step with poor Abel Cormack.”
“How far up the staircase have you gone?” Jess wanted to know.
“Not past the fifth or sixth step with anybody, I suppose.”
“Perhaps you should get in some practice,” Jess suggested wickedly. “I’m sure Ken MacGovern would be willing to help.”
“No doubt,” Sarah agreed wryly. “However, I’m promised, and I’ll keep that promise. There’s too much hurt taking any other path.”
“Climbing somebody else’s staircase,” Jess nodded, “but my word, you’re certainly going to have to gallop up Abel Cormack’s staircase when we get to Lyttelton.”
“Yes, I’ve been thinking of that,” Sarah replied, and a shadow seemed to pass across her eyes.
By morning the ‘Haldia’ was passing to the south of Ireland. After a disturbed night, several of the Irish passengers, the Gordon sisters among them, gathered at the weather gunwale to stare forlornly across the wild sea at the dim purple hills on the horizon.
“I never thought I’d see that land again,” one of them commented in a voice weighted with doubts.
“You’re not seeing much of it now,” another pointed out.
The strain on all their faces had little to do with seasickness any longer. They were all wondering if they were doing the right thing, giving up the poor but familiar homes that they knew, to seek something better in a strange land on the far side of the world.
“What a lot has happened to us since we left,” Sarah said. “So much, and so new to us.”
Sixteen
She made the same observation to Angus MacGillivray when she collected the breakfast for little Phyllis.
“You’ve had no chance to get bored so far,” he told her. “but things will change from now on. We’ll have ninety or a hundred days of the same thing day after day, except for the changes of weather.”
“I think I’ll have enough to keep me occupied,” Sarah relied with a weary smile.
“The ordinary passengers, especially the ones in steerage, won’t,” he said. “You wait till the boredom begins to affect them, the confinement, and the lack of privacy. The constables’ll have their hands full sorting out the squabbles.”
After breakfast, as she hurried toward the hospital flat, Sarah noticed that there seemed to be a great deal of activity up in the rigging. The boatswain himself was up there, the first time she had seen him above the decks. Ken MacGovern was standing nearby, his head back, following their progress.
“Is something wrong?” she asked him.
“We think so, but we can’t find it,” he answered worriedly. “It’s probably nothing important, but there was a frightful bang from up there somewhere, when the wind hit us last night, and we would certainly like to know where it came from.”
In the hospital flat Honora Mabon was trying to help Bridget Earnshaw with her poor, sickly, little mite. The baby had four filled breasts to choose from, but would suckle very little from any. Honora had brought her youngest into the hospital flat with her, a lusty lad who obviously took after his father. Bridget was feeding him, rather than her own child, just to reduce the uncomfortable pressure of her milk.
“It’s either a feast or a famine with me,” she observed ruefully. “Where before I didn’t have enough milk, now I have too much. Do you think Doctor Reade will come and look at little Matilda again? It’s not right for her to be refusing the breast so much.”
“Yes, of course,” Sarah said reassuringly. “He’s been in here often to see her. He’ll come again soon.”
The doctor, she knew, accompanied by the matron, was making his rounds of the ship, checking on all those who were still keeping to their bunks, or making hurried visits to the gunwales. He came to the Earnshaw baby twice as often as he visited anybody else, a measure of his concern. Sarah, like the young mother, was fearful that there was little he could do. Little Matilda might not be long for this world.
In other parts of the ship the doctor and Matron Greeley had their hands full with a relapse of the influenza that most folk thought they had finished with. Apparently their bouts of seasickness had weakened them, and brought it all on again. The matron was busy all day carting bed pans to one place after another, where people were too weak to leave their bunks.
Jess, in the great cabin, was having a much happier time. Only two children, both from the Plymouth contingent, had still to report for school, and the arithmetic testing had been completed for more than sixty keen students. School on the ship, especially the way Gilbert Inkster ran it, was much more interesting than any of them had known in the strict and bleak schoolrooms ashore.
Gil’s way of testing the children to find what standard each had reached, made it much clearer to them what they were supposed to be learning, and therefore trying harder made much more sense to them. Instead of the black looks they were accustomed to when they made mistakes, in some cases even a beating with a cane, a leather strap, or the back of a hairbrush, Gil’s response was a patient smile, and some help with the corrections if need be. Corrections he did expect though. Nothing was ever left wrong, if it was known to be wrong.
Behind his back the children called him Gil; something he could not help but overhear in the close confines of the ship. They were copying Sarah, of course, but not Jess. Never Jess. He was Mr Inkster to her under all circumstances, until such time as he might give her permission to call him Gil. Why this should be so, she couldn’t explain. She had never before had any hesitation in using some quite horrific nicknames for some of her previous teachers. It just seemed right that he should be Gil to Sarah, but Mr Inkster to her. For all of the children he was certainly Mr Inkster, or sir, to his face.
The arithmetic tests had been followed by reading. Those who could read well were soon sorted out. Gil or Sarah heard them reading aloud from the Bible, or from a book by a Mr Hodgkinson, ‘A Description of the Province of Canterbury, New Zealand’. Both books were well thumbed, the Bible having been aboard since the ship was built, and the Canterbury book for more than ten years.
Some ragged newspapers were a little more up to date. Copies of ‘The Lyttelton Times’ and ‘The Press’ had been bought during the ship’s previous call at Lyttelton, and were less than a year old. The odd thing about them was that some of the news in them was much older. Items of British news had been sent out to New Zealand, and were three or four months old when they were printed. Then the newspapers were taken back to England, and now, nearly a year later, the news was on its second trip out to New Zealand.
No matter how old, anything about the Canterbury settlement, Lyttelton, Christchurch, anywhere in New Zealand at all, was avidly read by all those who could read, and read aloud to all those who could not. Captain Hedley had a small library of books that had been published in the last twenty years, and while some of the information in them no longer applied, anything was better than nothing. There was a great hunger for anything that could be learned about their new homeland.
Suitable reading for those who were still learning was much more difficult to come by. The main book for reading instruction and practice was still the Bible. Gil had some books of fairy tales and legends, but they were full of long and difficult words. Items in the newspapers were often easier, because the editors knew that many of the people who bought their papers were not very good at reading, and were likely to give up trying if there were too many hard words to decipher.
Again, much use was made of the slates, and Gil and Sarah wrote lots of little stories and shipboard news items on them. They used only short and frequently used words, so that the learners had some chance of stumbling through them without losing the thread of what they were reading about. Once they had a reasonable supply of slates ready, Jess, Charles, and several other of the better readers were able to help by hearing the learners. Those learners were by no means just the smaller children. Several were older than Jess.
With the reading program started, writing and spelling were introduced, again using the slates. Scho
ol would have been almost impossible without those slates. They were used for almost everything, because there was nothing else to write on. Paper and ink was far too expensive to waste on lessons. The slates, thin, page-sized slabs of stone, with a wooden frame around the four edges, were written on with slate pencils, small sticks of a type of concrete slightly less hard than the slate. The pencils left light grey marks on the dark grey slate. They could be cleaned off again with a damp cloth, ready for whatever was to be written on them next.
Mr Rutherford had some paper, big sheets of newsprint which had been purchased with some of the passengers’ comforts fund. He also had a supply of ink-making materials, burnt bone, carbon black, and spoiled gin. Water-based ink would have been cheaper, but was no good on the cheap newsprint as it would run into the grain of the paper making all the letters ragged and smudgy.
He set himself up at the far end of the long table, and began to print by hand the first edition of the ship’s newspaper. He was the publisher, the editor, the reporter, the printer, and the distributor all in one. There would always be only the one copy of each edition, which would be displayed firstly pinned to a board in the great cabin, and later, on the same board, it would be sent to each of the steerage compartments in turn.
Some of the other passengers