‘Oh, no!’ Marina said. ‘Although I’ve begged my father to take me.’ What she didn’t add was that this refusal to take Marina to the seaside came only after her mother had left. And no one had told her why. She frowned, the merest scrap of a memory flapping at the corner of her mind. Her mother sitting on a rug on the sand, her green silk skirt spread out around her. Marina shook her head slightly to try and see the scrap more clearly, but she couldn’t focus on it.
‘I think all children should go to the seaside,’ Miss Smith said, thoughtfully. ‘The sea air is so bracing. It’s very good for their lungs.’ She frowned. ‘So your father has never taken you anywhere? Abroad, perhaps?’
Another scrap of memory. Her mother carrying her, quickly, towards the waves – her legs must not have been hurting her that day. Where was her father?
Marina shook her head again to dislodge the picture. It couldn’t be anything more than a fancy brought on by the excitement of the journey. Her mother couldn’t walk without two canes, let alone carry her child across an expanse of sand . . . and into the sea . . .
‘My mother wasn’t well. And then my father was at sea . . .’
‘What do you remember about your mother?’
Marina gulped and shook her head. ‘Hardly anything. I was very young when . . .’
‘But your father must have told you about her?’ Miss Smith raised an eyebrow.
Marina felt as if she should say that her father talked about her mother often. But he was away so much, and when he was at home, his work took all his time. What could she remember about her mother that would make any sense? She felt her silence disappointed Miss Smith, but the woman smiled as if she understood.
‘It is the same with my father. He died when I was small. It upset my mother to talk about him. So she didn’t. Parents don’t always know what’s best. They try to keep us from suffering but don’t see the harm they are causing.’
That was a shocking opinion, Marina thought.
They finished the biscuits and ate an apple apiece.
Miss Smith now pulled some papers out of her portmanteau and started to read them. Marina felt that she, too, should have an occupation. Clearly, clever women – the sort who wore short skirts and worked at the Admiralty and looked at every person as if they were a potential spy – were never idle. She pulled her length of rope out of her kitbag and attempted the fiendishly difficult knot her father had shown her the day before. But the knot got tangled and wouldn’t come right. She got flustered.
‘What are you doing?’ Miss Smith looked up from her papers.
‘Just tying knots,’ Marina said in an offhand manner. ‘I practise all the time. My father says a good sailor can tie a hundred different sorts.’
Miss Smith nodded. ‘But that one is proving quite difficult,’ she commented.
‘It’s the best knot for icy conditions,’ Marina explained. Why wouldn’t the loops lie flat? ‘My father showed me how to do it before he left.’
‘Well, he won’t be needing that knot in Cadiz!’ Miss Smith smiled.
‘How hot is it in Cadiz?’
‘Oh . . . boiling, I should think.’
‘Even at night?’
‘Of course.’
‘So no need for fur-lined gloves, then.’
‘I would think only a mad Englishman would wear fur-lined gloves in Cadiz. Why do you ask?’
Marina shrugged her shoulders and looked out of the window.
The rest of the journey passed quickly. Miss Smith was an amusing companion with lots of stories to tell about her work at the Admiralty, her landlady, and her childhood in Northumbria, ‘Where I acquired my strange accent,’ she joked. When the train steamed into the station at Portsmouth, they gathered their belongings, feeling quite the best of friends.
Miss Smith took Marina with her in her cab to the docks. And there they parted.
‘I must deliver my orders,’ she said. ‘But promise me you will meet me here at a quarter to five and we will travel back to London together. I will see you home.’ She frowned. ‘Although it’s probably best not to tell anyone – especially your father – that we have met. He was very against women being allowed into the Admiralty, and may make my task harder.’
Marina felt suddenly anxious that she might be returning to London later that day. Her plan to go to sea seemed foolish now she was here. ‘Yes . . . Of course . . . I’ll meet you,’ she mumbled.
‘Are you sure you’re going to be all right, dear heart?’ Miss Smith asked, her forehead creased with concern.
‘Oh, yes,’ Marina replied in what she hoped was a confident tone. ‘I’m going to see my father. He’ll be so pleased to see me!’
‘Just don’t let him carry you off to sea! It would be unbearable for me to have made such a charming and pretty young friend only for her to run away.’
7
Marina had imagined herself standing at the harbour and gazing out at the infinite, ever-moving sea – feet apart, her kitbag on her shoulder, having grand thoughts about how women must be allowed to work for the Admiralty. Women as clever and accomplished as Miss Smith (and as clever and accomplished as she passionately wished to be) must not be confined to parlours and nurseries. She would not be told what to do. She would shout her defiance to the waves!
The reality was rather different.
There was no wide horizon to accept her cry.Portsmouth harbour was preparing for war. It was taken up with steel hulls and gun turrets: enormous dreadnoughts docked in black and oily water. They had no interest in the voice of a twelve-year-old girl. There was no fresh, salty tang, only the sour taste of coal and oil and steam. Marina wrinkled her nose in distaste. Why did the world have to be so different from her dreams?
Marina found the harbour master’s office eventually. Miss
