Out of India Read Free Page A

chairs swinging out into space.
    My father was gone. Sometime in the stir and haste of the moment he, with other adult males, had been led away. Was there some logic applied to quitting a ship that decreed the break-up of families? I could not understand this dividing of our paths. Now more than ever I needed that tall figure, that paterfamilias. I renewed my grip on my mother’s hand. We – ‘wives and dependent children’ – were herded to a bay in the deck-rail where a bosun’s chair hung out from a cantilevered steel beam. How did one connect that skimpy canvas contraption on the end of a rope with the necessity of escape and safety? Anxiety made my brother’s face look strained and white in the moonlight, startlingly white, but he would not cry. My senior by a couple of years, he felt an elder’s responsibility. He had a boil on his bottom. As for me, if only I remained clutching my mother’s hand I was secure.
    A lifeboat was bobbing below, too close under the hullto be seen from the deck. Oars splashed awkwardly in inexpert hands. Male voices rose from the lifeboat, unnaturally hearty, ringing with false confidence, contradictory voices used to command but well out of their element now. A woman climbed over the rail and set herself gingerly on a rope ladder, descending very carefully until only her fastidious wrinkled forehead was above the deck. A child was quickly tied into the bosun’s chair and dropped from sight like a stone.
    In the mild night the evacuation was going quickly and smoothly but the plates of the ship were groaning and the stern was beginning to hunker down like an exhausted dog.
    â€˜Hurry, for goodness’ sake get a move on,’ came a voice from below, ‘or this damn boat is going to squat on us. Double up the kids in the canvas chair.’
    Along the deck a fat little boy, bigger than my brother and just old enough to start to form some cloudy notion of the ultimate danger, had changed from subdued snivels to raucous hiccups of fright. My brother was being settled into the chair when an exasperated sailor, unnerved by these squalls, grabbed the fat kid and thrust him onto the lap of my much smaller brother. Then down they went, my brother’s pinched face peeping from behind the enveloping suet of puppy fat. My mother and I followed, her arms tight about me.
    The last passenger came unsteadily down the rope ladder and a voice cried, ‘Leave off there, this boat’s full now.’ Oars were hovering above the surface of the sea and the lifeboat was kicked away from the scales of the rusty hull. Out from the shelter of the ship we sat on the swell, waiting for a signal from above that all was clear to pull away from the drowning ironwork of the stricken ship. On a bench in the lifeboat my brother and I crouched under the lee of my mother’s body, her arms hugging around our shoulders. My brother looked at the plump brat still trying to ride hishiccups and whispered with tears in his own voice, ‘He sat on me and burst my boiler.’
    *
    A brilliant night, out under the stars. Mythological wonders of gods and heroes were written on the palimpsest of the sky; I looked up with eyes new to this creation and felt instinctively the power of that divine writing that had suggested such a persuasive mystery to Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, Greeks, Polynesians, even to those weird blue men tending the ancient boulders of Stonehenge. The cold nip of the night gave a polish to the air, making those lights of heaven sparkle. We were alone now. The ship had gone, a quiet demise, slipping almost unnoticed into the confraternity of the deep. We held position according to the wheeling arms of the Plough and the certainty of the Pole Star. Somewhere not far to the south was Donegal or the coast of Northern Ireland. If we pulled steadily towards the east Glasgow awaited us. The rowers put their backs into the oars. There