I had never been to Leith either, or at least as I pointed out to Alec not to the docks, but I knew where it was and I navigated us there safely along the coast roads through Cramond and Granton and Trinity, braking and surging around the narrow twists and doglegs of the village streets, weaving through crowds of herring wives and, as we drew near the port, rather wobbly sailors newly released on leave. I remembered the name of the shipping company from my daydreaming over the steerage notice in the library last night and we were helpfully directed to their offices by a nautical-looking chap standing on fairly steady legs on the corner of Great Junction Street, whose accent was so much gibberish to me but in which Alec recognized the music of Dorset and of home. We wasted a good few minutes while the two of them reminisced about ‘The Bay’, but at last Alec dragged himself away again.
‘I miss these old Dorset boys,’ he said. ‘And the sea. Perthshire is delightful, of course, but when one has been brought up in sound of the sea it is a wrench to leave it. It must have been something fairly cataclysmic, I imagine, to drag Chrissie and Robert Dudgeon so far from the many bosoms of their families.’
‘Although New Zealand is not short of sea at least,’ I pointed out. ‘On maps it looks as though the tide might wash right over it at the height of springs, although I daresay that’s scale. Number fifteen, you said? Here we are.’
Brunwick, Allanson, the shipping line, had offices which struck a balance between the sepulchral dignity of a private bank and the rather more rakish atmosphere of a merchantman’s bridge during a party. There were a good many clerks flitting about in shades of grey but the panelled rooms were festooned with outdated nautical equipment of a semi-decorative sort and a few rather salty characters could be seen here and there through open doors. Above everything a mixture of lemon wax and pipe smoke gave a spice to the air that no bank ever had.
The desk clerk could not have been more helpful, but it soon became apparent that we were asking the most awkward of questions possible, inquiring about the passengers on a ship which had only left port the day before; in fact, the staff of the office were still referring to the departure time in hours of the nautical clock and would not, we were informed, begin to use the calendar date until the following morning when twenty-four hours had passed and the ship itself had docked and de-docked from the next port of call which was Plymouth.
‘If you wanted to see the passenger lists from last year, now,’ said the clerk, gesturing behind him at a wall of bound volumes with dates stamped in gold on their spines, ‘or ten years ago or even fifty, that would be the work of a moment with the help of a strong lad to lift down the book for you. But yesterday?’ He blew out his breath in a tootling little tune and shook his head. ‘And you’re not asking in an official capacity?’
‘We’re not,’ I told him, ‘but depending on what we find, someone soon might be. It’s best to be honest,’ I said, turning to where I could see Alec squirming beside me; clearly thinking we should have played our cards a little closer to our chests than this, fearful that the clerk would shut like an oyster at the hint of trouble.
The man merely shrugged and scratched at his chin, however.
‘We’ve nothing to worry about here at Brunwick, Allanson,’ he said. ‘We don’t have much to do with agents, and it’s not like the old days when we were our own excise men and our own policemen too. I’ve been forty years with the firm, you know, madam, and it’s changed.’ He settled his elbows on his counter and seemed disposed to launch into a tale. Perhaps even a clerk picks up the habits of sailors after forty years. ‘It was like the Wild West in the old Queen’s day,’ he went on, ‘before these picture passports and all the regulations. Well, that was the war, was that. There had to be some kind of a clampdown for wartime. Then it never really changed back and I don’t suppose it ever will now. So it’s up to the passport office these days to verify identities and make sure that all’s in order. At the quayside, as long as they turn up with a ticket and passport and are sober enough to say their names and walk aboard, we check them off on our boarding list and wave them through.’
‘Well, we don’t think these particular passengers did turn up, sober or not,’ said Alec, ‘but they certainly got a passport and we would make a large bet with our own money that they bought tickets too. Steerage tickets. On Friday.’
‘Steerage?’ said the clerk. ‘On Friday?’ I suspected that he might ring to have us removed on finding out that our interest was in something so lowly as a steerage ticket, but I could not have been more wrong. ‘In that case… and if you only want to see the ticket receipts themselves… that does help a little. They’re in date order – roughly – until we can cross-check the final lists and then we keep them all until the year end and send them to the bindery. But if you know it’s Friday and you don’t mind looking yourselves…’
We assured him that we did not, and although he huffed a little more about the slight irregularity and had to talk himself into it, telling us (as if we did not know) that these were public documents after all and that we were doing no harm, then he muttered for a moment about the Empire and the war and asked himself what the point was of fighting it if we were not now able to live free lives under His Majesty and, eventually, he left to fetch them.
The current records might be what passed for an unholy mess in the clerk’s opinion – he said as much with a great many apologies as he returned – but when one has recently gone through two sacks of burdock seeds with a garnish of horse-dung a box file full of papers can hold no fears and they were, as he said, in roughly date order. I untied the tape holding the file shut and the side dropped down. The early-booked, first class and cabin class tickets on the bottom were stacked in a neat-edged pile but as we got nearer the top towards the last-minute steerage bookings the receipts took on the dishevelled and scraped-together look one could imagine of the passengers themselves. I wriggled a finger into the stack just where the neatness stopped and the crumple began and heaved the top lot out.
‘Last Tuesday,’ I said, reading off the bottom chit, and I began to flick through them until I had isolated the fat bundle for Friday. I halved these and pushed Alec’s portion towards him.
Starting at a steady pace, I worked through my bundle, distraction always threatening – it was of some interest to see how many single men, how many young couples, and how surprisingly many huge families of children had set out on this trip – but as I pondered them I became aware of Alec whipping through his pile, snapping each receipt off the top, no more than glancing at it, and smacking it face-down on the growing stack at his other side. Almost automatically, I began to speed up too; I knew what he was up to. He wanted to be the one who found the prize and, in case he did not have it in front of him, he was ripping through his portion planning to take what was left of mine too. Having two sons for whom small daily bouts of competition were as necessary and as much relished as their four square meals, I recognized this immediately, ludicrous as it might appear, and being only human myself I did feel a pang of irritation when he spoke up.
‘Got it,’ he said. ‘Robert George Dudgeon, Cassilis, South Queensferry One-way, steerage class, paid cash in full.’
‘And?’ I said.
‘And nothing,’ said Alec. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just him?’ I said. ‘No Mrs Dudgeon? Let me see that.’ I snatched the receipt from him and looked for myself.
‘Would she be mentioned separately if she was on his passport?’ said Alec.
‘Absolutely she would be,’ I said. ‘Look at this: Bernard Lessom, Mrs Lessom, and all the little Lessoms down to Margaret Ann 15th May 1923 – imagine setting off with a babe in arms. Alec, if Chrissie Dudgeon was ever planning to go her name would be here.’