Authors: Valerie Wood
Maria and Annie both started forward, followed by the elderly woman who had spoken to Maria earlier.
‘Come inside please.’ He led the way into the building, the men moving away to let them through. Maria recognized some of them as shipmates of Will’s and they nodded silently as she passed in front of them.
The three women, united in their fear, sat quietly on the hard wooden chairs in the high-ceilinged hall as they waited to be called. They stared at the windows, the floor, anywhere but at each other, their hands clenching and unclenching.
Presently a door opened and the clerk came out again. ‘Mrs Foster!’
She rose unsteadily and followed him into another room, the eyes of the other women following her apprehensively.
‘This is Mrs Foster, sir.’ The clerk spoke to a man sitting behind a large desk. Behind him, looking out of the window down at the docks, was a tall fair-haired man Maria recognized as the captain of the
Polar Star
. The man behind the desk rose to greet her. ‘Mrs Foster, I am Isaac Masterson, and this is Captain de Raad. Please be seated.’
Maria bobbed her knee in a curtsey to the ship-owner and in some trepidation sat down in front of him, her eyes downcast. Will had often spoken of the master mariner who employed him, and she had seen his fine house in High Street, with its rich curtains draping the windows, and had many times reached up above the window sill to catch a glimpse of the gleaming silverware and sparkling crystal on the dark polished dresser inside.
He was speaking to her now, softly and quite kindly. Somehow she didn’t expect rich folk to be kind to people like her. She raised her eyes and saw a middle-aged man of heavy build, dressed in a plain grey coat of good cloth who was looking sympathetically across at her.
It seemed as if she only absorbed part of the conversation as he and Captain de Raad told her briefly of the reason for their early return; of the men they had lost and the injuries that they had sustained as the
Polar Star
battled with the ice and the frenzied whales.
‘Your husband was very brave,’ said the captain in his broken English. ‘He saved another man’s life at the risk of his own.’
Maria felt faint as they spoke, a black despair threatened to envelop her and she felt herself slipping away. She fought to control herself and as she did so Isaac Masterson leaned over her with a glass of water.
She thanked him and drank, and as she held the glass in trembling fingers asked weakly, ‘Is tha telling me, sir, that my husband is dead and his body left out there in ’Polar Sea?’
Mr Masterson took the glass from her and smiled gently. ‘No. You must thank God that he is alive and has been brought home to you. He is very ill, but the surgeon says that he is a strong man and will recover.’
Maria stared at the two men, scalding tears beginning to well in her eyes. ‘Then what –?’
‘I’m telling you, Mrs Foster, that your husband’s whaling days are over. That due to an unfortunate accident, and in order to save his life, the surgeon had no option other than to amputate his right leg.’
Will Foster woke to an onslaught of pain. Not the burning, tearing agony of mutilated flesh which he remembered as the line wound around his leg, but a dull thudding persistent torment below his right knee. He groaned and retched as he tried to sit up to view his surroundings.
A woman came towards him, impassively put her hand on his chest to push him back on to the bed and then walked away.
‘Hey – wait, wait on,’ he called feebly. ‘Where am I?’
The woman didn’t answer and kept on walking right out of the room, her long grey skirt swishing and her boots tapping on the wooden floor.
Will closed his eyes as the effort of movement and speech made his head spin. He concentrated on coordinating his thoughts and trying to remember the events that had led up to finding himself in this unfamiliar bed.
He remembered that he’d been on board the whaler, the
Polar Star
, on her maiden voyage and that they’d set sail during the second week in March from the New Dock in Hull, along with one of Isaac Masterson’s other ships, the
Greenland Star
. He’d waved a long farewell to his wife Maria and their son Tom as they’d stood tearfully watching on the wharf side in the grey dawn of that cold wet morning as the ship slowly moved out into the Old Harbour and on into the wide Humber.
He’d stood for a long time on the deck, gazing back at the still sleeping town as the shoreline receded, looking as if for the last time at the windmills and church spires piercing the skyline, the whole dominated by the tall tower of the magnificent Holy Trinity Church.
He recalled that a brisk wind and fine weather had stayed with them as they had entered the German Ocean, but on reaching the Shetlands they had experienced violent gales and lashing seas and had to shelter for nearly a week, the men growing restless and anxious. Then as the gales subsided they took on extra men and supplies from the islands and set sail across the Atlantic for the Davis Straits. For a month they’d sailed northwest until the wind changed against them and the captain, a Dutchman, fearing that they would not reach the Arctic Straits in time for the fishing, altered course and headed for Greenland.
I can remember we reached ’ice at ’beginning of May, he thought, but then his mind became confused, and his head was full of images of threshing whales and bloodstained seas and splintering ice. He heard a voice shouting, ‘Is anybody there?’ and was bewildered to find that it was his own.
The woman came hurrying back through a door, and as his vision cleared he saw that he wasn’t alone in the long room, but that there were other beds besides his, some occupied and some empty.
‘Where am I?’ he repeated. ‘Am I in England or Greenland?’
The woman laughed. ‘’Course tha’s in England. Tha’s in ’ospital, in ’Infirmary. Back ’ome in Hull.’
‘How did I get here? I was on board ’ship – who brought me?’
The words started to tumble out incoherently and his leg twitched in a painful spasm.
‘Tha’ll have to wait and see ’doctor,’ she said, her voice and manner rough. ‘I don’t know owt about it, they don’t tell ’likes o’ me. I’m only ’ere to clean up after everybody!’
She walked away to the next bed, but then turning back said in a softer tone, ‘If ’tha likes, after ’doctor’s been, I’ll fetch thee a jug o’ beer.’
He closed his eyes and lay back again. The pain was getting worse and he was desperate for water to slake his thirst. ‘Nurse,’ he called. ‘Nurse!’ But she either didn’t or wouldn’t hear him and he drifted off again into an uneasy, tormented sleep where the screams of whales and men intermingled, and the icy Greenland waters washed over him, pulling him down into blackness.
When he awoke again it was almost dark, the only light coming in from the bay window at the end of the room. There was a man sitting by the bed and as Will turned his head towards him he looked up and gave a gappy smile.
‘Hey, Will, I’d given thee up. I thought tha was a goner.’ The man cleared his throat and wiped his nose on his bandaged hand.
‘Is that thee, Rob? I’m right glad to see thee. What happened? Where are we?’ Will again tried to sit up, but he was curiously unbalanced and fell back once again in the bed.
‘We’re ’ome, thank God,’ said Rob Hardwick. ‘Though there’s some not so fortunate. We lost Richard Bewley: ’e were a good lad, his ma’ll miss him. Alan Swinburn. Does tha remember me telling thee he’d gone? Day after thy accident it was. What a way to dee. Killed by a barrel o’ blubber! I don’t like to speak ill of ’dead, but ’e’ll not be missed. ’E were a miserly old pinchgut, stinting on ’is poor bairns and spending ’is bonus in ’dram shop.’
He leaned forward towards the bed, his eyes keen and searching anxiously into Will’s face. ‘Does tha remember us reaching ’ice and catching a big un?’
Will nodded. He recalled three six-man boats putting out from the whaler. They’d made one clean kill and towed the whale back to the ship for the flensers to do their work of dismembering the carcase and storing the blubber. The following day they heard the cry of other whales and moved off after them.
‘Aye, well, it was that day that we made a dock in ’ice and gale started to blow, and we were all fearful of being stove in; but we put off four long boats and set out chasin’ again. We knew there was plenty about by ’row they was makin’.’
Will put his hand to his eyes, trying to shut out the vision as recollection returned. The sea was his livelihood, the only one he had known, and he would wish for no other, yet he seemed to be haunted by the memory of the gush of blood staining the water, and could smell the oily reek of blubber. But most of all he thought he could hear the anguished cries as the harpoons struck their victim and see the stricken whale as it dived again and again, turning over and over as it vainly tried to shake off the barbed iron and line, until finally the great threshing body was stilled and it floated, its white belly exposed to the alien skies. The cheers of the men echoed in his ears.
‘Well, we’d got two that day,’ went on Rob, ‘and was just towing them back, when a third one just came out of nowhere, right up ’side of ’boat. It threshed about that much we had all on to keep ’boat upright. Then Richard Bewley threw his iron with such force that he went right over ’side. He never stood a chance. I reckon he went right under ’ice.’
‘Aye, aye, I know all that,’ said Will wearily. ‘But what happened later? Why am I in ’Infirmary with a broken leg? For judging by ’agony I’m in, that’s what it is. And why is tha bandaged? Did tha get ’frost?’
Rob fiddled with a loose end of his grimy bandage, his eyes averted from Will. Then he got up from the chair and walked to the end of the bed, looking anxiously down the ward towards the door.
‘Tha’ll ’ave seen ’surgeon, ’asn’t tha?’ he asked nervously.
Will’s blue eyes, already swollen with pain, narrowed suspiciously as he observed his shipmate, so obviously in confusion. ‘I don’t think so,’ he answered, ‘I don’t remember.’
A sudden paroxysm of pain convulsed him, causing him to draw in his breath and clench his teeth, sweat running down his face as he tried to control the agony. He put his hand beneath the sheet to take hold of the offending source of pain, and found beneath his swollen, bandaged right knee a void, an emptiness. An emptiness of piercing, burning anguish which sent his senses reeling, and as he drifted into unconsciousness he hoarsely cried out, ‘Wilt tha fetch Maria and my bairns!’
Maria sat once more in the hall of the Dock Office, her eyes closed and her head cupped in her hands. Her thoughts were a confusion of relief and despair as she gradually absorbed the knowledge that Will was alive, but she trembled at the realization that her proud, vigorous husband was now crippled.
Annie and Mrs Bewley had been called in together. Annie turned towards Maria as she went through the door. ‘Wait on us, Maria, for I’m that afeard.’
A shaft of sunlight slid from the high window and dust particles danced at her feet as Maria sat locked in her loneliness, whilst life outside continued its normal pattern. Sounds of activity filtered through into the quiet hall as the dock workers unloaded cargoes of timber, hemp, linseed, tobacco, brandy and rum on to the quay. Ships from Gothenburg, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Oporto and America were among the many foreign vessels which crowded the busy port.
Then from within the inner room came wailing and a low pitched moaning, and Maria knew that her own suffering was as nothing compared with that of Annie and Mrs Bewley.
By the time they reappeared Mrs Bewley behaved with quiet fortitude, as became an elderly widow. She sobbed quietly into the corner of her shawl, murmuring her son’s name over and over, shaking her head to and fro in disbelief. But Annie was distraught, clinging frantically with one hand to the clerk who had brought them back into the hall, and with the other clutching a bag with her husband’s belongings, and crying out in hysteria that she and her bairns would starve in the gutter, now that there was no man to support them.
‘He’s dead Maria! Crushed by a barrel of stinking blubber!’ she screamed.
Maria rose pale and trembling from her chair and took hold of her arm.
‘Nay, Annie, don’t tek on so. Be brave and think on ’childre’. We’ll all help thee.’ Though God knows how, she thought. The little money saved through her thriftiness would soon be whittled away when there was no wage coming in.
But Annie, she knew, had no money and was probably in debt to the moneylender for she was a poor housekeeper. Alan Swinburn spent his wages as soon as he came home, drinking rum heavily or gambling on cock fights, whilst Annie resorted to stealing coins from his pockets as he lay in a drunken stupor on the bed they shared with their children. There were times when he caught her out and then she was given a beating as a punishment.
Maria sighed. Poor Annie, at least she would be spared that, for many times she had bathed Annie’s bruises and fed her ragged, pathetic children.
The clerk tugged at Maria’s sleeve. ‘When Mrs Swinburn is over ’shock,’ he said quietly, ‘tell her to go to Trinity House, they’ll help her, it’s her right. And thee, Mrs Bewley,’ he added. ‘They’ll find a place for thee at Seamen’s Hospital.’
At this Annie started to wail again. ‘We’ll have to go on ’relief. To collect our Sixpences!’
Maria grew impatient. She felt drained of energy, she had an ache in her back, and was sick with anxiety over Will. Didn’t Annie think that others had worries too? Life was going to be hard, there was no doubt about it, but they would manage if they were careful.
Trinity House collected money from the seamen’s wages – known locally as the Seamen’s Sixpences – to give out in relief to the widows and children of drowned seamen, or those who were maimed at sea, and spendthrifts like Alan Swinburn were forced to subscribe. Old people like Mrs Bewley were taken for shelter into the almshouses to end their days. They were given food and clothing and a bed to sleep on and had no need to resort to begging in the streets like some less fortunate souls.
‘I’m going home,’ said Maria. ‘I must see to my bairns, and then I shall go to Will. He needs me. He’s been taken to ’Infirmary. He’s a cripple!’ As the words tumbled out she started to cry, the tension and emotion of the last few hours finally erupting into floods of tears.