FOURTEEN
LEAVING HOME
Florence opened her eyes and lay in her bed for a moment, until the realisation slowly dawned on her that although it was a Monday, she did not have to get out of bed. She smiled an indulgent smile and smugly pulled the thin eiderdown closer around her face, and listened to the sounds from outside her room. Though it was a working day she had given up working, for the time being. Her room on the front ground floor of the house was a mere few feet away from the people she could hear walking along the street, separated only by a wall of bricks, and the thought made her smile. How strange to think that people were walking along the pavement, no more than ten or fifteen feet from her bed. What would they think if they could see through the wall and observe her lying in bed? She grinned to herself and listened to the sounds of the people and the sounds of the house going on around her. Would they know she was still in bed, and if they did, would they be concerned that she had not risen and gone off to work? Well, she thought, that job is gone now, and in a few days she would be travelling back to the north for the last time.
Within a few minutes the novelty of lying in bed wore off, she threw back the bedclothes and swung her legs onto the floor, stretching her arms out luxuriously in the delicious knowledge that she had no work to go to today. It was June, and even at that time of morning it was quite warm in her room. The early morning sun shone on her side of the house, and quickly warmed the whole of the building. She sat for a moment then stood and stepped forward to pull aside the curtains at the window to peer through the small gap she made where they had met in the middle. The sky was clear and cloudless; one or two people were walking along the pavement to their work. She smiled to herself again, and pulled the curtains back together then turned to sit back on the edge of the bed where she pulled on her clothes, then pushed her feet into her shoes which, as usual, had taken themselves for a walk in the night under her bed.
She walked in the silence from her room down the short corridor to the kitchen of the house. Seeing that there was nobody else about in the kitchen she made herself a mug of tea and a slice of bread and jam then returned to her room where she sat at the table and started to eat. The jam dribbled onto her chin and with one hand she wiped it back into her mouth whilst with the other she took up a letter which had lain on the table for over five days since it was delivered. She looked again at the unfamiliar address which was written on the reverse side of the envelope. It was from BFPO Ships and the letter inside was written from her Tommy.
When he had first told her about the postal service which the Army and Navy operated she was astounded, then as the letters started to arrive from various ports of call on his first long voyage, she became more accustomed to their irregular arrival. Like her, Thomas, was not a keen or fluid letter writer, and she often felt she wanted more with ever, each brief letter he wrote. This last one had been from Sydney where the ship had put in for a few days after a time patrolling the western coast of Australia.
During late January of that year she had received his first letter posted whilst the ship had been in dock in Sydney, at a strange place which he had called Woolloomaloo. She struggled for several minutes to get her northern tongue around the strange looking word. Her first thoughts when she read the word was that Tommy was pulling her leg, and that no such place existed. As she had read the letter again and again she started to believe that such a place did exist, and that the ship was tied up at a jetty near to a long pier called The Finger Pier. Again she was sceptical about the existence of the place with the strange name, but with subsequent letters he convinced her it really did exist, and it was the main loading pier for the wool exports from the country. She supposed that the name of the place, Woolloomooloo was connected to this industry.
Once again, she read his brief description of Sydney and the big buildings on the sea front with its warehouses, the new seaman's mission and the grand Custom House. Reading between the lines she had a feeling that Tommy was enjoying the sights of the city more than he was telling her, but she accepted that it was understandable, and accepted too his words for what they were, a short description in his own stilted way. No matter how often she read the letters, which were now forming a small pile since his departure several months before, she felt that something was missing from them. The words told her what he wanted to say, but there were times when she was particularly missing him, that she felt there should be more than he was saying to her. All would be well though when finally they were together once again, and that time was not too far off.
She drank from the mug of tea then replaced it on the table, licking the final drips of jam from her fingers then wiping them down the side of her dress. She finished the letter and replaced it once again in its envelope, placing the envelope on the small, but slowly growing pile, of other letters she had received from him. She pushed the mug to the back of the table then reached over to the far corner to take up a wooden dip pen and a small bottle of ink which stood by a small pile of writing paper and envelopes. She placed one of the sheets of paper in front of her and unscrewed the top off the bottle of ink, moving it carefully out of her reach so that it would not be knocked over when she was writing. She dipped the nib in the open bottle of ink and wrote her address carefully in the top corner of the page, and then wrote, 'Dear Tommy'. At that she dried up, and sat back in the chair and sucked gently on the end of the wooden pen, trying hard to compose the letter. She wanted to say so much but did not have the education to put the words in her head down onto the paper. In the end she wrote to him simply about finishing her job, and her plans to go back to see her parents before going to Liverpool to find out about ships sailing to Australia. It took her a long time to write the two pages of the letter and when she read it through after finishing it she was unhappy with what she had written. It was not a polished piece of work, like she had read in newspapers over the past months, it was not even how she would normally speak. Her frustration boiled as she tried to imagine how the letter would look to him and how stupid she felt that she was not able to say the things in her letter which were in her mind. Never mind, she said to herself, I'll tell him myself when I see him. She folded the two pages together and inserted them into the envelope, sticking the gummed lip of the envelope. Taking a postage stamp from near the envelopes on the table she fixed it to the top right hand corner of the envelope. At least now she had his address, she thought, it looks like a proper letter. Hope you like it my love, she said to herself and kissed it gently before replacing it on the table. She would post it at the main post office in Plymouth later when she went out to the reading rooms to look at the latest newspapers. It was only in this way that she had been able to find out news about the Empire, and in particular Australia and her Tommy's ship, the Powerful. News of His Majesty's Ships was frequently written about in the papers. She followed his progress around the far side of the world quite easily, though at a long distance in time and space.
Rising to her feet she took up the letter in her hand, and found the key to her room on the sideboard against the back wall of the room. Walking into the corridor she turned to lock the door then reached out for her coat and hat which were hung on hooks opposite her door. Leaving the house she found the post box at the corner of the main road and with a swift 'good luck' to Tommy she popped the letter into the red metal box, then turned along the main road in the direction of the Hoe and the seafront at Plymouth. She walked at a brisk pace along the road leading up the slight incline to the Hoe where she stopped. The exercise was doing her a lot of good, just ten minutes brisk walking in the sunshine, feeling the sun on her face and a slight breeze in her hair brought a blush to her cheeks. She suddenly felt good and took off her hat and, swinging it by her side, strode on with the sun in her face and the sea on her right. After a further ten minutes she stopped and turned to look out across Plymouth Sound, the beautiful, seemingly unending expanse of water facing out towards Drake Island in front of her, and Mount Edgcumbe to her right. The sun dazzled on the water and bounced against small waves thrown up by the tide and the numerous boats out on the Sound. Small wooden boats and large steel ships made their way around the waterway, in and out of the harbours and bays. Boats were still strange sights to her, but she slowly grew happy in their presence as they became more familiar. Some of these are Tommy's boats, she thought to herself, and then it suddenly dawned upon her why she had felt so miserable this past few days. She loved Tommy, but she missed him so much since he had left on the Powerful, and every day and all day she was surrounded by memories of him. The sailors coming from the dockyard, the sailors walking along the Hoe, the boats in the harbour, the warships leaving and entering the harbour so gracefully. All of these were a daily reminder of the man she was married to and who now was onboard one of those ships thousands of miles away on the other side of the earth. She needed to get away from the memories until such time as she was in a position to leave this country and see him again. The proximity of the Royal Naval dockyards and the sailors who worked in and around the place was a constant reminder that Tommy was not there. She would go home, back to Bolton. Florence stopped dead in the pathway and abruptly turned towards the sea, almost causing a young man who was walking in the same direction as her to collide with her. He skilfully sidestepped around her, tipping his hand to his hat in a mute apology. Florence smiled at him and said,
'Sorry love, my fault.' He smiled back at her and carried on walking. Florence jammed her hat back on her head, roughly pushing the long flowing black wavy hair back under the rim of the hat, and started slowly and thoughtfully to walk back to her lodgings. Her mind was made up, she would go back to Bolton, maybe get herself a job in Warburton's bakery shop on Blackburn Road; never going back to the mill, she thought. She would find some job or other to earn some money, to augment the savings which she had managed to accrue in the months since Thomas had left. She would work hard to earn and save enough for the passage on the first ship she could find to take her to Australia. Her dismal life in Devonport was over, she was determined; her life was starting a new phase now, she simply needed to find out exactly how much the fare to Australia was, and add a few more pounds to whatever she had so far saved, and then she would be off. The realisation and the decision made her break into a wide smile, and she looked once more across the Sound to the ships, the sea walls, the small boats, the sea gulls whirling in the air above the water, and most of all, the water. She would soon be seeing far more water than she was seeing now, or what she had seen in the past. This would be the blue deep water of the Atlantic, the sea around Africa, the sea close to India and finally the deep blue sea of the Pacific, not the dirty brown water of the Irish Sea at Blackpool or Fleetwood which crashed in over flat loose sands. This would be water full of great sea monsters and adventure, not simply the sea played in by holiday makers from the mill towns of Lancashire, or the gentle people from the southern part of England. In great delight she once again took the hat from her head and this time threw it gently into the air above her head, catching it with one hand as it came towards the earth. A man and a woman who were walking towards her smiled in puzzlement at her obvious joy, nodding to her as they passed. She nodded and smiled back at them. She was going home!
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