Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

  Wonder Cruise

  A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

  Ursula Bloom

  Copyright © The Estate of Ursula Bloom 2016

  This edition first published 2019 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1934

  www.wyndhambooks.com

  Publisher’s note: As this novel was written, and takes place, many decades ago, occasionally terms of the times are used that would not be used today.

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover images © Ollyy / Hank Shiffman (Shutterstock)

  Cover design © Wyndham Media Ltd

  Other titles by Ursula Bloom

  published by Wyndham Books

  Three Sisters

  Fruit on the Bough

  Dinah’s Husband

  The Painted Lady

  Youth at the Gate (autobiography)

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  DEDICATION

  There was a Commander

  and also a Cadet, here’s to

  them. God bless them …

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  PART TWO

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART THREE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Preview: Three Sisters by Ursula Bloom

  Preview: Youth at the Gate by Ursula Bloom

  Preview: Promises by Catherine Gaskin

  Preview: Victoria Four-thirty by Cecil Roberts

  Preview: Wind on the Heath by Naomi Jacob

  Preview: The Print Petticoat by Lucilla Andrews

  Preview: A Shaft of Light by John Finch

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  I

  The extraordinary happenings began to occur in Ann Clements’ life that particular morning in mid-April. It was very warm for the time of year, muggy some people might have called it, but Ann would have described it as being just nice. There was the strangely sweet earth smell in Onslow Square, and a thin veil of green about the grey trees. The birds were singing, too, with a new note, and the men and women in the London streets were selling gay bunches of tulips and gold daffodils, so that everyone knew that it was spring-time. ‘How wonderful it would be in the Mediterranean!’ thought Ann, which was queer ‒ perhaps the first of the extraordinary happenings, for Ann wasn’t the sort of person who thinks about the Mediterranean.

  Ann was thirty-five. What was worse, she looked thirty-five. She had, in point of fact, never been young. She had soft brown hair with little gold threads in it at times, but generally it was knotted back so closely into a firm bun that the gold did not get a chance to show. She had been blessed with a good skin, but she had never done anything to help that skin. It struggled manfully with soft pink roses in the cheeks; it could not do more. Ann’s eyes were grey, and she had soft dark lashes. Her mouth, innocent of lip-salve, was too pale. She was just the ordinary woman you see in any London street, going to business, or coming back from business, and who you know, by her very look, lives an entirely nice life at home.

  Ann had lived a sheltered but somewhat unfortunate life.

  For twenty years she had dwelt in a country rectory where nothing that was in any way nasty ever happened. This had, though she did not know it, been a tremendous disadvantage.

  Her mother had died when she was eleven, and from that day there had ensued a life of earnestness, of zeal, and of praiseworthy though somewhat narrow attempt.

  Ann’s only brother Cuthbert was ten years her senior, and he had gone into the Church as soon as ever he could. He was now comfortably settled in a suburban parish, just outside London. He had an evangelical outlook, and a robust figure and florid countenance. Cuthbert had married a plump and exceedingly worthy wife called Eleanor Higgins, whose family had been chapel but who had turned C. of E. in order to marry Cuthbert. They had one daughter, Gloria, whose birth could only be looked upon as a miracle, seeing that Cuthbert was for ever declaring that marriage had no physical side; she was now nearly eighteen.

  Ann was her godmother.

  Ann had lived all through infancy, adolescence, and early blooming in the country rectory, where nothing ever happened. The red house on the hill was graciously flanked by laurels and yews, which gave it a depressing effect in winter, and a certain sombreness in summer, which Ann’s father thought extremely right and proper.

  Ann could only remember the grinding monotony of the twenty years spent there. The little interests which were so essentially mundane. The hens, who never laid when required to do so by the prohibitive prices of the egg market. The Easter offering, which never came up to expectations. The baptisms and churchings, and the weddings, often of no connection with the baptisms and churchings, and the funerals one after the other. The children smiled upon when born in wedlock, and scowled upon when born out of it. ‘It all seems to be very wrong,’ Ann had been wont to remark, and her father had replied, ‘Yes, you see it is wrong, all very wrong, and that is why one can but frown.’ Which was not quite what Ann had meant.

  Sometimes on a Sunday, when for the third time in the rigorous day she tramped back from the church, which was inconveniently marooned in a muddy field ‒ the original village having been destroyed by fire by some Elizabethan practical joker ‒ she would say to herself: ‘If I live to be seventy, I shall be doing this, I suppose. Tramping to church, playing the harmonium, tramping back.’

  Only fate took a hand. Fate had isolated Ann for twenty years, so that when her father died and she left the village she had, by very reason of her surroundings, grown into a placid, well-meaning young person, who lived a well-ordered but terribly monotonous life. This had not been her choice, but had been her unfortunate necessity.

  Her father’s stipend had been so small that saving had been out of the question. They had no private means, and Ann had found herself in the rather difficult position of being left practically penniless. On the proceeds of the sale of furniture she had come to London to undertake a secretarial course, and had lived for six months with Cuthbert until she would be qualified to earn for herself.

  Living with Cuthbert had been far f
rom amusing, in fact nowadays Ann could not imagine how she had put up with it. It had been even worse than living at home. Cuthbert was arbitrary and dictatorial, and Eleanor was afraid of him. Cuthbert had a horrid time-table to which his house and his parish ran. Woe betide the stranger who inadvertently fell foul of this time-table. He was both punctilious and exacting, and he expected everybody else to order their lives as he ordered his own. He had no patience with novelty or disorder. He classed every individuality as a heretic. Even Gloria, who was only two at the time, seemed to realize that she could not do as she would with her father, and never howled for her own way with him. Eleanor had of course given up trying and was a mere shadow of her former self.

  The time spent in the manse at Balham was disconcerting, and, despite the fact that Cuthbert emphasized that in common gratitude the least she could do was to go on living with them as a paying guest after she had qualified and was earning, Ann went off to rooms the moment that she could.

  ‘Such gross and heartless ingratitude,’ said Cuthbert scathingly.

  Ann worked in an office in Henrietta Street, that street of publishers which lies so close to the great flower-market of Covent Garden. She had been very grateful when the appointment had been offered to her, but that was a long while ago now.

  And during the ensuing years she had grown a little sick of doing the same thing at the same time in the same way. When she had first come to London she had thought: ‘Now this is going to be very different from Wadfield.’ But London wasn’t so very different from Wadfield, at least not the London that Ann knew. The same deadly monotony had encompassed her again, and she had arrived at the conclusion that it encompasses all life; in particular all spinster life.

  And Ann would never marry now. She was thirty-five, and, as I said before, she looked thirty-five.

  She had rooms in South Kensington, just off Sussex Place, and they were ‘nice’ rooms, both cheap and convenient, but again they were dull! Ann inhabited a big bed-sitter, and the bed could be converted into a sofa by day, which she had thought at first to be most ingenious. But it made neither a satisfactory bed nor a convincing sofa in reality. The carpet was tired and worn, the one easy chair had adapted itself to Ann’s frame, so that she could see the vague outline of herself for ever sitting in it. For over fourteen years now Ann had spent the complete twelve months in Onslow Gardens at Mrs. Puddock’s, save for the one fortnight when she took her annual holiday and went to Worthing with Cuthbert and his family.

  Even that was extremely dull.

  They always stayed at the same place in Worthing too, at a Mrs. Simpkins’ on the Parade, which was equally drab. Mrs. Simpkins was only another Mrs. Puddock, and Worthing was only another Onslow Gardens when you came to analyse it.

  Mrs. Puddock was a pale-eyed woman with a large flabby bust, and large flabby hips. She had taken Ann as a favour, for she generally only took in ‘gents’, as they gave less trouble and were not so finicky. It did not do to be finicky over the Puddock ménage. Her arrangements did not bear too close an investigation. There had not been a draught through the house for years, and there was the faintly frowsty smell of stewing tea and of washing up, and of dust that had accrued. The thin hall led to thin stairs, all hung with an impossible paper on the walls, and where the paper was not, there were rather grim pictures of famous generals meeting at different Boer War relievings, and of Queen Victoria in négligée having just learnt that she was Queen Victoria. There was one picture of Princess Mary’s wedding. Patriotic history ceased there as far as Mrs. Puddock was concerned.

  On the first floor was Ann’s room, and outside the window the plane tree in its green-gold brightness. The plane tree meant much to her, for it was her one link with the country. The room caught the sunshine, which in its turn caught the dust, and disclosed much of Mrs. Puddock’s haphazardness. There was plenty of accommodation and space, and a gas fire fitted with a useful ring.

  In the beginning, Cuthbert had approved the rooms, because there was a lithograph picture of the Bishop of London hanging over the fireplace. He felt that Mrs. Puddock must be a good woman if she had a picture of the Bishop of London hanging there. He little knew that this had been obtained in the same way as the other more patriotic engravings, in a job lot at an auction sale. For Mrs. Puddock was not at all a good woman at heart. She was mean and grasping, and Mr. Puddock had had no qualms about departing and leaving her to fend for herself as best she could.

  He had walked out on her one evening when the may was in bud.

  ‘I’m just going round to the “Toy and Hoop” for a quick one,’ said Mr. Puddock (familiarly referred to by his wife as Mr. P.), and she had never set eyes on him again.

  Mr. P. had gone off into the blue; he had in all fairness divided his savings, leaving her half, and where he and the other half had decamped to nobody knew. Certain it is that the ‘Toy and Hoop’ had never seen him, not even for the ‘quick one’.

  Ann, finishing her breakfast ‒ brought up to her on a japanned tray ‒ would get ready for her office, and then she would walk through Church Street to Chelsea Town Hall, where she could catch her number eleven ’bus. On fine mornings she would usually get out at the Ministry of Health, and she would walk briskly up Whitehall, and across Trafalgar Square, and up to the Strand. But to-day she went all the way to Charing Cross.

  The sunshine was very gay indeed, and the houses looked bright and impertinent in the light, and round the column where the great little Admiral stood, the fountains glittered.

  In one of the basins a flower-seller was moistening her flowers. Deep red and full pink tulips, golden daffies in armfuls.

  ‘It’s a shame to go into that dull old office where nothing ever happens,’ thought Ann …

  II

  The office was always exactly the same. You said good-morning to the man in the enquiry office downstairs ‒ Brockman was his name. You mounted the stairs, carefully carpeted in hair cord until you reached the second flight where clients never ventured, and where opulence had descended to mere linoleum. It was quite patchy in parts.

  On the first floor was Mr. Robert’s office, with Mr. John’s alongside, and the outer room where the three secretaries sat. You went upstairs to the second floor, and hung up your things in the derelict little cloakroom, with the tap above the cracked wash-basin that invariably leaked ‒ drip, drip, drip! And the tired towel behind the door which nobody used, for you kept your own in a drawer of your desk and brought it up with you when you wanted to wash.

  You powdered before the mirror which gave such a distorted reflection and which was set over the marble mantelshelf. For once the building had been a private house, and it had never been properly converted from its late-Victorian grandeur. A thin wood partition railed this corner off, that was all.

  By the litter along the marble shelf you could tell which of the other secretaries had arrived. Miss Thomas, if it were a little ‒ a very little ‒ Nilde powder in Rachel. But if Miss Gelding had preceded you, there would be rouge fluttering about, and a liberal supply of Quelques Fleurs, and perhaps a dash of thick red paste where a lipstick had rested.

  Ann, who only mixed rather aloofly with her fellows, knew them in this way. Nilde, reserved, discreetly applied. Rouge, Quelques Fleurs, lipstick in a smother.

  Then you went downstairs and, sitting before your desk, drew the lid off your typewriter and cleaned it ‒ a hateful job! You were all ready to take down Mr. Robert’s letters when he came in. Little Gelding was Mr. John’s secretary. He was younger than Mr. Robert, flighty and bright, and Ann had always been truly grateful that she had been employed by the elder brother, who was dignified and prim (inclined to be irritable at times, it is true), but, as Cuthbert had said, ‘always a gentleman’.

  Mr. Robert was fifty. What was more, he was a sedate fifty. He was punctilious and pernickety as to his correspondence.

  ‘Oh, I could never put up with him,’ little Gelding would say; ‘now Mr. John …’ and she would roll her e
yes round in appreciation.

  For Mr. John was not punctilious and pernickety, and he was not fifty ‒ not by long chalks!

  Having taken down Mr. Robert’s letters and brought them out, and typed them and taken them in again to be signed, the morning would have gone. It would be lunch-time. So ran the day.

  You took down your hat and coat and your umbrella ‒ the umbrella was considered to be an insurance against bad weather, a ruse which did not always work. You went out to lunch at the nice little restaurant round the corner run by two ladies, and on affluent days you had soup and entrée and a sweet; on days when you were not quite so affluent, Thursdays and Fridays for instance, you had just a poached egg on toast, or chips, and a cup of coffee.

  Just sometimes you went there with Miss Thomas, never with little Gelding.

  Little Gelding was mysterious about lunch. There was always some ‘boy’ in the background of little Gelding’s picture. She would prink and perk before the mirror with the distorted vision, and she would give her scarf an extra tie, or tilt her hat a little more, and giggle excitedly. Little Gelding found life delicious, such a joke, and always something more amusing round the next corner. Billets Doux. Assignations. Flirtations. Flippancies. Parties and Palais de Danse. She believed secretly that both Ann and Miss Thomas were jealous of her, but then they were old. Poor old things, she would say to herself. Never mind! They had had their fun, or perhaps they had not had their fun. Much more likely not, little Gelding told herself.

  Ann and Miss Thomas lunched with each other twice a month. At the beginning of the month, Ann paid. Towards the end it was Miss Thomas’s turn to return the compliment. They had entered into this arrangement when they had started their work together in the office, and now, though Ann was quite sick of the whole system, she could not think of a good but polite excuse to terminate the agreement.

  Miss Thomas was inclined to be a little trying, for she was interested in charitable associations, and had always got subscription lists, and raffle tickets that she wanted to dispose of. The subscription lists were all very well, only Ann had not the money to subscribe to them, but she was not at all sure about the system of raffles. Once she had won a yellow silk cushion with a one-and-sixpenny ticket. She had been very pleased about the cushion, for it had all happened at Christmas-time, and, although she did not want it herself, she had been worried to death about a suitable present for Eleanor; the appearance of the cushion had solved the difficulty. She had taken it along to Balham in its tissue wrappings, and there in a fit of truthfulness she had confessed to her sister-in-law how she had come by it.