Fremantle Harbour Entrance

By Warrigal Mirriyuula

Benjamin and Edward were brothers. They were the identical twin sons of Maeve O’Sullivan and Daniel Fitzpatrick.  This is their story.

The twins were an unexpected and somewhat difficult blessing that cold December morning when Maeve went into early labour in the tiny workers cottage where the family lived in Gateshead. At first, given their prematurity, the twins were not expected to live.

It was a mercifully brief labour. The midwife, looking upon them after she’d cleaned, swaddled and laid them, one on each side of Maeve, thought of the sadness that would come in train of this cold windy beginning with the slates on the roof rattling out their tattoo of stony cold welcome. These plucky little boys would be lucky to see the week out. She took Maeve’s limp exhausted hand in hers, put on her best, most brave smile and said, “Two strong sons to look after you and Danny. You’ve done so well for one so young and your first time too”.

Nodding vigourously to confirm the truth of this statement, she turned away and busied herself tidying up the room. She stoked the little fire in the iron grate and added another lump of coal. By the time she turned her attention back to Maeve the young mother was asleep and the baby boys, faces red and still showing the creases and folds of the newly arrived, fisted little hands and their eyes screwed shut, made the best they could of their first day on earth.

Maeve did washing for the posh, and a little needlework when she could get it. A native of Skibbereen, Maeve’s family had come to Newcastle in search of work for her da. He’d got a job at a nearby pit

Maeve met Danny on a works outing when she still had a job in the bottle washing plant at the Newcastle Breweries. She had been sixteen when they met. Danny, an orphan from Belfast, was nineteen and worked on the docks and in the warehouses along The Tyne, taking what work was offered and drinking most of his pay. Indeed he’d been drunk the day Maeve first set eyes on him.

Still clutching his bottle of Brown Ale, he was throwing up and admonishing himself all at the same time. Maeve didn’t know what to make of this untidy apparition as she looked down between the refreshment tents. There he was, barely upright, amongst the crates and strewn empties, the ropes and pegs, half full bottle swinging loosely at the end of his arm while his other hand tried valiantly to keep his glossy black, curly fringe out of harm’s way. Between goips he smiled so sweetly at Maeve, like an angel; and so honestly, without a hint of self-consciousness in his bright green eyes.

“Musta got a dirty bottle.” he slurred in a tone that fully confirmed that his current situation was in no way his fault. Indeed it wasn’t the drink at all, or even the surfeit of it, but a dirty bottle, no question.

Maeve let go a spontaneous laugh before her face assumed a more utilitarian look of mock outrage.

“I wash them bottles!” she said with just a little more self-importance than she intended; or was due so ordinary a job. Danny shrugged, smiled sweetly again, then turned and spat into the grass. He straightened himself to face Maeve, his black curls in his eyes.

The men in Maeve’s family were always drinking so the sight of this good-looking young man drunk in the middle of the afternoon was nothing new or extraordinary. It was a brewery picnic after all.

“Here, gimme a look at ya” she said bossily as she stepped over the guy ropes to join him between the tents. “Let’s get this mess off ya.”

Maeve helped Danny right himself and wiped his mouth and face with a little spit on her favourite cotton handkerchief. The one she’d embroidered so carefully with the little swallows and blue birds. She’d wash it out when she got home. She folded the messy stink into the hankie and tucked it back under her cuff.

Danny, unused to such tender ministration, simply dragged his coat sleeve across his mouth and inspecting it blearily, seemed somewhat perplexed to find no evidence of his late indisposition on the coarse wool. Maeve felt then that she would like this drunken young angel; and Danny, looking at her really for the first time, believed he might have discovered something more intoxicating than drink.

The rest of that summer they spent as much time together as their work and Maeve’s parents would allow. Friends said of them that they were made for each other. Danny’s thirst for the drink seemed to abate. He believed he’d found a good hearted country girl who accepted him for what he was, and Maeve’s friends wondered how long it would be before Danny put the whole thing on a more matrimonial footing.

That would have to wait however.

In September, as the leaves were turning and falling, Danny got a berth as a general hand in a steamer on the Australia run. Maeve’s mammy and da thought just as well. She was only sixteen and Danny wasn’t exactly the match they’d hoped for. He was a good enough young man and he doted on their Maeve, but he drank too much and at such a young age. Perhaps the hard work and discipline at sea would knock some responsibility into him. They hoped for the best for their only daughter.

Danny had first laid out his plans for Maeve and himself one evening as they shared a late cup of tea in a café.

As a treat in the midst of their austerity they’d been to see the new talkie “Blackmail”, at the refurbished Stoll cinema on Westgate Road. Before they went in it was obvious that Danny had something on his mind and to make things worse, during the film Maeve just couldn’t feel at ease. She was distracted by the sound of Anny Ondra’s voice. It just didn’t fit. Sometimes Maeve thought it was someone else’s voice altogether. Besides, people didn’t really behave like this. Well, no-one she knew.

Danny didn’t seem to notice it though. He’d sat, wide eyed, transfixed by the new wonder of sound. Maeve loved his boyish enthusiasms and remembered fondly the day they’d walked some miles along the Durham Road looking for a likely hilltop from which to fly a kite they’d made. It was put together from salvaged brown paper and some willow sticks Danny had dried and then shaped with his penknife. Maeve had made the flutters for the tail from scraps of silk in her sewing box. It had been their first family project, of sorts, and during the making of the kite Danny had shown his serious side. As the chief designer and engineer of the kite he’d directed Maeve in a rather stern manner. His own commitment shown by the appearance of the tip of his tongue, slipping out between his lips on the right side of his mouth as he applied the glue to the brown paper and folded it over the springy willow frame. His reserve when they met outside the cinema, put aside as they sat through “Blackmail”, indicated that whatever it was that was on his mind, it had to be at least as important as the kite.

Oh, but it had been great fun that afternoon. Just a couple of kids in the wind blowing over the rounded hilltop, catching the kite and drawing it high up into the blue arc of the sky filled with fluffy white clouds. Maeve imagined herself and Danny riding the kite through the fat clouds, a sort of cumulo-nimbic inspection with Danny as the exuberant comptroller and she as his avid assistant. It was a glorious afternoon.

As she sat in the darkened cinema watching Danny’s rapt attention to the screen she found her apprehension regarding whatever it was that had been distracting him earlier had completely passed away. She squeezed his hand in the dark and he didn’t seem to notice, so completely was he captivated by the screen. Whatever was on his mind, he’d tell her later.

Danny’s plan, as laid out between excited slurps on his tea and interrupted with flashes retelling the film, was to work as hard as he could, spend as little as was possible and put together a nest egg. Maeve would do the same. When they had put enough aside they would get a little house and their life together would begin. The only thing that seemed to be lacking as Maeve’s mind went off into other clouds of puffy possibility, was an actual proposal of marriage. Danny had managed to describe their current understanding and feelings for one another quite well, if a little dispassionately. Maeve had put this down to his wanting to be serious about his life changing plans for them both. He had then recommenced the narrative of his plan at some point after the wedding when they were already set up in their own little house, perhaps assuming that these details would somehow take care of themselves in the living of it. It certainly didn’t seem important to the telling. Maeve had thought this to be just like a man. The ceremony, the satin and lace would be entirely Maeve’s concern.

That was their plan as Maeve farewelled Danny on Tyneside with the wind and the cold October rain flying in sideways off the North Sea. The miserable cold of their parting did nothing to damp the warm glow Maeve had begun to feel about her life and her future with Danny. More sure of herself than at any time since leaving Cork with her family, she saw her future as assured; Danny had almost given up the drink and he would become a hard worker who might turn his personable nature into advancement for himself. Maeve for her part would bear them many healthy children and keep a happy, tidy house with a welcome for all at the door.

That was how she saw it and was working towards that future when Danny’s first letter arrived postmarked Aden. He wrote of how he missed her and of the hard work on board and how his foreman drove him and the other first timers to exhaustion. He wrote of the voyage across the Mediterranean and down the Suez Canal. He said he wanted to describe everything for her and how exotic so much of it was for a young man out in the wide world for the first time.

The words, scrawled in his spidery ill tutored hand, written lying on his bunk with a borrowed fountain pen, filled her heart and she saw, in the dreamscapes she built with Danny’s detailed descriptions, the flying fish leaping across the sparkling blue Mediterranean while the seabirds followed the ship; she saw the colourful ports and the strange people. These sun drenched visions kept her warm as the bitter northern winter set in.

Maeve took to wearing Danny’s rough woollen coat around the house. The one he’d been wearing the day they’d met. She told herself that she could feel, as if from inside it all, the strong contours of the muscles of his back and shoulders. She could smell him in the coat. She shivered a little in excitement and anticipation. Each night as she sat by the small fire doing her needlework in the parlour, too grand a name for this pokey little front room, she would dream of Danny, casting him as a swashbuckling pirate or brave naval hero. All of these dreams ended with Danny running up the quay, tossing his seabag aside, grasping her about the waist and throwing her up into the air; then, slowly, gently, allowing her to slide down the facing of his donkey jacket until their lips met and the reunion exploded into a passionate embrace ending with a long kiss as they both, entwined, turned slowly on the slick cobbles of the quayside.

Late one evening she became so distracted by her reverie that she pricked her finger with the needle and looking, discovered that she’d made a hash of the work and would have to unpick the lot and do it all over. She threw a few pieces of coal in the little grate and began again. A small inconvenience when balanced against her vision of their future.

Danny’s next letter arrived postmarked Goa. Danny said that the crossing of the Indian Ocean had been stinking; hot hard work during the days and sweltering sleepless nights with no breeze. Below decks tempers flared and apparently the Chinese cook had taken it into his head to murder one of the stokers with a meat cleaver. Maeve was shocked and worried for Danny.

“All Chinamen are mad.” Danny had written, as if that explained the whole thing, but that wasn’t the end of the story.

Danny had intervened as the stoker ran down one of the companionways with the cook close behind. Danny tripped the cook who went sprawling at the bottom of the steps, dropping the cleaver. There’d been a scuffle for the intended murder weapon and Danny’s hand got a grip first, but his grip didn’t quite close and the cleaver slid through a scupper, tumbling down the side of the ship before sploshing into the sea. The stoker disappeared round a corner while Danny got up and wiped himself off. The cook, thwarted in his murderous ambitions, spat vehemently over the side and fixed Danny with an inscrutable oriental eye; apparently he only had the one, before turning and walking off down the deck muttering violent curses only he and his malevolent gods would understand.

The mate had fined Danny 10/6 for the loss of the company’s cleaver and cancelled Danny’s next shore leave. Apparently the cook was mad, but he was a great cook and the First Mate, looking to cool the whole thing down, decided that on this occasion he’d adjudicate the matter as black and white letter of the law. It was Danny’s hand last on the cleaver, it was Danny tripped the cook. The stoker wasn’t called and nobody wanted to deal with the mad Chinaman.

Danny had thought this grossly unfair and told Maeve so in terms that carried the salty smell of the sea right off the paper.

With his next letter from Singapore his mood had blackened. There were no fanciful descriptions of the foreign and bizarre, no tales of sunlit seas and far blue horizons. Just a withering tirade against the mate and his foreman, who Danny wrote “treats me like a slave; and he’s always pushing and kicking the new hands. He’s a ironclad bastard, if you’ll excuse my French!”

She got only a postcard from Fremantle but Danny promised a long letter from Adelaide. It didn’t come.

By the time Danny’s letter from Sydney arrived Maeve had some bad news of her own for Danny. The financial collapse soon after Danny’s departure to sea had seen Newcastle Breweries sack many of its workers; “last on, first off” had seen Maeve lose her job. Her two elder brothers had been laid off too and the family was struggling on only Da’s wage and the little bit Maeve and Mammy brought in from needlework. The brothers were out every day, trudging up and down the waterfront and the warehouses along the Tyne trying to pick up work. As demand for coal dropped, so too the pits began to put men off and Maeve’s Da hoped he could hang on to his job but it seemed the whole town was now unemployed.

Maeve so needed to talk with Danny. She badly needed his old optimism but she had no idea how to contact him other than through the shipping office down on Tyneside. It was only a mile from her home in Gateshead down to the docks so she walked. When she got there one of the shipping clerks told her that apart from radio telegraphy, which she simply couldn’t afford, there was no way she could contact Danny until he would be almost home, and that might be another three or four months depending on cargo and whether they came back via the Cape or Suez or went across the Pacific and through the Panama Canal. The clerk, seeing her distress, took pity on Maeve and offered, “If you come back in a few days we’ll know which way the ship’s going and you might be able to send a letter “Post Restante” to a port along the way, but the seaman would need to know and pick it up. Do you think he’d do that?” It was the best he could do. Maeve was disconsolate. She thanked the clerk adding, “It’s silly, I’m silly! We didn’t make a way for me to write to him.”

She thanked the clerk again and began the walk home, her eyes filling with slow tears. Suddenly she felt as if the bright future she and Danny had planned was in dire peril. With her out of work she couldn’t continue to put that little by each week. Indeed all her savings were going on keeping her own family ahead of the landlord and the sheriff. Uncertainty began to dog her every thought. She abraded herself for not thinking that, of course, she’d want to write to Danny. “That’s what comes of too much daydreaming.” she thought, as a coolness crept into her and she began to doubt herself, Danny, and the future.