Dear Shipmates:
"I
was a deckhand on the Wallasey Ferry in June 1954, just before I
emigrated to the United States.
" I was on my last run from Liverpool to Seacombe. After we
left the Pierhead, I went around to the starboard side where I found
a young girl, crying her eyes out, standing on the buffer and threatening
to jump overboard.
Knowing how difficult was to handle the wooden lifeboat in the tide
and of course being concerned for the girl's welfare, I started
talking to her.
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漏 John Bythell 2001 |
"It
appeared that she had given of herself in the biblical sense to
a Yank, an airman on the promise of marriage and a ticket to America,a
pleasing prospect in the poor, postwar economy of the UK .
Needless to say, no marriage proposal or ticket to America ever
came.
"On
the day that I met the depressed young lady, her English boyfriend
had beaten her up in Liverpool outside Lewis's, when he heard about
the affair with the Yank.
"Well,
I talked her into climbing back inboard, off the bumper.
"
This was an absorbing and lengthy task as you might expect.
"
In the meantime the captain was going crazy in the wheelhouse, trying
to dock in Seacombe, waiting for the forward line to be thrown out.
He was trying to dock between two moored ferries.
He'd cut the engines, the tide would take the ferry backwards into
the moored ferry, he start the engines go forward, cut the engines
again.
Still no line.
" The first mate was shouting over the side, the hawser man
on the pontoon was wondering what was happening. All the while,
I was comforting the maiden in distress on the other side of the
vessel. Then it dawned upon me where we were, I rushed to the other
side and threw out the line. The captain was annoyed at first but
understood when he saw and spoke to the tearstained girl.
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| Liverpool's
waterfront |
"As
it was crew change time, I picked up my bike and walked the girl
home to her house, somewhere in Egremont.
Stories like this usually end by saying, that they lived happily
ever-after. Not so here!. I might have gotten a hug and a little
kiss on the cheek, but I never saw her again.
" If the young girl is still alive, she would be in her late
sixties. I didn't make a formal report of the incident, other than
explain to the rest of the crew the reason for my absence on landing
in Seacombe.
" I did, however, on resigning, receive a wonderful letter
of recommendation in copperplate writing from the Ferry Master,
which I have to this day. Such was the nature of the full-service
given to passengers of the Wallasey Ferries in the fifties.
"Other
full-service escapades to passengers on the longer New Brighton
to Liverpool run, were much, much more personal in nature [none,
in which I was personally involved] and are perhaps left unreported.
"
I resigned from the Ferries and went to America where, after two
graduate degrees, one in Chemistry and one in Business Administration,
a stint in rescuing messed-up heavy construction projects, such
as a large suspension bridge and a seventeen arch dam, I became
a professor of Economics, which I still teach."
听
听
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