The Safety Pin Crossing
I wasn’t frightened of flying but neither did I enjoy it. Not once in the ten years since my parents had moved back to Ireland had I taken the ferry, even though I loved the sea, the humming of the ship and the train journey that would have rattled me there through the Midlands and along grimy Welsh valleys to Swansea.
Ferry crossings were laden with the history of journeys with my mother, a fretful brew of memories. Those trips across the unpredictable Irish Sea stood out in my childhood as a particular purgatory. We had made one each summer for fifteen years, visiting my grandmother for a month. My brother had been there for some but being twelve years older than me, he had soon vanished away to Canberra and then Hong Kong, leaving me to travel alone with my mother. My father would join us for the last ten days and come back with us, allowing someone else to deliver the Royal Mail in south Tottenham.
Perhaps my mother simply hated travelling. Any journey that took her beyond the usual confines of her shopping expeditions brought a fixed, recalcitrant look to her face. Certainly, the build-up in the days before we set off to Cork indicated huge anxiety. As a child, I experienced it as part of the ill-tempered fussing that accompanied any major departure from routine and I dreaded it. Bags would be packed and unpacked, tickets double-checked, masses of food prepared. There was always cold roast chicken wrapped in greaseproof paper and if the journey coincided with a dieting phase, plastic boxes filled with grated carrot and shredded lettuce. All of my mother’s movements became razor-sharp. She slammed doors, trod fast and heavily through rooms and became accident prone, nicking fingers and bruising herself.
Inevitably, a zip or buckle on a bag would break an hour before departure, causing mayhem. My mother would seize and roughly apply brown tape or jab huge stitches with a darning needle, muttering under her breath that somebody – whoever had used it last – must have over-stuffed it, causing it at last to give way. These things were always another person’s fault and it was always her bad luck to be the one who was there when the trap was sprung. As usual, she was the patsy getting the pay-off. While she cursed, the flabby spare flesh on her upper arms wobbling, I would slink away and sit watching the red buses trundle past the window, a sick fluttering in my stomach. I felt hopeless and useless, thinking that there was something I should be doing but knowing that if I tried to help it would go wrong. Then, just as we were about to leave, she would glance at me and find that I was wearing a jacket that made me look like I was on an outing from the orphanage or my hair resembled a duck’s ass or the colour of my shirt suggested that I was going to a funeral. Then I would tell myself that I hated her, that never again would I go anywhere with her, that I deserved a mother who wasn’t grossly fat and bad-tempered.
When I was ten years old there was the journey that I called The Safety Pin Crossing. The sea boiled around the boat. It was crowded with high-season travellers. We couldn’t afford berths and we struggled through the swaying bodies, hampered by carrier bags, trying to find seats for the night. I’ve since heard the ferries to Ireland referred to as cattle ships and it was an accurate description then; the passengers were tightly packed, anxious, breathing each other’s fetid air, fighting their way to taps for water or to toilet bowls to be sick.
We found one empty seat near the end of a row. On the adjacent seat sat a bulging rucksack, ownership firmly declared. My mother bowled it carelessly onto the floor of the aisle and shoved me down, plonking herself beside me.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ she said, ‘I’m destroyed. Me feet are like burst spuds.’
She rustled the food bag and extracted a lump of chicken, tearing the goose-flesh skin off with her nails. I refused food, anxiously waiting for the rucksack owner to appear. The ship ploughed and rolled out of the harbour and the sight of glistening chicken flesh made me nauseous. The owner of the displaced bag was young and tall and he turned up after five minutes with a can of beer. He looked at me and gestured with the can.
‘Could the young fella move, Mrs?’ he said to my mother. ‘That’s my seat.’
My mother offered him a blank gaze. ‘Pardon?’ she said in the mock-English accent she employed when she was on her dignity. It was modelled on the Queen Mother’s refined tones, although my mother always referred to her as Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, as if they’d been on nodding terms in their youth.
‘That’s my seat,’ he repeated. ‘I left my bag on it.’
She looked around, mystified. ‘We found it empty.’
He retrieved his rucksack from the aisle and balanced it between his legs, pointing at it. ‘I left this on the seat. Someone must have moved it.’
She rubbed her chin with a greasy finger, blinking. ‘I don’t know about that. These seats are ours.’
I stared at the floor. In these situations I repeated my seven times table over and over inside my head until it was safe to breathe again.
‘You’re winding me up,’ he said. ‘There’s nowhere left to sit now.’
‘I’m sorry for yeer trouble but what can I do? Me son’s diabetic, he can’t stand for long. Are ye all right, pet?’
She gave my arm a gentle push and I nodded, my cheeks healthily fiery.
‘Seven sevens are forty-nine,’ I ranted to myself, focusing on his desert boots.
‘It’s not fair,’ he said, but you could tell that he was backing off. They usually did.
‘Ye’d hardly ask a diabetic child to stand while a fine strong fella like yeerself lolls in a chair,’ my mother said loudly.
Defeated, he picked up his rucksack and stomped away.
‘Would ye look at the cut of him,’ my mother said to the woman next to her. ‘He looks as if he was dragged through a ditch backwards. Would ye like a chicken leg?’
A small triumph accomplished, my mother puffed up and moved into social mode. Conversation ensued with the swapping of family details. She was all graciousness, sympathizing about her companion’s bereavement and promising a novena. The reek of vomit pervaded the decks and people staggered by, mouths covered with handkerchiefs. After a while I rested my head against my mother’s cushiony arm, my nose on the indented circle left by vaccination. The slippery material of her Tricel dress shifted scratchily beneath my cheek, its polka-dot pattern dancing under my eyelids as they drooped. There was a familiar smell of warm sweat perfumed by the face powder she applied for public appearances, imparting an odd orange glow to her skin. At other times I might have been pushed off because she was too hot or my forehead was too bony but now she was in good humour and replete with chicken. So I dozed, hearing my mother’s voice in the distance; ‘… me son, Dermot … off to a good position in Hong Kong … ye can’t beat a bank for security … oh this one here, Rory … I had terrible trouble … these hot flushes are pure murder … aren’t nerves the devil incarnate …’
I woke just after midnight to find that my mother had a splintering headache and we had to go and find if they had any Aspirin at the First Aid station. The chicken was fighting a rearguard action in her stomach. Everyone around us was asleep, heads dangling. Snores lifted and dipped with the ship. We rambled like drunks to the deck above, following the arrows to First Aid. My mother slapped the bell on the counter and after a minute a stout woman dressed in a nursing outfit appeared. She was as fat as my mother and her uniform was tight, trussed around the middle with a wide belt. She had various badges marching across her chest, attached with safety pins.
‘Yes?’ she said in a Welsh accent, her chin jutting.
My heart sank. I knew that this woman would be more than a match for my mother who wasn’t keen on the Welsh. She thought them squat and shifty. A Cardiff man had once overcharged her for a pound of bacon in Cooper’s on the High Street.
‘I’ve a terrible head,’ she said in a whisper. ‘Have ye any Aspirin?’
‘I don’t dispense Aspirin,’ the nurse said in a clear ringing voice. ‘Passengers can’t expect that kind of thing. I’m here for emergencies.’