Russian Tea

2006 - Mary Woodward

I remember the story. I think I remember the story. It flaps gently at the back of my mind like a little moth caught in a glass before it is released back into the night air. Maybe I remember enough to write it down, to release it into other people's minds. I play for time; I think maybe I should ring my aunt. She was there. It may have been more than sixty years ago but she has a good memory. She just might have the one or two details which will make it live. But then I pull back. No. She could say it wasn't like that. Not the way you heard. It was this. It was so. And what she says might not help. Might stamp it into oblivion.

I stay in all afternoon, do some filing, prepare a stack of blank paper. The story now and then gives itself a tremor, sends up a signal that it is still alive, that it can be rescued, lifted up. get away from here, possess itself.

Its visual reality deepens. At first it has the appearance of a stylish war movie. Great clothes. wonderful setting. They've even got the hair perfectly right. My mother is twenty three, her dark waves are rolled up and kirbi-gripped in for the long and difficult journey back. She is standing on the platform at Kilfree Junction waiting for the noon Sligo to Dublin train. Her suit is very smart: navy blue wool, it cost her half a month's wages (she is a ward sister in Hackney Hospital) in Oxford Street. She has hardly worn it during the last two weeks on holiday back home on their farm, only a couple of times for Mass and once when she visited the nuns at the convent for tea. Otherwise she has worn the cotton dresses and shorts and blouses now carefully packed in the suitcase at her feet.

She is trying hard not to cry as their father says goodbye to them. Her younger sister Nancy is starting to blink too fast and is talking too much, Their mother never comes to see them off, saying she has to keep an eye on the younger ones but they know it is because it is too painful. The train, hissing like a huge cat, slowly draws in along the platform with the sinister punctuality trains you don't want to catch always have. Noone gets off. Along the platform there are five or six local people but they'll only be going as far as Boyle to the mart.

Their father hands them up their cases. 'Be good girls now,' he says as he always does at the last moment. It is his joke. They are meant to laugh. They manage wobbly smiles, knowing that really he still means it just as much as when they were five and seven. He stands faithfully there and waves as the train moves out and puts on a horrible speed away out of their own landscape.

They fall back into their seats and both of them cry. I wonder why they are going back, to a war, to bombs, to fire, to possible death. Even now, though my intellect knows the reasons - poverty, migration, work - I cannot understand how they could willingly have said goodbye on such a morning, and there was more than one, to their fields, their family, the peaceful cows, the green lanes, the hills, the clear streams, to return to the hell of London. But by Mullingar they have cheered up; Nancy has produced a flask of tea and two little triangles of soda bread and treacle and they are debating whether or not my mother should get engaged to Peter Cleary, who is working in Hammersmith for London Transport. Well before Dublin they have decided that she shouldn't. As the train arrives at Westland Row Nancy pulls out an enamelled compact and a lipstick. She sweeps a little drift of Rachelle powder over her summer hay harvesting brownness, and shines up her mouth with a new coat of Holly Red to take on the capital. She becomes a very young Vivien Leigh in a patriotic movie about brave young nurses returning to their posts.

By now it is early evening; from here on they know things will start to go wrong. There is no other possibility. The boat could be late. Very late. The sea could be rough. It is not impossible the boat could be torpedoed. This marriage of war and nature guarantees crossings full of empty hours of waiting and anxiety. They are used to it. All around them in the bare waiting hall there are other girls travelling back to English employers, and young men in khaki returning to British regiments. The overcrowded air is full of talk and laughter but also the metallic undercurrent of anxiety. My mum is already longing to be back at home with her parents or safe in her room at the hospital, with her navy and white spotted dress ready for the morning, her starched linen cuffs waiting side by side on the dressing table.

Nancy puts her suitcase on its side and sits, very lightly, on it, searching for a cigarette at the same time. There is enough smoke in the air to make the other side of the hall half lost in greyness in the low wattage lighting. She is as smartly dressed as my mother in a black suit with a yellow and black striped silk blouse she bought in Jax at the Marble Arch end of Oxford street. Though she works at a different hospital they meet on their days off to go shopping together. Always they buy things for their next holiday. This will be nice for Higgins' dance or for Mass or Mammy'd like you in this. Then they have tea somewhere and go and see a film. Every week. Sometimes they have to go home in the shrapnel flying around during an air raid. But it doesn't put them off going out.

Eight o'clock, nine o'clock pass; boredom is giving way to real weariness. Then at last there is the ratcheting of bolts being pulled, doors opening, the heavy clankings from the quayside coming in with the cold air from the sea to the end of the Customs hall into which they now push. They take their turn to queue up at one of the trestle tables; their neatly packed things are expertly rolled around and glanced through by a sandy haired man who looks handsomer than he is in his braided cap. Nancy makes a joke about the diamond tiara under her jacket. He winks and then gives her case the same acclamatory chalk tick on the side as her sister's.

'Thank God,' she says as they inch their way on deck with the crowd, dive down the central staircase to the main lounge, on into the Ladies section at the far end where they claim a length of battered maroon upholstery and spread out themselves and their bags. With luck they might hang on to enough room to be able to sleep. There are several girls their own age, some middle aged women with elderly mothers. No babies, thank goodness.

They take turns to take a walk on deck; sailors finish hauling gantries; the engines begin to knock away dully somewhere in the hidden life of the hull. It is eleven and Dun Laoghaire is gone as Nancy takes a last look at the shore pulling away from them.

Back in the Ladies lounge the blue night lights are on, creating a shady indigo quiet.They take off their shoes and stockings, put them tidily behind the suitcases so they will be able to find them quickly. Jackets over them, they fall asleep. It is a rough night. The ship reels like a heavy dancer; it hurls up and down but it knows the steps and they have done the crossing so many times they doze on, while all over the boat sick and nervous passengers cling to the rails, try to reach lavatories or decks before they start retching. Black foam spray hammers the deck and the windows of the lounges like a torrent of deliberately aimed marine venom. At five, still nowhere in sight of land, the weather eases a little. They are awake.

'Jesus, Kathleen, if I don't have a hot cup of tea I'll faint,' says Nancy. They find their shoes, decide to take their cases because it can't be that long before Holyhead surely, and make for the restaurant. There are a few others before them, survivors of the night before, who slept in here, heads down on the tables. At first it seems there is no other life, then a steward appears behind the counter with teapots and jugs, then another with a tray of bread rolls and little saucers of marmalade and margarine. A smell suddenly of hot fat from the galley behind seems to declare they have come through, no more chance of torpedoes, no more bad weather, no more sickening, lurching night.

With their big cups of tea and two little packets of Marie biscuits they sit over by the windows to watch for the Welsh coast. The restaurant fills up around them. At the table next to them, sitting behind my mother but facing Nancy, there is a man in Royal Navy uniform, a lieutenant's dark suit, cap on the table. He too is drinking tea, and smoking, and scanning the oil-grey horizon.

Nancy kicks my mother neatly under the table and gestures with her eyebrows, only a millimetre but her sister doesn't miss it, to look over her shoulder. She does so. He is, of course, extremely handsome: dark brown hair, very blue eyes, an understructure of intelligence in his good looks. However, my mother, while supposedly nearly engaged to Peter Cleary has her mind on an English soldier she met some weeks before in London. So her glance at the sailor is neutral. Nancy is undeterred. She catches his eye.

'Terrible weather.'

'Terrible. but not as bad as at home.'

'Where are you from?'

'Galway. Just outside.'

'We're from the West too. Sligo.'

'The Wild West.'

They all smile at this oh so familiar little joke.

'And where are you two off to?'

'London. We're nurses. Well, I'm a nurse and Kathleen here's a sister,' says Nancy. This pleases my mother who is notoriously proud of what she's achieved. 'And what about you?' Nancy knows he is more than likely to be going to Liverpool, will get off the boat train at Crewe.

'I don't know,' he says but what he means, of course, is I can't tell you.

'We're nursing with girls from Galway. Do you know an Ellen McShane?'

'No.'

'Gracie Tivnan?'

'No'

'Bridget Tansey?'

'No. No. Wait. Bridie Tansey. Not Bridie Tansey? With red hair?'

'She's the staff nurse on Kathleen's ward,'says Nancy with enormous satisfaction that she has been able to produce someone he does know, when there he was so smugly saying no as if it were impossible they could know anyone in common.

And of course at this point he comes and sits at their table. They buy more tea and share out cigarettes. It turns out that his brother was engaged to Bridie Tansey but it finished badly. Holyhead is sighted. He stays with them in the melee to disembark. Customs is faster here in the cold air of dawn and Nancy doesn't crack her joke about the diamond tiara a second time.

James Maguire, as my mother told me he was called, helps them find seats on the waiting train and they sit together as if they've been friends from childhood. He puts their cases up on the rack and then they all settle to watching the waves shoving up at the train as it steams along the embankment out of Anglesey to the mainland.

'You must know where you're off to next,' says Nancy, by now wild with curiosity about him.

'Arrah, Nancy, quit. He can't tell you.'

'I can, I suppose. Part of it. I'm on the Russian convoys.'

'Jesus, that must be cold.'

'Cold's only the half of it.'

They have heard, or read rather, about these convoys. In the East End Churchill's about-turn to support the Russians has gone down well. It is welcomed, a relief to have an ally who seems to be determined to fight.

'What ship are you on?'

'Well now, I can't tell you that.'

'What kind of a ship then? A destroyer?'

'Or that.'

Whatever he was going to join, battleship, destroyer, cruiser, sloop, corvette, he was not saying; but they knew without him telling them what the sea must be like: the Irish sea multiplied ten times over, incandescent with storm and ice even in the summer, darkness all round the clock in the winter months, unending light and nowhere to hide from the Luftwaffe twenty four hours a day in summer.

'Have you stopped in Russia?'

'Once. In Archangel.'

'What was it like?'

'Grim. Air raids all the time. Grand if you like vodka.'

'Do you?'

'No.'

Nancy unclips her handbag. She is so proud of it, a black calfskin clutch with a silver clasp that she'd saved up weeks and weeks for when she first saw it in Dickins and Jones. She would play with its fastening just to draw attention to it but this time she rummages around inside and from the scented tombola of gloves, handkerchiefs, lipstick, powder compact and tube of Silvermints she pulls out a 2 oz bar of Cadbury's chocolate. She snaps apart the squares and puts a small pile in front of each of them.

'There now. Elevenses.'

'We can buy tea at Crewe.'

'Aren't you getting off there?

'No.' He gives in. 'No. Yes. I'm going to London. After that 'tis a mystery. To me as much as you.'

The talk returns to Bridie Tansy and why she and his brother, John, had broken up.

'My parents weren't too keen. And she sensed it.'

'Why not? Didn't they like her?'

'Oh, they liked her well enough.'

'Are you farmers?'

'No. My father's a doctor. And so was my mother before she married him. She's English.'

Oh. They can see now only too well why Bridie, pretty and bright but one of twelve from a tiny smallholding half way up a mountain, had not been suitable. But then, it wasn't his fault, not this James Maguire. Surely he wasn't like that himself? But for the first time the conversation between them stalls. He is a little uncomfortable.

'Is Bridie courting now?'

'She is,' said Nancy with some satisfaction that she could speak of their friend and colleague as a girl who had not been destroyed by being cast off by the Anglo-Irish middle classes. 'In fact she's engaged. To an English pilot.'

There is a silence which says so much for that John Maguire and well done Bridie Tansey. James has the grace to smile in acknowledgement of this.

'I'd better not tell John, He'd be very cut up. He hasn't met anyone else.'

And serve him right, the girls think as would any woman hearing the story. He sees a change of topic would be discreet.

'You're a brave pair of girls staying in London.'

'We've no choice.'

'You have. You could work somewhere else. You could go to America or back home.'

'We'd be bored back at home. There's nothing to do.'

'You're not frightened in the raids?'

'Sometimes.'

'I'd be terrified.'

'But you're all right on your boat in the middle of nowhere?'

'Ah, but we can fire back.'

He buys them cups of tea from the platform stall, while the train waits at Crewe. The few seats left fill up and the entire carriage is packed with a mass of khaki. A few sailors struggle with white canvas duffel bags. They are proud to be seen with him with his nice face and his officer's uniform. Maybe it crosses my mother's mind for a moment that this might be Nancy's destiny to meet this sailor. But, no, the thought of his parents and Bridie Tansey wipes out the possibility before it takes real shape. They are as poor as the Tanseys, No chance of anything. But maybe Nancy is too young to see this. Maybe for an hour or two on that train heading for London she did think Is this him?

Outside Rugby, somewhere, in the middle of the tidily ploughed Midland fields the train stops. You just never knew. Five minutes. An hour. Five hours. No point in even trying to guess. Once, at night, travelling to Holyhead, the train had stopped and not moved for seven hours. There was a huge raid nearby, Coventry or Birmingham, screaming on in the distance, across the sky, like an apocalyptic thunderstorm, infinitely malevolent while they stay jammed together in the dark carriages, trying to sleep and longing for the hiss of steam getting up in the locomotive. Today at least, thank God, it is daylight and it can't be a raid delaying them. The two girls fall asleep, and James Maguire reads the News Chronicle he's bought at Crewe. When they wake up he is doing the crossword. They help him with the clues for the rest of the journey.

'Will you be going to Archangel this time?' says Nancy as the train at last slips through Watford and everyone starts to stretch and find coats, and gather their things together. She says it with no more emphasis than if he'd possibly be staying in Brighton.

'Well, I might. Can I bring you anything back?' he says, equally easily as if he were going to be asked to bring back a stick of rock.'

'What do they have in Archangel, Kathleen, for God's sake?'

My mother thinks hard, It is a chance to give him an address, for them to stay in touch with him. What can they ask for? From Russia? All she knows about Russia is that they eat caviar. No use asking for that. Or vodka. Noone back home in Sligo would give you a thank you for either. And no point in asking for sweets or stockings or perfume. Then she remembers their mother grumbling about how expensive the tea had become in Stensons. They might not have rationing in the Republic but the wartime market has its own equally powerful ways of limiting supplies.

'Tea. You could send our mother some tea. Do you have tea on those convoys?'

James Maguire thinks of the decks of the merchant vessels chained full with fighter planes and tanks and jeeps, and the holds stuffed with ammunition and guns and barrelfuls of fuel. But there was the odd small, slow, stocky ship carrying Empire foodstuffs the Russians asked for too, spices, coffee, and yes, tea. Some tea.

'We might. Give me your mother's address.' He pushes the News Chronicle towards them with the pencil he's been using to full in the crossword. Nancy writes across the top Mrs Scanlon, Clooneigh. near Ballymote, Co Sligo.

'I can't promise but I'll try.'

But as he leaves them when they turn off for the tube at Euston he suddenly sees clearly how young they are, and how far from home, and how vulnerable. And as he goes for the taxi rank, he shouts across to them and laughs, 'I'll do my best about that tea. I will now.'

Months went by, black months of fatigue and destruction. For a while James Maguire steps out of the human reality of this story which takes such an act of will to resurrect; he fades into the distant cold of the Arctic seas. Research cannot tell which ship he was on - HMS Achates, or Palomares or the Lark, the Hardy, the Trinidad, the Matabele, the Bramble, the Bluebell, or any one of all the others, cruiser or battleship or corvette. He could be on one of many Flower class corvettes, really just redesigned whalers with guns, and for some reason all of them named after English flowers: HMS Snowdrop, HMS Campanula, HMS Spiraea, HMS Oxlip, and on and on, a whole vast armed garden of them. Can anything more unlikely be taking on U boats, with only their sinister numbers to mark them?

Other facts are easy to discover. All the figures are there on the cargoes needed to equip an army on the Eastern front: the nearly 8 million rounds of .5Ó Vickers ammunition, and the guns to go with it, the 30,727 miles of telephone cable, the 40,000 tons of raw copper,the thousands and thousands of fighter aircraft and tanks, the 15 million pairs of boots, all that and much more stashed into or lashed onto those desperately slow merchant ships crewed by men who had never meant to sign up for anything like this, the bewildered Chinese and Arab sailors who found themselves in the Arctic storms with the Luftwaffe bearing down at them and the submarines steadfast in the depths beneath them. Somewhere with them, trying his best to fight the unbelievable cold and the lack of sleep and the ever present threat of attack, in a woollen duffel coat and thick long Johns is James Maguire.

The girls return to their jobs and forget about him. They have met hundreds of young men risking their lives one way or another. They don't take any of them very seriously. The holiday before they had met two handsome Americans on the boat to Ireland, who had asked them where they were staying in Dublin so they could collect them for a night out. The Gresham, Nancy had said, knowing that by the evening they would be alighting at Kilfree and, anyway, never in their whole lives would they be able to afford to stay at the Gresham. So James Maguire does not linger in their memories for very long.

Now and then there is an occasional reference to the Russian convoys in the press, reminders that somewhere the Anglo Russian alliance is expressing itself in real terms: allied bullets hit grey uniforms, American jeeps hurtle down Soviet roads, Indian spices in Colonial style tins enliven Red Army kitchen supplies.

What is to be hoped is that he was not with the doomed convoy PQ 17, that he was not on one of its escorts, HMS Fury or Ledbury maybe, or the corvettes Dianella or Poppy, because that would have broken his heart for ever, to have to live with the memory of the merchant ships they deserted, ordered to flee by a high Command unnerved by the possible nearness of the mighty battleship Tirpitz. He'd never forget the overladen lumbering ships, many of them American, left to the enemies waiting in the sky and sea, an abandonment which soured relations between the Royal Navy and the Merchant Marine, and the United States Navy, for years, caused many a fight in harbour pubs, was still causing libel suits in the 1960's.

'Sorry to leave you like this. Goodbye and good luck. It looks a bloody business.'

Signal from Commander Jack Broome, Senior officer of the PQ17 escort.

James Maguire becomes a player in the saddest of sea tragedies, with, incredibly, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. there as an officer on the USS Wichita, as if what happens has not enough power already to catch our imaginations. If James was on one of PQ 17's treacherous escorts, was actually on the Dianella, he survived its reeling decks, the constant watches, the diet of flabby corned beef, to reach Archangel, where he stayed for a cold and dull three months trying to like vodka and making the most of the occasional football match with the local sailors. We know he survived, unlike the seamen found by the Russian ship the Murmantz, a sad wreckage of bobbing orange life jackets among the floating sacks of flour, unlike all the others never found, never even looked for.

Nancy and my mother had two weeks holiday the following winter. The crossing was fine, the delays not as bad as they might have been. Their father, in his best suit of course, met them at Kilfree and carried their cases back across the fields. The younger children ran down to meet them. The Christmas supplies had been bought: jam and a sack of sugar and a tin of biscuits. And at night there was no black-out, not that the soft light of their oil lamp could have been seen too far off.

They have brought a few presents, some hankies they've embroidered with initials, and some comics, and a lipstick for their mother. They hide these in their cases and put them on the top of the wardrobe in their parents' room where the little ones are not allowed to go. There is nothing so wonderful as the first night home and though they could go to a dance somewhere towards Boyle they stay in. Their mother puts on a kettle over the turf smouldering in the hearth. She goes to the dresser for the teapot and cups and saucers. While she is there she says something over her shoulder to them. They do not quite catch it.

'What?'

'And the tea you sent has been grand.'

'What?'

'The tea you sent.'

'We haven't sent you any tea. We can't get tea.'

Their mother points to the back of the dresser. There is a large wooden box behind the jug and the china.

'It arrived last week. I thought you must have sent it through a friend. I didn't know the writing.'

'Where was it posted from?'

'Arragh, how would I know that?'

'The stamps.'

'It had British stamps on. But the box has funny letters on it. Foreign looking.'

'Foreign looking how?'

She brings the teapot over to the fire and fills it with boiling water. She is a little exasperated by all this.

'It doesn't make sense to me.'

'Wasn't there a note or anything?'

'No'.

By now Nancy is holding the box. The Cyrillic does not make sense to her either. This is not so much a box as a small crate. She slides aside the opening slat on the top. Inside it is lined with heavy metallic paper and is almost full of black tea. She sniffs it. The dry leafy fragrance is subtle and even. This is expensive tea. Fine tea. Tea which would grace porcelain with gilded rims, with sky blue cherubs painted among green and silvery foliage, clinking lightly next to silver spoons in rose scented drawing rooms. Tea for another world.

'It's the best tea I've tasted wherever it comes from,' says their father.

For a moment, they, and we, can see James Maguire on the quayside in Archangel. He is talking to one of the sailors on a merchant ship from PQ17, one of the few which did manage to come through, maybe the Empire Tide. They were together in the football team last weekend and have met by chance a few times in one of the dark and festeringly busy little bars which try to serve the whole of Archangel. The sailor is from Calcutta and has worked on the Empire Tide for the past five years. But those were the calm old journeys bringing spices and striped Indian silks to Liverpool He whistles through his teeth with horror when he talks about the catastrophic voyage they have only just survived. Never again, he says, never bloody again. I'm going to stop in Liverpool and get a job on the ferries.

Last night James asked him what the Empire Tide was unloading. Cooking oils and spice. And coffee and tea. For the politicians, he says, shaking his head. James promises him a good price for a small box of this tea. He meets him early in the morning when the quayside is busy but there are not enough Soviet inspectors around to query the transaction. James hands over a couple of notes. With luck he will be leaving port in the next couple of days.

The tea goes into the bottom of his duffel bag wrapped in a towel, The journey is not without its panics and alarms but Dianella makes her way, unholed, to Reykjavik and then back to Glasgow. At this point James thinks of writing a note to go in with the box but he is in a hurry. He has two days' leave and he wants to get to Edinburgh to meet up with some old friends from school. And besides when it comes to it he cannot think of anything to say. Maybe he is too depressed by what he has been part of to want to write to anyone at the moment. Or maybe the girls on the Holyhead boat train are fading from his memory too. All he has is the recollection that he made this promise lightly yet it is a challenge to live up to it. Maybe keeping his word on this will start to redeem for him what has happened to PQ 17, for that moment when, disbelieving, he stood on deck and felt Dianella change course 20' east and move away, upping her knots, like an untrustworthy collie which has turned away from its sheep and fled for home. For the rest of his life, perhaps, he has become the sort of man who never fails to do what he said he'd do, as if he can by that expiate the fate of the twenty five doomed ships they were supposed to protect.

He has kept the address folded up in his wallet. The box is wrapped in brown paper from Woolworths and a piece of string he finds in the wardroom. He finds time to rush into a small post-office on his way to catch the bus and then the tea is safe, on its way to the Republic.

It lasts a good few months even though tea drinking is a day long, night long pursuit in Clooneigh. When my mother and Nancy go back to London in the New Year of 1943 they take some in a large brown envelope and divide it up between when they arrive. It makes fine cups of tea in the cold, early spring evenings and mornings. After that they are at the mercy of rationing for the foreseeable future. They never hear of James Maguire again.

And even as I write he vanishes for a second time, even more completely. Researching this story I check his name on the Internet. 'James Maguire, Russian Convoys,' And, yes, there is a result. But it isn't a man. There is a James Maguire, wonderfully enough, but it is a merchant ship, not a human being. Is that what my mother said? He was on a ship called the James Maguire. Did she misremember? Have I got it wrong? Did I only half listen to her on one of those Sunday afternoons when I'd read the papers and occasionally she would tell me some little memory or another? She's dead now so I can't check. In the end after I have written most of this my Aunt Nancy rings me for a chat. I ask her about James Maguire. but she can't remember him. She remembers the Americans she misled about the Gresham. But James Maguire? Nothing.

But I know this happened. I know what my mother told me. There was a sailor. And there was the box of tea, and it did make its way from the Arctic Circle to the farm in Country Sligo. And in trying to rebuild this little story I have hit, as if it were an iceberg itself, the vast truth, the huge, terrible, undoubtedly real story of PQ 17 and the deserted merchant ships trying desperately to keep up with their trusted Royal Navy escorts even as they sped away from them; and the circling predatory u-boats and planes; and the dozens and dozens and dozens of merchant seamen lost in a sea so cold even the best swimmer had no chance of survival; and, as in all wars, the disastrous orders issued from too far away, in panic or misunderstanding or callousness, and the commanders who dispense death as if human lives were no more than tea leaves in a cup.