AllFreeNovel
Share Us
By the time he had that done, his hands were trembling from the adrenaline his body was dumping into his bloodstream. This was it. He had to find the information.
It had to be here. He needed proof.
The first hour passed, with nothing on the first two tapes. He didn’t dare fast-forward in case he’d miss something.
Marek was methodically working through his own stack of eight tapes, two of them carefully set to the side. He had a sheet of paper and was jotting notes in a blocky all-caps handwriting.
Weston slid in the third tape. According to the notes, Frances Sheridan had been the East Dorset wharf master’s youngest daughter, and one of the first women to enter the workforce as part of the war effort, working as an engineer and building ships.
He’d ranked this one highly, because he was hoping that she’d talk about her father, the wharf master.
It started with a bit of murmuring, probably the person handling the recording giving her instructions.
“Fine, fine,” said an older woman’s voice. The audio quality wasn’t great, and her voice was soft with age, but he could hear her well enough. Weston settled in to listen.
I’ll start then, will I? My name is Frances Sheridan. I never married. I’m seventy-five years old. My father was the wharf master, back when there was still good fishing here. Small vessels, the water here isn’t deep enough for the big ships.
She went on to talk about how she’d been the first woman to step forward and offer to go to work, back when only unmarried women between the ages of twenty and twenty-three had been allowed to join. She’d gone to work building war ships. Some of the work she described was that of an engineer, which she acknowledged, though she said she never had a title like that. She was a fisherman’s daughter at heart, and she knew boats, and what the ocean wanted from those who dared to ride her.
Weston forced himself to keep listening, though the tape didn’t have what he’d hoped for. He was nearly forty minutes in before he heard the muffled voice of the interviewer ask a question.
“What do you remember about Poole, what was happening here during the war? What was the feeling?”
There was a beat of silence on the tape before Frances responded.
All I remember of Poole was in the early years. Once I left in nineteen forty-two, I didn’t come back until the war was over. I was here during the blitz, and for six months after. The feeling? We were terrified, losing the war. Everyone knew someone who’d died. We’d listen to the news every night, pray quietly for the men who died in battle, prayed that London would survive another night. Prayed we weren’t next. Everyone knew they’d bombed London, but that wasn’t the only place. Portsmouth, Southampton, Bath, Coventry…they were all hit. This place, our home, didn’t feel safe anymore. When women started packing up their children and heading north and inland, to the country, no one said anything. To say anything would be admitting we were afraid, and admitting we were probably going to die.
There’s one time I remember when a ship docked in the middle of the night.
Weston sat up, then raised his hands, pressing them over the headphones so he wouldn’t miss a word she said.
I was out with Father, helping him. It was late, after dark, but there weren’t many dockworkers left, too many had gone to fight and didn’t come home. The fish needed to be unloaded, nets mended. We worked all night sometimes. America had just entered the war so this must have been February or March nineteen forty-two, and the mood was up that night.
Then this ship comes in.
It was a ship, not a boat. You know the difference? No? Well, it was a ship. Might have been a cruising ship before the war. It was flying a British flag when it pulled into port, but when I grabbed the line I saw one of the crew stashing away a Spanish flag. Spain had remained neutral. Flying their own flag protected them from both sides.
We had no record of it coming in, but I saw my father talking to a London man. You could tell just by looking at him, he was from London. Well off, expensive clothes, but his face was…his face made it seem like he’d been in the mud in France.
They talked, then the man went back to one of the warehouses. It was standing empty, every scrap of material that had been stored inside already sent off to the factories. But this London man went in. He opened the door, and men started pouring out, carrying trunks and boxes of all sizes—a lot of narrow ones. I promise you, those boxes hadn’t been there long, because I knew that warehouse was empty. These men doing the loading, they didn’t look like hands. They were dressed as nice as the London man, but they all looked grim.
Narrow boxes—the kind art was stored in. This was it. Weston pumped his fist once in the air, and Marek looked up. Weston grinned at him, but kept listening.
When all the boxes were loaded, the men went back in, and this time they came out… There was a pause in the tape, and he heard Frances take a deep breath before speaking again. They came out holding the hands of children. A dozen at least. Most too young for primary school. A few older girls, but none older than ten. The kids were crying, and by then some of the men were too. They led them up the gangplank onto the ship. Then one by one, the men got off. The children were crying for their daddies, but the men got off. The first man, the London man, stayed on long enough to speak with the captain. Then he came down, too.
The ship pulled out, almost the moment the man was off. You could hear the children crying until they were hustled inside. I watched that ship pull out and I was crying. Imagining if it was my little brother and sister, and my parents were sending them away to keep them safe. The blitz was over, so we thought things like that weren’t happening any longer.
We’d been smiling and laughing, those of us working that night, but not once we saw those children.
The interviewer spoke. “What happened to the ship, do you know?”
Frances replied, “Esperanza. She was the Esperanza.”
Weston went still. The Esperanza. This was his proof. The Esperanza had docked in England. He could now directly tie the painting that had belonged to the Ellingtons to the ship. But there had been children on the boat too. Weston’s stomach knotted.
She must have been captured by the Germans after she left here. Probably dropped the children and goods off in Wales or Northern Ireland. A week or two later, I saw a notice in the paper that she’d been sunk by an American ship. I never did figure out who the Londoner was, but I told myself those kids spent the war out in the fresh air, on a nice farm in Wales, and that their parents were still alive when the war ended.
It’s probably a bit of a fairytale, but those were the kinds of things you had to believe to get through it.
