The Sea Turtle's Back

by Walter Bazley

Overview

THE GREAT STEAMSHIP MARQUESS lies without power and drifting in the midst of a fierce North Atlantic storm. With a huge hole in her side, she lists dangerously and may sink at any moment. Captain Paul Henriques has seen his crew transferred to a passing liner, but will not abandon the vessel entrusted to his command. His only chance lies in the arrival of deep-sea tugs from Boston, five hundred miles to the west. While his vigil extends from hours to days, Henriques is assailed by memories of an extraordinary life and wonders if an ancient family emblem will work its magic once more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781450274593
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/11/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

Read an Excerpt

THE SEA TURTLE'S BACK

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By Walter Bazley

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 Walter Bazley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-7458-6

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Chapter One

Broxbourne

Paul was born and grew up near the village of Broxbourne, which lay in the shallow valley of the river Lea. It was twenty miles north of London, a nondescript confusion of cottages with small charm or character; a thrown-together sort of village with railway station and church, a tedious collection of houses and a main street that was too narrow even by the modest standards of the 1920s. One night a lorry missed its turn in the centre of the village and went crashing through the wall of a house, killing two of the occupants. On another occasion, when Paul was four or five years old, he watched as an airship made its stately progress overhead. The villagers gathered on the street as the vast contraption appeared in the sky and seemingly lurched forward on its journey to distant lands. The grownups said that it was going to India, where Paul had lived brie y when he was very young. It was only a few hundred feet aloft and although he could not see the passengers, he could hear the engines and make out the propellers thrashing the morning air. He wondered why they were not larger, like the sails of a windmill.

If Broxbourne could be said to have had a centre it was the post office where people took letters and parcels to be stamped and sent to their destinations. Not far away, on a corner, was the Saracen's Head with its gruesome sign showing the severed head of a dark-skinned man apparently horrified by its own detachment. During public-house hours the drinking fraternity stood with glasses in their hands and in good weather a few sat on a bench that rested against the wall of the building. The ripe aroma of malt and hops was ever present and drifted into the roadway, a gratuitous advertisement of the satisfactions to be found within. The harness shop, a little further down, was filled with saddles, bridles and shiny brasses. It had an elegant smell in keeping with the skilled workmanship of the leather trade. Each employee was a craftsman in his own right, which gave the place an unspoken seniority within the village. The bakery and cake shop was a little apart, its aromas a reminder of the homeliness and monotony of English life. The butcher shop, by comparison, reeked of animals and their insides. In those days, the line had not been drawn effectively between death and dinner, the butcher had not cleaned up his act and there were forlorn creatures tethered at the back of the shop awaiting the completion of their misery. Further on, the bookshop appeared neutral, having no distinctive or compelling odours beyond dust and oldness. An open Bible was displayed in the window but, as with most shops in Broxbourne in those days, the windows were not formed of wide expanses of plate glass but ordinary panes. The ironmonger was next with his shiny collection of hammers, saws and nails.

On Saturday mornings Paul would ask his mother if he could accompany Amy and Stubbington on the weekend shopping expedition. Paul's mother did not take part in these excursions but agreed, because it got him out of the way while leaving her secure in the knowledge that he was in trustworthy hands. Stubbington would back the car out of the garage, which had been a stable until the Henriques family had purchased the house, and Amy climbed into the back seat with her shopping basket. There was a glass partition between front and rear seats so that in more opulent circumstances such confidences as might be exchanged behind would be known only to those responsible for them. The car, an Armstrong Siddeley, had a square, dependable look and a roomy interior. Stubbington said that it had been designed so that a gentleman would not be obliged to remove his top hat, and a lady in court dress would not be inconvenienced.

On Saturdays it was the custom of the village shopkeepers to clear their shelves of perishable items. Refrigeration in those days was just another long word, and it was with reason, therefore, that the well-dressed customers would be served until midday at regular prices, after which the poor were offered leftovers at much reduced rates. In later years the practice might have been called 'dumping', but in those days it was known as charity. As the clock struck midday, the poor, sometimes whole families together, would wait to be beckoned inside and costs fell to levels that had not been seen in England for more than a century. A loaf of bread went down from two and a half pence to a halfpenny, cakes and pastries to a quarter of their normal price and meat scraps would be wrapped in newspaper and pushed across the counter without the ceremony of a weigh scale. Nor were local fish, such as pike and bream, as well as rabbits, milk, cheese and vegetables allowed to go bad or collect dust over the weekend. The drama lasted no more than half an hour and, as shelves were cleared, the conscience of the village was eased. The poor took their way homeward with sacks over the men's shoulders and baskets in the hands of women and children. Meanwhile, the more affluent stood back and chatted among themselves, seeming to take comfort from the shopkeepers' largesse. From his level no higher than the counter, Paul saw Stubbington take a shilling from his pocket and nod to the shopkeeper at the same time indicating a distressed little group.

"That lot's genuine," he said to Amy. "Thirteen children. Not like some here that dresses in old clothes of a Saturday morning."

"I wish they had done that in India," Paul's father said later. "I applaud this sort of charity because the recipients pay in some measure for what they receive. Government handouts are not the same." That afternoon Paul's father asked about the family with thirteen children and was told that they lived two miles out in the country in a village so small it didn't have a name.

"There's Romany blood there somewhere," Stubbington said. "I heard tell that the man could divine for water with two sticks. Good at it, he is. He works as a labourer and has a vegetable garden."

"They'd need to grow vegetables with thirteen children," Paul's mother said.

Paul's father was a judge, not senior in his profession, but fortunate to have been appointed to a judgeship in England after his career in Bengal had been cut short. Paul's mother could not tolerate life under the hot sun of India, was always ill with sunstroke and put on such a display of dissatisfaction that they felt compelled to pack and return to England. It was a move with which few of their friends could sympathise because it flew in the face of the assumption that the standard of living was higher on the sub-continent than it would be in a comparable position at home. A few years earlier he might have practiced law in England, but in his heart he wanted to do justly, to be seen doing it and possess the authority to make his decisions count for something. To embrace only one side of a dispute left him unsatisfied, and he had perplexed his contemporaries by announcing that a lawyer who had not at some stage of his career been called upon to sit and pass judgment had sidestepped the demands of his profession. Indeed, to be retained by one litigant or another, to be recompensed according to his performance in the courtroom, could never equal, in his eyes, the higher duty of determining where justice truly lay.

As a father, Justice Henriques was not so well defined. When Paul was born he was nearly fifty and, having been married several years, he had allowed the thought of children and the good intentions that he had manifested as a young man to slip silently away. His wife was younger, he reasoned, she did no work, had few hobbies or interests outside the home so she was likely to make a suitable mother. This was one of his few faulty judgments.

Paul's mother regarded her son as an intrusion in her life, an incident for which she had been unprepared, so she had handed him over to an Indian nursemaid, later to Amy and Stubbington. Only when a visitor, relative or neighbour came calling was Paul summoned to be ritually kissed and fussed over. Her only notable accomplishment was her facility with languages, but her harsher critics would say that she made little sense in any of them. To the quiet, uncomplicated people of Broxbourne she appeared breezy and theatrical. She had chosen, together with her studious husband, to live in a house on the edge of the village, although she might have fitted more naturally into the teeming metropolis of London. On first being introduced the natural reaction was that she was an actress, or should have been. She fitted the stereotype of no particular national identity, did not walk into a room but effected an entrance, did not contribute to a conversation but blew it asunder, did not smoke a cigarette but flourished it like a work of art. The words and phrases of other languages decorated her pronouncements and left her listeners baffled. It was hard to imagine a wider disparity than that which lay between herself and her serious husband, nor was it hard to see why Paul, in his early years, gravitated toward the plain normality of Stubbington and Amy.

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All human societies, except the most primitive, share the characteristic of embodying wealth and poverty between the covers of the same book, luxury on one page and squalor on the next. England in the 1920s was no exception, and the first Great War, which had ended in 1918, had brought the disparity into sharp focus. The minds of the wealthy were rooted in the pious certainties of Victorian England, and the poor had been aroused by the war and experienced horrors that Dante himself could not have visualised. Returning servicemen who clamoured for change were greeted with brave rhetoric and pious sentiment. 'Houses for Heroes', yes, but who was to build and pay for them? 'A country t for those who won the war', but they faced soaring unemployment, which was the more frightful because the wounded, mutilated and distressed had now joined their ranks. There were men who hobbled on ill-fitting crutches, who had empty sleeves, sightless eyes, and speech that was rambling and disconnected. They stood on street corners and in public parks, and the names of those who had not returned were carved on Broxbourne's war memorial. In the main, however, Broxbourne could absorb its wounded and give some succour to its poor, but a constant reminder of the plight of others were the beggars from the metropolis of London who slept in barns and begged from house to house. They left chalk marks on doors to communicate to their brethren the amount of generosity that might be found within.

The word 'empire' was much on the lips of public figures at that time, as though it excused the country's plight. Being an unplanned empire it was often assumed that lack of organisation was a component of British genius. The trophies of empire glimmered afar for few to enjoy, but while the sun never set on the empire beyond the seas, rarely did it rise over the dark tenements at home. A baleful side effect was the shortage of men. The war had claimed a higher proportion of men than women, and a further drain was created by the need to govern a quarter of the globe. A whole generation of men disappeared into the jungles, deserts and bazaars of countries that were painted red on the map. It was said that there were three million surplus women left in the British Isles, only a few of whom, the very rich, could afford to go on world tours and shamelessly hunt down husbands in the military messes and up-country stations of empire. Their accidents and adventures, particularly in places that had few amenities to offer visitors, were a source of constant humour.

The village of Broxbourne could boast a lord of the manor, or at least an approximation of one since he was not actually a lord, but whose magnificent house, tree-studded parkland and ample fields lay about a mile distant from the Henriques house. Paul remembered him in later years as a large, imposing person of commanding appearance and impeccable dress. He was a retired military man and master of foxhounds, and these two qualifications clung like ivy to his hyphenated name, Smith-Bosanquet. The fact that he was able to trace his lineage back to the Norman Conquest gave him a ready topic of conversation by which he could command the attention of people to whom he had just been introduced. Paul's father and mother lived in a much smaller house and kept only two servants, not twelve, and the uneasy truce between the two families rested on the unspoken acceptance that one had more money and the other more brains. Invitations to dinner parties tended, as Mrs. Henriques pointed out, to be last minute affairs that came in consequence of cancellations by more socially prominent guests.

The lady of the manor was also large and imposing, which was not surprising since six, seven and eight-course meals were served regularly at her table. She dressed, perhaps reluctantly, in the pitiful fashions of the 1920s, when dresses had suddenly become short and hats were like saucepans. She did not ride to hounds but was much in evidence at the 'meet' which preceded a hunt. Such an event, which took place on the broad gravel driveway in front of the great Bosanquet house, was regulated in fine degrees of class-consciousness. The apparent confusion created by forty or fifty mounted men, some of whom wore 'pinks', or full hunting regalia of red coats and white breeches, plus a large pack of hounds, was something of a delusion. The social niceties were all the while being observed. Footmen would serve liquor in what were called stirrup cups, containing a couple of ounces of whiskey or brandy. The cup itself was made of silver or some other metal with appendages on the sides making it easy to grasp by a man on horseback. Theoretically undroppable, they did occasionally fall to the ground and had to be retrieved from the driveway or grass. On one such occasion a lady on a restive horse dropped her cup and Stubbington retrieved it. Paul noticed that when he handed it back he was not thanked; indeed, the footman snarled at him with words that Paul was unfamiliar with. What Paul did understand, even at that early age, was that the employees of a wealthy man did not necessarily possess the same amiable sentiments which were to be found in the Henriques house.

At the lower end of the social scale was the Crismaru family, thought to be Romanians, with their thirteen children. It was known in the village that the government was operating a scheme whereby indigent families with numerous children could send those whom they chose to part with either to Canada or Australia. Proponents of the scheme said that the children would be adopted by farm people who were childless or would accept additions to their own families. The children would find themselves bathed in colonial affection, leading healthy lives and enjoying opportunities they could never expect if they remained in overcrowded Britain. It was made out to be a privilege, a golden opportunity, a sort of Rhodes scholarship for the poverty stricken. Opponents of the scheme were horrified. The government, they said, had no idea where the children would go or how they would be treated. It was little better than slavery and brought nothing but discredit on the British government and the colonial authorities who had done nothing by way of preparation. Most of all, it brought contempt on the parents who were gullible and did not know enough to limit their own reproductive processes. How, in this green and happy land, could people cast off their children for adoption beyond the seas?

At all events, the Crismaru family was swept up in these crosscurrents and, with misplaced faith in the government, the parents nominated two of their offspring for the honour of being deported. It was learned that Timmy, aged seven, and Annie, six, were to be the lucky ones. Looking back in later years Paul could make no sense of what had happened, and when his parents spoke about it Paul had become saddened, refused his supper and said he wanted to be sick. His mother, however, assembled household items and some cast-off clothes, put them in a bag and sent Stubbington to deliver them. Paul went with him but did not go inside the cottage, which was small, smoky and crowded. There was no word of thanks from Mrs. Crismaru, merely a command, "Leave them there!" Stubbington was not within earshot but in the garden helping one of the little girls as she pumped water into a wooden bucket.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE SEA TURTLE'S BACK by Walter Bazley Copyright © 2010 by Walter Bazley. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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