The Golden Lion Read online

  PAMELA HAINES

  THE GOLDEN LION

  Contents

  PART ONE 1916 – 1935

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART TWO 1939–1961

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Prologue

  The Lusitania

  May 1915

  A green cliff of water, towering. It rose. Higher, higher. Her hands were pressed into her bulky life-jacket. Mamma, help me! Seconds only and it came towards them, rearing, bringing with it bodies, debris, broken lifeboats. Nearer and nearer, higher than ever, crashing down on to the deck. Smashing into them, frothing and bubbling as it swept up her eleven-year-old body.

  Her buttoned shoes were torn from her feet. Down now, down, down into the blackness. The weight of the world, of the whole ship, on her head.

  Then, as suddenly, she was pushed up and up. She was fighting again. Thrashing. Up into the sea. Above the sea.

  At first it was darkness. Sacru miu Gesù – Mamma, help me! Trying to call out. No sound. Her mouth full of water. Bodies thrashing around her. Drifting wood, chaos, moaning, weeping. Such a weeping and wailing. A man beside her, floating dead. She was with others yet utterly alone. Sunlight, high above them in the afternoon sky.

  Then she heard the voice:

  ‘Maria, hold on, Maria.’

  And saw, coming as if from nowhere – his face. A face she knew and trusted. The face of certain rescue.

  Five days ago in New York, standing amongst the crowd at Pier 54 and waiting to go on board, she had been happy. The Lusitania. Why, it’s as tall as a hotel, she had thought. A floating hotel, six storeys high, rising out of the water.

  The bustle, the clamour, people waiting to wave goodbye, hawkers selling miniature Stars and Stripes and Union Jacks – photographers, ciné-camera crews. All that noise and excitement, and I’m part of it, she’d thought proudly. The loading on: luggage and more luggage wheeled up the gangway, the scores of hat-boxes and cabin trunks piled dizzily on the trolleys. And some of it is ours, mine and Mamma’s.

  Five years ago, arriving in the States from Sicily, their possessions had come wrapped in cloth and sacking and tied with string. Now for this journey she had all these dresses and skirts and shoes, thanks to Mr and Mrs Ricciardi. Everything was thanks to the Ricciardis. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she had said and so had Mamma.

  But Mrs Ricciardi told them it was nothing, nothing at all. It was just so that Maria might feel at home with the other children. For they were to travel first class, as did the Ricciardis and their four children and nurse, Gina. Mamma must be near at hand always to look after the baby, Ettore. Mamma did anything Mrs Ricciardi asked. All she wanted was to please her. Maria felt the same.

  Happiness was America now. It was New York and living with the Ricciardis instead of in a tenement. It was the change in their lives from when Mamma had been a kitchen helper and then done washing and sewing for Mrs Ricciardi. And from before that when Papa had been sick from a bone disease, and dying. Days of being so poor they wondered whether tomorrow would happen or who was to take care of Sicilian immigrants who fell on hard times.

  The change had come about because only Mamma could stop little Ettore crying. The youngest Ricciardi child who’d cried day and night almost from birth, who refused food and grew peaky, who it seemed might die. Then one day in the nursery, Mamma had held him – and at once he had stopped. The next time, the same. For her, he smiled. For her, he gurgled. He ate, he laughed.

  And it was because of that, Maria stood today with Mr Ricciardi on the promenade deck of the Lusitania, in her new white boots and her cream light silk coat, her dark curling hair tied up in a blue satin bow. She didn’t look (Mamma said so) like a poor immigrant, but a rich little Sicilian-American girl. The Ricciardis were to spend one year in England. He was to set up a new office for his bank, Sacco’s, in London, and Maria and her mother, as part of the family, were coming too.

  Just then, a man holding a copy of the New York Tribune touched Mr Ricciardi on the arm. One page of the newspaper was folded back. Pushing it under Mr Ricciardi’s nose, he pointed to a paragraph bordered in black.

  Notice! Travellers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or of any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travellers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk. IMPERIAL GERMAN EMBASSY.

  ‘Had you read this?’

  ‘I had,’ Mr Ricciardi said curtly.

  ‘And you’re not worried?’

  ‘I am not, sir.’

  The man moved away. And then at last the all ashore gongs went. They were more than two hours late leaving. Three blasts of the horn, so loud she had to clap her hands to her ears. The crowd on the pier cheered as they moved. Confetti was thrown. Alphabet flags streamed from the masts. As the boat slipped past the Statue of Liberty and out through the Narrows, the sun broke through, glinting on the scummy water. Seagulls hovered round the hot black smoke from the funnels. The drizzle and stickiness earlier had made Maria’s blue satin bow limp. As she stood at the rail, it flopped forward heavily, working loose.

  Excitement and exploration took care of the rest of that day. She began by sliding along the greeny-grey linoleum of B deck corridor. She was able to get a good run until she collided with a steward. She was wearing her second best boots: they were more worn and slid better. When she thought she might lose her balance she clung to the round mahogany railing. Another delight was the elevator that went up and down between decks, from the Grand Entrance to the dining saloon. When she saw it almost full, she would rush along and squeeze in. Sometimes she stared at the people but when one woman said ‘You’re a rude little girl,’ she was surprised. She had only been curious.

  Mr and Mrs Ricciardi had a suite on B deck: day room, bedroom and bathroom. Gina, the nurse, slept nearby with Serafino and Gabriela and Franco. Maria and Mamma’s room had a large brass bedstead and a small cot for Ettore. All the furniture was bolted to the floor.

  When Ettore cried the first night, Mamma was able to stop him. Maria remembered overhearing Mrs Ricciardi in New York telling her friends, ‘She’s just wonderful, this woman. Speaks only a few words that aren’t Sicilian – but children, well, she’s only to look at Ettore and he’s quiet.’ Then later: ‘Yes, we’re taking her along. I don’t fancy a year of hired nurses.’ The wonderful thing was the way the Ricciardis had made Maria feel wanted too. Sending her to a good school (that had been hard, real hard at first), treating her almost like one of theirs. For over six months now the Ricciardi chauffeur had collected her when school came out.
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br />   The Lusitania sailed on Saturday. By the Sunday evening several of the children in first class were seasick – one of them actually vomiting in the dining-room and having to be removed in a flurry of warm water and damp cloths. As she lay with Mamma in the big bed, Maria felt the slight pull and heave of the boat. There was a smell too of paint mixed with seawater – it should have made her feel bad with its memories of that other terrible sea voyage. More than six weeks crammed into the bottom part of a cargo ship, Palermo-Genoa, Genoa-New York, tossed about, awash with vomit. Hunger, sickness – nearly everyone had seemed to be ill. If there was a doctor she never saw him. Six years old, she had thought the journey would never end. It became her life. She was frightened she would never know another. And then when they had at last arrived – she didn’t want to remember now, what that arrival had been like.

  Most of the time on the Lusitania she was free to do what she wanted except that she must spend two hours a day on her studies, including lessons in correct Italian (the Ricciardis’ idea – although they were not being too strict about it on a sea voyage). But when she went along in her blue dress with the red bands, thinking she might play with the other children, they’d already made a circle that didn’t include her. It was no better when she wandered down to second class although there were many more children. She talked to a Canadian boy whose lumberjack father was coming over to join in the War. But the next time she saw him, he was with a group and didn’t seem to know her.

  Gina, the nurse, who had never been on the sea except for a trip round the bay, became very sick which meant a lot of extra work for Mamma. There she was, in the children’s dining saloon, holding her own with some very superior nurses. Pushing Serafino and Franco around and seeing they ate up, answering any criticisms with: ‘What you look at? You know Signor Ricciardi in New York, very fine family? You don’t? Then why you no shut your mouth?’ Maria was proud of her – how not? She loved to see Mamma fighting back (where would they have been without?) but at the same time couldn’t help feeling a little ashamed of this stout woman in black, without a proper nurse’s uniform.

  She hated her shame. To please Mamma, she tried again to play up on the boat deck. There was one girl, frizzy hair tied with a pink and white striped ribbon, nose tilted up like a pug dog’s. She was accompanied always by her younger brother. ‘Tell me, hokey pokey,’ he said to Maria, ‘what is that language you speak with your Mamma?’

  Perhaps the Ricciardis had some idea she wasn’t getting on with the other children, because next morning they invited her into the Palm Lounge where they bought her a strawberry ice cream. At a nearby table a man was explaining in a loud voice how he walked round the deck each day to keep fit. ‘Six times equals four miles,’ he told his companions. Mr Ricciardi asked her, ‘Is that ice going to spoil your dinner?’ but Mrs Ricciardi interrupted, ‘Nothing spoils Maria’s dinner.’ It was just then, as she was scooping up the last melted bits at the bottom of the silver cup, that a man stopped by their table. Dressed in a light check suit, he had receding sandy hair which grew thick at the sides. His expression was serious, but his face looked as if it preferred laughing.

  ‘Eric Grainger … I’ve spoken to a number of persons over the last two days – and I wonder if you’re as concerned as I am that there’s been nothing you could call lifeboat drill since we came on board?’

  ‘Right,’ answered Mr Ricciardi. ‘But I don’t think –’

  ‘I do,’ Mr Grainger said, ‘and what my thinking tells me is that we’re in a very dangerous position. You’ll have noticed they don’t black out the portholes properly? We’re at war with Germany even if you Yankees aren’t, and these waters are the war zone. U-boats – there’ve been rumours, you know. And some have received rather odd warning telegrams.’

  ‘That’s correct, sir,’ Mr Ricciardi said. ‘I had one myself.’

  ‘And it didn’t frighten you?’

  ‘It did not – there’s always someone wanting to scare the hell out of you. There was a warning in the newspapers too, but the Captain’s British, he’s experienced, and he’s been instructed, I guess. If he hasn’t fussed us with lifeboat drill then I reckon we don’t need lifeboat drill.’

  Mr Grainger didn’t seem put out. He just lifted his hand in farewell, then moved on to the next table. Mrs Ricciardi said: ‘Don’t you listen, Maria. Don’t you let them scare you.’

  They stood up to go. Mr Ricciardi said, ‘Somebody ought to put a stop to that guy. Going around scaring the wits.’

  In the evening it was lovely and sunny and she tried to play medicine ball with the usual group, but the boy just called her ‘hokey-pokey’ again. She thought: I’m not going to cry.

  ‘I don’t want to play stupid games anyway,’ she said, leaving them. ‘I’ve got friends that are grown up.’

  It was as if, because she’d said it, she had to make it come true. The next day was sunny. She didn’t stay up on deck, but wandered about. She went into the lounge on D deck which she liked best, with its damask sofas and marble fireplaces and lovely domed ceiling. She saw the man from yesterday, Mr Grainger, on one of the sofas, and opposite him a young dark-haired man, sitting on the edge of his chair. She sat down on a smaller chair near them. The young man didn’t look up but Mr Grainger glanced over, eyebrows raised in half recognition.

  ‘I came through Canada quickly,’ the young man was saying. ‘I’m raring to have a go at the Hun. You can tell me, perhaps – England, how is she? Down at all? I mean, it hasn’t gone like it should. All over by Christmas –’

  ‘I don’t like the way they’re dug in,’ Mr Grainger said. ‘It’s too static, is the trench system. Give me an open battlefield every time. Cavalry charges, even bows and arrows.’

  ‘Do you know the States at all, sir?’

  ‘My first visit. I’ve been to the nickelodeon. A few New York sights, but otherwise strictly business.’

  ‘And what is that, sir?’

  ‘A foundry in Middlesbrough, Yorkshire. Lately we’ve been interested in, and interesting to, the aircraft industry. I’m not giving away secrets when I say we’ve a casting process could help them a lot. Packard … I’ve been seeing them with a proposition which excites them a good deal. Let’s say, the visit’s been worth my while.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’ll have to be off … I’ve liked talking to you. I’ve one son at the front already. I know how you feel.’

  He stood up to go. As he was about to pass Maria, something came over her. She thought afterwards, I don’t know why I did it. Out shot one of her legs so that he half-tripped, reached for the small table, fell against it, and righted himself. He turned to her.

  ‘Gee,’ she said. ‘Gee, I’m sorry, mister.’

  ‘So you should be, little lass. So you should.’ And patting her on the head, he walked away.

  Just before lunch she overheard the man they called Staff Captain Anderson asking passengers if they’d care to contribute to the ship’s concert on Thursday. ‘Where are all our Clara Butts and Carusos?’ But no one could be persuaded. ‘It’s the same in Second,’ he said. ‘I shall have to try steerage. A colourful lot there.’

  She ran after him, ‘Mister, I’ll sing. I don’t need a piano, I’d really like to do that, mister.’ The officer seemed pleased. He wrote down her name and the number of her cabin. She told the Ricciardis and Mamma that she was going to sing in the concert. ‘This ship’s officer asked me to.’

  Afternoon now, and she still had all this energy. Gina was as seasick as ever and very weak. The ship’s doctor was to look at her. Mamma, very busy still, made Maria promise she wouldn’t get into any mischief.

  When she’d watched the waves a little and then ridden three times in the elevator between the first class lounge and the dining saloon, she went back to her old game of sliding along the linoleum, on C deck this time. Hand out, ready to grasp the shiny mahogany rail, a small run, a little push and, I’m flying!

  A door opened just as she came to a halt, grasping the
rail. A voice behind her said:

  ‘It’s our little tripper, isn’t it? You all but had me over again.’ She looked down at her boots. He went on: ‘Don’t you have anything to do but try and kill off elderly passengers?’

  ‘Mister, I’m sorry. I sure am sorry.’

  ‘What do you reckon we should do about it?’ He took her arm. ‘Come into my parlour, as the spider said to the fly. No, don’t look puzzled – it’s a rhyme, that’s all. I’m inviting you to come and see my sitting-room. I’m lonely today. I miss my children.’ When she hesitated: ‘I shan’t eat you. At least, not till dinnertime.’

  ‘No, thanks, mister. I guess I won’t.’

  ‘Do I look like a spider?’ He said coaxingly, ‘Come on, there’s a kind little lass. I’ve a phonograph. And some brand-new ragtime records.’

  She felt silly that she’d held out because really she wanted to see inside everyone’s cabin. He rang for a steward: ‘I’m going to get you a lemonade.’ Then as she sank into a big chair, ‘Now tell me who you are so we can be properly introduced. My name’s Grainger.’

  ‘Sure, and you’ve a foundry and you’ve been in the States about a piece of metal and you’ve a son in the War –’

  He smiled. ‘Eavesdropping and tripping. What a cheeky one … But I can’t say “lass” all the time. What do they call you?’

  ‘Maria Verzotto, mister.’

  ‘Not a little Yankee then, but an Italian?’

  ‘No, I’m not, I’m Sicilian.’

  ‘Italy, Sicily … The same, aren’t they?’

  ‘They are not, mister.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I understand … But you live in the States?’

  ‘Since I was six years. I’m eleven now. I didn’t have one word of English when I came off the boat. But I learned real fast, didn’t I? What Mamma and I talk, that’s Sicilian … I’m going to sing in Sicilian tomorrow night, at the concert.’

  ‘Are you now?’

  ‘I’ll sing a lullaby that Mamma sings to Ettore. That’s the Ricciardis’ baby.’ She was finding it easy now to talk. The lemonade arrived. She sipped it and looked about her. His room was like hers and Mamma’s except for a red bedspread and carpet instead of gold.