Listen to the Moon
Papa, it turned out, had recovered well, faster than expected, and already been sent back to the trenches. It could not have been easy to track him down, but Dr Crow persisted, and at last found out where he was, with his regiment near Ypres in Belgium. Dr Crow told me nothing of any of his searches at the time, only that everything was being done to find Papa. I tried not to think of Papa too much, but in the months that followed I could think of little else. I feared for him, pined for him, longed for the sound of his voice, to see him coming towards me, arms outstretched, to have him catch me up and whirl me round. I knew how sad he must be to have been told he had lost both Mama and me on the Lusitania. I sang to the moon whenever I could, hummed to it, listened to it, told him I was alive.
I thank God I did not know much then of the dangers he was in, nor of the horrors of that dreadful war. They kept such things from me. Mother Mary prayed with me every night for him. I believed her completely when she said that God would look after Papa and bring him back to me. I was surrounded by my new family, cocooned in their love and care. They reassured me, calmed my fears, helped me through those darkest hours, when I remembered Mama and the peacock dressing gown in the sea. When I cried, as I often did, I never had to cry alone. There were always comforting arms round me, comforting words, comforting smiles.
Beyond the farmhouse as well, beyond my Scillonian family, I could feel the warmth of the whole community, and at school too – Mr Beagley excepted. He alone remained as he always had been. Beastly. But everyone else, now they knew my story, was doing their very best to make me feel one of them again. In every look there was regret for past suspicion and wrongs and hurt. With every kind deed, a friendship was made or renewed. All the harsh words were soon forgotten. With Alfie at my side, I became absorbed as never before in the life of the family, the island and the school. Their sadnesses and disappointments and tragedies were mine too – and there were many of them during those long dark days of war. But their joys were my joys. I belonged there. I was an islander, a Scillonian.
There was a rhythm to my life on Bryher, the boat to school with Mr Jenkins rowing us across, playing the piano at school, which Miss Nightingale insisted I did, for every morning Assembly now; riding Peg around the island with Alfie after school, going out fishing sometimes on Penguin at weekends, drawing in the boathouse with Uncle Billy, making bread with Mother Mary, and sometimes there were trips out to the Eastern Isles in the Hispaniola to see the seals, all of us on board, the Jolly Roger flying, all of us singing out loud Uncle Billy’s ‘Yo-ho-ho’ song as we sailed along. And of course there was always church on Sundays. Mother Mary leading us there, singing the hymns louder, more fervently than anyone else, and we were never again left alone in our pew. But, happy as I was in my island life, every night I grieved for Mama, and worried over Papa away at the war. I sang to the moon. I listened to the moon. Some nights I heard Papa singing, I know I did. But sometimes I did not, and then I cried myself to sleep because I thought he must be dead.
I remember it was after school, and I was riding round the island with Alfie. He was for some reason badgering me to get home as fast as we could, but would not tell me why. I wanted to take my time. He knew I liked to stay out riding on Peg as long as possible. But Alfie was up front, and he was trotting and cantering her home as fast as Peg could go. I couldn’t stop him. So in the end I gave up grumbling and enjoyed it. As we came along Green Bay, she almost broke into a gallop.
When we reached the farm, we did not stop as I had expected, but rode on past Veronica Farm down the track towards the quay. I asked Alfie where we were going, but he wouldn’t reply. The boat from St Mary’s was in. Dr Crow was there, Mother Mary and Jim, and Uncle Billy, and dozens of islanders too, all in a huddle on the quayside. There was a man in uniform, I saw, in among them. I thought at first it must be the officer from the garrison I had met at Dr Crow’s house, the one who had taken Wilhelm away that day. But then I saw that the soldier had a moustache and was taller, considerably taller, and was walking towards us as a giraffe walks, with a long and loping stride, with sloping shoulders and a long neck. It was a walk I knew, a moustache I knew, shoulders I knew, a neck I knew. But only when he took his cap off was I quite sure that it was Papa. I ran to him. He caught me up in his arms and whirled me round. We clung to one another then on the quayside until the tears stopped. It was a long time, a long hug.
THAT NIGHT OUTSIDE THE HOUSE, Peg wandered up to introduce herself to Papa, and the three of us stood there, listening to the fall of the sea on the shore. Two of us at least were looking at the moon, a full moon, a bright moon, our moon. We hummed our tune together, but we no longer had to listen to the moon. We were together again.
That in a way, I suppose, was the end of it all, but of course it wasn’t. There never is an end, because there are always new beginnings. Papa could stay for only a couple of days. Soldiers don’t really have holidays, he explained, not in a war, just a few days’ leave if you were lucky, to see family and friends. We spoke of Mama, of course, and of the sinking of the Lusitania. But not much, and I never told him about her peacock dressing gown. That would have been too hard for him to bear, I thought. We cried together a great deal when we were alone, because our thoughts often turned to Mama.
But when we were with my Scillonian family we talked more of what was to happen to me now. Papa was quite determined that I should not go back across the Atlantic to New York, “not with those U-boats prowling the seas,” he said. There was a distant aunt of his who lived in Bath, on the mainland of England, who had agreed to look after me until the war was over. She lived in a handsome stone house, he told me, with trees all around, and with a good school nearby, of which she happened to be the headmistress. But I was every bit as determined not to go there as he had been not to let me sail back to New York. We had quite an argument – perhaps the first argument I ever had with Papa.
Mother Mary was the one who intervened on my behalf, and passionately too. She said it would not be right to send me to live with a complete stranger, that I was one of the family now and should stay with them for as long as I liked, at least until the war was over, and that whatever happened I would always have a home with them. She turned to Jim and Alfie then, for support. I remember well what Jim said. “Course she should stay. We quite like her, don’t we, Alfie?”
Alfie didn’t say anything, but just smiled.
So it was arranged. Father went back to the war, and I stayed on Bryher for the next three years, and did most of my growing up there. All this time I was falling in love with Alfie, I think, but without knowing it – until, that is, I saw him in his uniform when he was sailing off to war in the winter of 1917. We wrote letters to one another every day for a year, until the war was over, until he came home. I’ve kept all his letters, every one of them. I did a lot of writing, writing often to Papa as well, and to Aunty Ducka and Uncle Mac and Pippa, but my spelling never improved. Still hasn’t, to this day. I love to draw though, and I play the piano every morning. The ‘Andante Grazioso’ is still the piece of music I love to play most of all.
Quite soon after the war was over, Alfie came home. So he was there already by the time Papa arrived to take me back to New York. I told him I was staying, because I wanted to be with Alfie, to marry him and spend my life with him.
Papa was sad, I could see that, but he did not object. He gave me away at our wedding in Bryher Church, with everyone on the island there, Peg too, waiting outside in the graveyard, and grazing away. Someone had plaited flowers in her mane and tail. She didn’t seem to mind. Alfie and I rode her home to Veronica Farm afterwards. That night a gale blew in, and Papa had to stay on with us longer than he intended, so that he got to know my Scillonian family, my other family, and was soon at his ease with them. When he finally left, he made me promise I would come to New York, to see him, and Uncle Mac and Aunty Ducka. It was a parting that all children in the end have to make, and was hard to bear. But I had Alfie with me.
Five years later, Alfie and I did go over to New York. It had always been Alfie’s dream to travel to America. I will not pretend I was not nervous on the Mauretania, the liner that took us across the Atlantic. Alfie and I dropped flowers in the sea for Mama, and Brendan and little Celia, as we passed by the coast of Ireland off The Old Head of Kinsale. I am glad we went when we did, because Uncle Mac and Aunty Ducka were old now and frail. And Papa, I discovered, had never really recovered from the war, either in mind or body. So many of them never did. It was plain that all of them, Pippa most of all, wanted me to stay, needed us to stay. So, after much soul searching, we did.
Alfie found work on the same great ships that had brought us over, and in time became ship’s captain. Three times, over the years, I joined him on board his ship with our children, and with Pippa, who had become like an Aunty to them now, one of the family almost, we sailed for England and made the journey over to the Scilly Isles to see grandparents there, and family and friends, to bring our children to meet them. We wanted them to tread the fine white sand on Rushy Bay, and walk the wild cliffs around Hell Bay. Here we would sit on the soft thrift and tell them about Mother Mary, and Jim, and Uncle Billy, and Peg, and Dr Crow as well, all of them gone by the time of our last visit, but all still remembered. Thank God for memory, I say – which I know all too well these days we should never take for granted. And thank God too, for our children and for our grandchildren. For, without them, who would ever tell the story?
And if our story lives on, mine and Alfie’s, then so do we.
So do those we remember.
MY OWN LIFE HAS IN many ways mirrored Grandma’s and Grandpa’s. I was brought up in the family house in New York, spent my summers at Bearwood Cottage in Maine, learnt how to sail there, rode in Central Park, fed the ducks on the lake, listened to my father reading me The Ugly Duckling, and bit by bit picked up the family story as it was told to me. Which is why when I was older I decided to come over to England, go to the Scilly Isles and find out all I could about the place my grandfather came from, and that both of them had talked about so much. And, once here, I found I could not leave, that this place is where I belong. Veronica Farm is my home now, has been for many long years. I have my family here all around me, grandchildren of my own living on the island. I am a fisherman, a farmer – I grow daffodils, thousands of them every year – and I’m a bit of a writer too.
As I write this, I am alone at the kitchen table in Veronica Farmhouse. But I’m not quite alone. I am being watched from the kitchen dresser by a certain raggedy-looking, one-eyed teddy bear. All the while, as I’ve been writing this, I’ve been reading bits of it out loud to him to see if he’s happy with it. I’ve just read this last chapter to him. He’s still smiling. So that’s good. It’s important he likes it.
READ ON FOR
SOME BACKGROUND TO
Listen to the Moon
The S.S. Lusitania
THE SINKING IN MAY 1915 of the Lusitania, known familiarly as ‘The Lusy’, shocked the world. She was at one time the biggest, most luxurious ship in the world and had held The Blue Riband for the fastest crossing on the Atlantic. She could cruise at twenty-five knots. A passenger ship, she was making the crossing from New York to Liverpool when she was sunk.
The Lusitania was torpedoed on May 7th by a German submarine – U-20 – twelve miles off The Old Head of Kinsale on the south coast of Ireland. She went down in only eighteen minutes (the Titanic, in comparison, took over three hours to go down) so the loss of life was large. 1198 passengers drowned, 128 of them men, women and children from the USA. At the time it was the greatest single loss of civilian life in warfare, and the first such loss of any kind suffered by the United States of America.
In theory, submarine attacks were limited by international agreement to military and merchant vessels. As a passenger ship carrying civilians, the Lusitania should therefore have been exempt from such aggression. As a result, and although at the time America was still a neutral power, the incident caused huge diplomatic friction between the United States and Germany, and many believe it played a role in America’s eventual entry to the war.
Seeing the ship explode and sink, the people of Kinsale put to sea in boats to rescue survivors and to bring back the dead. It was some hours after the ship sank that they came across a grand piano from the dining room floating on the ocean. There are reports that a girl was lying on it, although it is not at all clear whether she was alive or dead.
A great and continuing controversy surrounds the sinking of the Lusitania. The German Embassy placed notices in American newspapers weeks prior to the sailing, stating that vessels flying the British flag in waters surrounding Britain were liable to be targeted. These ran prominently alongside advertisements to sail on the Lusitania.
Passengers were greatly worried by this, but nonetheless the ship was almost full when she sailed.
After the ship was torpedoed and in the face of international outrage, Germany maintained that the Lusitania had been carrying munitions destined for the European front and was therefore a ship of war. A German company even brought out a medal to celebrate the sinking of this, the biggest British ship – and in response the British too brought out a medal to commemorate the dead and to condemn the sinking as an atrocity and an example of German barbarism.
Feeling against Germany and Germans rose amongst the Allies, and stiffened their determination to win the war. Perhaps more importantly, Americans were enraged, and anti-German sentiment rose significantly, all of which made it more likely that sooner or later they would enter the war on the Allied side. The USA did join the Allies in the struggle against Germany and her allies in 1917.
The controversy regarding the Lusitania’s cargo continues to this day. Britain and the ship’s owners have always maintained that the ship was carrying only non-explosive ammunition, of a kind allowed by the rules of war. However, some have argued that the ship was secretly carrying larger munitions and explosives, and that this may have contributed to the second explosion that caused her to sink so quickly.
Divers visiting the wreck have failed so far to find conclusive evidence. But as recently as May 2014 the British Government released secret files from the 1980s warning that “something startling” might be found on the wreck and that divers faced “danger to life and limb”.
Due to this danger, and the great sensitivity surrounding the question on all sides, the full truth of what the Lusitania was or wasn’t carrying may never be known.
The U-boat campaign in World War I
THE ROYAL NAVY HAD A far superior surface fleet to the Imperial German Navy, and blockaded Germany successfully for much of the war. In response the Germans launched a U-boat campaign to prevent supplies coming into British ports. Effectively they wanted to starve the Allies into defeat. Their campaign was hugely successful and very nearly succeeded. Allied losses were appalling. 5000 Allied ships were sunk and 13 million tons of shipping destroyed. But losses were heavy on the German side also. 178 U-boats were lost and 5000 men killed.
But there were in this dreadful war of attrition remarkable acts of kindness. One U-boat captain surfaced to warn British sailors on board their merchantman that he was about to torpedo their ship and that they should take to their lifeboats, which indeed they did, and lives were saved. There was also an instance of a U-boat commander coming to the rescue of men in their lifeboats and towing them in closer to shore.
The Isles of Scilly
THE SCILLY ISLES LIE SOME twenty-five miles out in the Atlantic, off Land’s End in Cornwall. An archipelago of five inhabited islands – Bryher, St Agnes, Tresco, the largest island St Mary’s, and St Martin’s – it also comprises several uninhabited islands and some more recently deserted, amongst them St Helen’s.
The isles are the first landfall for ships coming across to Britain from Southern Ireland and the United States. There are about 2000 inhabitants who have traditionally been great seamen and fishermen, farming early potatoes and narcis
si to eke out a livelihood on these windswept islands. Nowadays tourism plays a greater part in their economy and in their lives. There are, it is said, a greater concentration of wrecks in the waters around Scilly than anywhere else in England, so treacherous are the rocks and currents, so exposed are these islands to violent storms.
St Helen’s lies between St Martin’s and Tresco and was centuries ago lived on by monks who dug the well and built a chapel. Since then it has been used as a quarantine island, and a Pest House was built there to house the sick and the dying, who could not be brought ashore for fear of infection. The ruins of the Pest House are still there to this day. The island is visited only rarely by passing yachts and researching writers!
The S.S. Schiller
AMONGST THE HUNDREDS OF WRECKS lying on the ocean floor around Scilly one of the most famous is that of the German ocean liner S.S. Schiller. She went down on May 7th 1875 – exactly forty years to the day before the Lusitania. There was heavy loss of life. 335 died, almost all Germans, despite the best efforts of the Scillonians to rescue them.
They did, however, manage to save over thirty of the passengers. When the story of this rescue, and of the respect and dignity shown to their dead by the people of Scilly, reached Germany, there was widespread admiration and gratitude amongst the German public. So much so, that even forty years later, during World War I, the order went out to the Imperial German Navy that no Allied ships sailing close to the coast of the Scilly Isles were ever to be attacked. None were.
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