, looking a bit green.

‘Go and fetch us some soda water and dry toast,’ Freda said to me. ‘There’s no way I can move.’

I couldn’t believe my luck. As the day wore on, I had to do various bits of fetching and carrying but was pretty much free to wander the ship at will. My father didn’t seem to have the strength to make me keep to his rules; in fact it was quite clear he and Freda wanted me out of their way. My presence only caused them extra irritation.

Luckily, I didn’t feel sick at all and soon found my way outside to the fresh air, holding tight to the rope banisters as I climbed the flights of stairs to the upper deck. Once
out there, I staggered up the ship to the bows, clinging onto the rail for dear life. I now felt like the sprig they’d named me: a fragile stem being torn and buffeted by the gale.

If any of the crew had seen me out on deck I would have got soundly ticked off. I could easily have been swept overboard. Huge splashes were coming over the sides of the ship, and the crash of the waves as they hit the bows was deafening. As I stood there, tossed and blown almost to pieces, I felt exultant as the clean, heady oxygen filled my lungs, invigorating every vein and nerve in my body. After the stifling, dank airlessness of the cabin, the freedom to wander about on deck was like a cool drink of water to a wanderer in the desert.

I stood there alone, clinging to the rail, and facing into the wind, a small figurehead amidst a vast and boiling sea. I knew that it wasn’t just the air invigorating me. I felt at one with the storm, a part of it – wild and lost.

It was after the Bay of Biscay that my nightmare really began.

The sea became calm, and the sun grew hotter. The other passengers started at last to enjoy the trip, sunning themselves on deck and cooling off in the pool. I’d watch them come in to dinner looking rosy and relaxed. But deep inside the ship the heat grew unbearable. Alone in my cabin, I started to wonder if I was going to die. No one would have guessed how bad it was for me down there in the middle of the day as the air had cooled down by the time people returned to their cabins to dress for dinner.

I lay on my bed in a stupor, dressed in my jeans and shirt. At times, I almost passed out, and once I was forced put my mouth to the keyhole in an attempt to suck air
through it. My hair was wringing wet and I had little to drink as our pitcher of foul-tasting water was only changed once a day. I used a little of it to wet a flannel to put over my face, but it didn’t bring my temperature down for long and soon grew warm.

Sometimes my heart started pounding and fluttering at a frightening pace, and then I started to feel really panicky. Overheated and starved of oxygen, I felt terribly alone. There was nobody else on our deck, no footsteps, or any other sounds at all. If I had cried out and pounded my fists on the door, no one would have heard.

After a few days of this torture, I felt desperate enough to ask my father if I could have the door open.

‘No, you can’t. You know the rules,’ he said, glaring at me.

I was sure that’s what he would say, but I had to try. I knew that he felt safer if the door was locked. That way nobody would discover there was anyone in the cabin.

Every day I longed for dinner time. My dad must have decided that he’d better let me eat with the other passengers or people might question my absence. As it was, I did wonder what the Rippons thought. Cathleen must surely have told them that I was never in the playroom with the other kids, and didn’t join in the games on deck; but they never said anything. In those days, children weren’t encouraged to join in the conversation at mealtimes, so people didn’t think to ask me anything, and it didn’t seem strange to them that I never said a word.

As soon as dinner was over, I was always told to go straight back to the cabin. To put off the torture for a few minutes more, I used to chew each mouthful really slowly.

One afternoon, I heard footsteps in the corridor outside our cabin and the door was flung open. I sat up, startled. No one ever came down in the middle of the day. I saw my
father standing there and instantly my mind started racing wildly. A rat in a trap.

Oh God, what have I done this tim
e?

‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

I followed him along the passage and up the flights of stairs to the deck. My eyes were dazzled by the sunlight and sparkling water. Everything was so brilliant and blue. I hadn’t seen daylight for a week or more.

I wondered what was going on. I knew my dad wouldn’t have let me out through pity. He’d never felt an ounce of the stuff in his life.

As we stepped forward towards the crowd that was gathered by the pool, the ship’s captain beckoned us over. He was standing in front of a line of boys and girls who were wearing T-shirts with name tags pinned to them.

‘Come on, slow coach, didn’t you realize it was the Crossing of the Line Ceremony?’ he said jovially. ‘It’s not every day you get to cross the Equator.’

In his hand, the captain was holding a list. I realized then that he must have been reading out all the kids’ names and was now waiting to hand me my name tag. My father must have felt in a bit of a spot earlier when my name was called out and I wasn’t there.

I took my name tag and pinned it to my shirt. I was conscious of everyone around me laughing and having a good time while my father stood in the midst of it all like a dark ghoul at a wedding party, fixing me with a glare as if to say, ‘Don’t you dare do anything to call attention to yourself.’

One by one, the kids were covered in a flour and water paste and thrown into the pool. When it was my turn, I turned away from my father’s glaring eyes as paste was slapped on my shirt and in my hair, determined to have
fun like the other kids. Then I was taken to the poolside. As one of the crew pushed me in the water, I felt an extraordinary sense of relief as the cool water closed in over my head before I came to the surface.

I felt in my element, playing team games in the pool. I’d learned to swim on our summer holidays while I was at St Joseph’s and now I dived down confidently to fish rubber quoits from the bottom of the pool, as slick and bendy as a seal. And when it was my turn to walk along a wooden plank without falling in the water, I was as poised and able as a gymnast. Even though I was aware of my father and Freda standing by the pool with the other parents, pretending to enjoy the fun but looking hard-faced nonetheless, I loved every moment of it.

After about twenty minutes in the pool, it was time to get out. My father came straight to me. He didn’t need to say a word – I knew my time was up and I felt as if a cloud had all at once covered the sun.

Why can’t you just let me be? Just leave me for once to be a normal kid along with the others?

It was so oppressive having my jailer bearing down on me that I could almost bear going down to the cabin. At least I was out of his sight and I knew it wasn’t long till dinner time.

When we docked at Freetown, in Sierra Leone, there was an excited buzz at breakfast. The passengers were getting a day out to explore and everyone shared in that feeling of escape. Everyone, that is, but me. I knew that I’d be left alone on board. My dad would never dare let me near another customs official if he could help it.

If I’d known that morning what I found out later – that back in England my mum had alerted the authorities
about my abduction and that officials in Freetown were only a day away from being given the order to make me a ward of court – I would have jumped ship there and then. But I didn’t know, and the order came after we’d already left port.

I found out later that Mary and Dora had been sent to Wood Street to deliver my Christmas present and that my mum, on hearing that we’d emigrated to Australia a couple of weeks before, had fallen into a huge fury that that my father had duped her. She immediately took action and told a journalist from the
Daily Mirror
about the abduction. They moved fast, printing the story with a picture of me, making enquiries at Australia House, and painstakingly searching every passenger list from air and sea lines. When they realized my father had left a false trail, they turned their attention to immigration ships leaving for other destinations. The Union Castle Line gave them the information they were searching for and the authorities were informed. All this happened quickly, but not quite quick enough to catch up with us at Freetown.

That evening, everyone came back from their trip ashore loaded down with scarves and trinkets, and at dinner the women leant over the table to admire the bangles and necklaces they’d bought in the market. Everyone was talking about the imminent Christmas party.

‘We’ve managed to buy some really lovely material for Cathleen’s fancy dress costume,’ Gladys Rippon was saying. ‘And it cost almost nothing. Although, goodness knows how I’m going to make it without a sewing machine.’

‘Mum, am I going to have a stocking this year?’ Cathleen asked her.

‘Never you mind, cheeky. I expect Father Christmas might just have to come down one of the funnels.’

‘But how’s he going to find our cabin? And where are we going to put his glass of sherry and cake?’

Mrs Rippon and the other diners laughed indulgently. ‘Oh, I expect he’ll think of something, poppet. But you’d better be a good girl and eat your chicken or he might think better of it.’