admit.
‘Does she know? About Jerome, I mean?’ Sally’s tone was confrontational.
‘No. I haven’t had a chance to tell her.’
Sally rolled her eyes. A muscle twitched in her jaw as though she was trying to get her anger under control. A moment later she sighed and shook her head. ‘You’re right, Mum. We’ll not think about her any more. Let’s just get on with sorting out Nanna’s things. Right then. This box next.’ Sally opened a box marked ‘Ornaments’ and they continued the process of separating them into keep, charity, and tip piles.
Three boxes later they had finished all of Harriet’s mother’s stuff. Harriet was pleased to find she had only decided to keep half a dozen items from it all for sentimental purposes.
‘So now, this? What is it, some sort of travelling trunk?’ Sally patted the trunk that the boxes had been stacked on top of.
Harriet nodded. ‘That was my grandmother’s sea trunk I think. Mum had it stored in her attic and after I cleared her house, I just moved it here.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘No idea. I’ve never looked. It’s locked, and I don’t have a key. But we’ll never manage to get it downstairs and out of here. Maybe we can just push it to a corner of the attic and leave it here when I sell up.’
Sally stared at her mother, an expression of utmost horror on her face. ‘Absolutely no way, Mum. We are not just leaving this. There could be some real gems in here. What do you mean, her sea trunk?’
‘My grandmother worked on board ocean liners when she was young,’ Harriet replied. ‘I guess this is what she packed her stuff in, to take on board ship. Grandpa worked on them too – it’s where they met.’
‘Yes, there are labels on it – White Star Line. That rings a bell,’ Sally said, frowning as she peered at the sides of the trunk.
‘That’s the one. Gran worked on the Olympic, which used to sail back and forth across the Atlantic from Southampton to New York.’
‘Hmm. But you say you don’t have the key?’
‘Not anywhere I know of. Shame.’ Harriet ran her hand across the top of the trunk, feeling its scratched and battered surface. Finding it had piqued her curiosity about her grandmother’s early life. As a child she could remember sitting on her grandmother’s knee, listening enraptured to tales of life at sea. She’d loved gazing at Gran’s wrinkled and powdered face, watching her eyes light up as she told her stories. She could remember the feeling of Gran’s arms wrapped around her, the smell of her perfume and powder, the gentle sound of her voice. But she couldn’t remember much of the detail of Gran’s stories – just vague impressions of her talking about her job as a stewardess on board ocean liners, being run off her feet by spoilt and demanding passengers.
And now here, in her attic, was Gran’s old sea trunk. Harriet sighed. How she’d long to see inside it!
‘Mum?’ Sally was on her knees in front of the trunk, looking closely at it. ‘Thought you said this was locked?’
‘It is.’
‘No, it’s not. It’s just held by a catch that’s a bit stiff. Look.’ Harriet watched as Sally prised open the catch then pushed the lid up with both hands. It made a cracking sound as it rose, as if decades of dirt that had sealed it were being broken, but then it was open, the lid leaning back on its hinges, and the contents of the trunk exposed for the first time in many decades.
Emma Higgins’ earliest memory was of being on board a ship. Well, it was not really a ship, she supposed. It was a ferry, a steamer operating between Southampton and Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. She’d been about four years old, her sister Ruby just a babe in arms and her sister Lily not yet born. She’d been so very excited to be on board a boat, amazed that such a huge thing could float, and astounded at the views from the deck as Southampton faded into the distance and Cowes loomed ever closer.
The family were on the ferry because they were moving to the Isle of Wight, where Emma’s father, George, had secured a job working in a new hotel in the fashionable resort of Sandown. ‘There’ll be a beach for you to play on,’ he’d told Emma, ‘and the sea for you to paddle in. We shall have a wonderful life in Sandown!’ But it was the sea crossing – steaming down Southampton Water and then across the Solent – that had captured little Emma’s imagination. When she looked back on it, she thought that was probably the moment that determined her lifelong fascination with being at sea.
They had lived in Sandown, George working in the hotel and Emma’s mother Amelia taking in sewing, for almost ten years, until George had fallen prey to a gang of ruffians one stormy afternoon when he had been carrying the hotel’s takings to the bank to lodge. They’d beaten him and stolen the money, leaving him lying in a ditch with broken ribs and a smashed skull. He was found some hours later by a passing policeman but did not recover from his injuries. Amelia, on hearing the news, had collapsed and taken to her bed for a week, by which time the rent was due and there was not enough money to pay it.
Emma’s second sea crossing, therefore, was the return trip from Cowes to Southampton, where the now-fatherless family stayed for a while with Amelia’s sister until Amelia felt able to leave her bed, take on work as a laundress and seamstress, and move herself and her daughters into a tiny terraced house near the Southampton docks.
Now, as Emma hurried back to that same terraced house, bursting with her news, she wondered what her mother and sisters would make of what she had to tell them. Would they be pleased? Or fearful? She had no idea. All she knew was that this felt like her destiny. A chance to go to sea again – properly to sea! – and actually live on board a ship. It felt so right. It seemed like a job that had her name on it; a job she’d been meant to do since she was four years old and had marched onto the bridge of the paddle steamer on the way to Cowes, demanding to see the horses that powered the ship. Her father had been simultaneously mortified and delighted by her audacity, she recalled, and the ferry’s skipper had picked her up and let her hold the wheel for one brief, glorious moment.
She turned a corner, passed the small grocery shop where Ma went every day to buy the family’s dinner, waved to the little girl who lived across the street and was playing out with a hoop and stick, and found herself running the last few yards to her front doorstep, where she almost tripped over her sister.
‘What are you doing sitting out here, Ruby? You’ll make your skirts all dirty and Ma’ll be furious.’
‘Huh. I scrubbed the step this morning so it’s clean as anything. Sitting out here because it’s better than being in there.’ Ruby pointed over her shoulder with her thumb at the house.
‘Oh dear. What’s happened now?’ Emma sighed. Her news would have to wait a while. She nudged Ruby with her foot to make her move over, and sat beside her.
‘Ma. That’s what’s happened. Making me scrub steps and wash clothes and sweep floors. I ain’t a general skivvy, Ems.’
‘We need to share out the jobs.
