Listen to the Moon began, in a way, a very long time ago, in 1950. Clare, my wife, was a small girl of eight then, living in a large rambling house called Silverbeck, very near to where London Airport is now. She had chickenpox. In those days, children who caught chickenpox or measles or scarlet fever were often isolated, to prevent other children from catching it. (I remember spending two weeks in my boarding-school sanatorium myself, in bed with the measles. Good fun it was. No lessons!)
Anyway, Clare was at home with her chickenpox. She was kept in a guest room down a corridor, away from everyone else, not allowed to play with her sisters. Her meals were brought to her, but otherwise, the days were long and tedious, and she soon became bored. In the room, there was an old chest of drawers, and one day, because there was nothing else to do, and she’d already read lots of books and done lots of drawings by then, she thought she would see if there was anything interesting hidden away in it. There were socks, lots of them, and shirts and pillows – all her father’s. She rummaged through, and suddenly came across something at the bottom of the drawer. A large medal, not shining silver or brass, but a rather dull grim brown. She picked it up. It was made of a heavy metal of some kind, and cold to the touch. It wasn’t at all like other medals. No king’s head, no laurel leaves, no ribbon. Instead, there was a strange image on it, in relief, which was difficult at first to make out. And there were letters and words too that she couldn’t really understand. But the image was beginning to make sense to her. It was of a great ship sinking beneath the waves. There were people drowning in the sea; and on the deck of the ship, she could clearly make out shells and guns. She turned it over in her hand. On the back, the image was even more horrifying. A queue of people were lining up to buy tickets, obviously for the voyage on the ship. But the man selling them the tickets was a skeleton, his head a skull. Upset, afraid, Clare put it back in the drawer, and didn’t look at it again. It was too sad, too gruesome. But she did not forget it.
Years later, quite some time after we were married, her father died, and she discovered he had left her this very chest of drawers. Opening the drawers, she discovered that all the clothes were gone, but the medal was still there. She remembered it instantly and showed it to me. LUSITANIA, the letters read, and then there were some words in German I did not understand. I knew there had been a huge ship, a passenger liner, of this name sunk in the First World War. But that was all I knew. The images on the medal haunted me, just as they had haunted Clare when she was little.
Over the years, entirely because of this medal, I began to piece together the story of the sinking of the Lusitania. The more I found out about it, the more the thought of all those innocent families who lost their lives – over a thousand of them – and the suddenness of the sinking horrified me. This great ship, struck by one torpedo from a German submarine, went down in just eighteen minutes after a huge explosion. The Titanic had taken over three hours to sink. I happened to go many years later to a book festival in Kinsale on the south coast of Ireland, close to where the Lusitania had gone down in May 1915, just twelve miles out to sea. Many of those who perished are buried here, and there is a memorial to them. It was from Kinsale, I heard, that many dozens of boats put out to sea to try to rescue survivors, and, sadly, to pick up the bodies of the dead. The terrible story of the sinking of the Lusitania became vivid for me all over again.
I began, after this next visit, to read more extensively about the subject, kept taking out this medal, holding it, looking at it. I was beginning to believe I might write one day about this tragedy, but I knew it was still all too distant from me, too lost in the statistics of the losses, in the propaganda war between the British and the Germans that followed the sinking. It was the passengers who drowned and the survivors that interested me, not so much the politics of it. Yet the politics and the propaganda had to be part of the story I was beginning to think I might tell.
The medal, I knew by now, was part of the propaganda war. It had been brought out by the Germans to defend their part in the sinking. They had, it’s quite true, issued a warning before the Lusitania sailed, had published it in newspapers in New York, making it clear that they had good cause to attack the ship because they knew that as well as the 2,000 passengers and crew on board, she would also be carrying weapons and armaments. The British denied it. The passengers must have been worried, of course, but at the time it was dismissed as German propaganda. Each side was doing all they could to demonize the other – this always happens before wars, in wars and after wars.
The controversy over the sinking of this great and beautiful ship is still alive a hundred years later, I discovered. Over a hundred Americans perished in the sinking, and America was neutral in the war at the time. They were enraged. The world was enraged. This horrible tragedy might well have helped bring the Americans into the war two years later, an intervention that ultimately brought the war to an end, to defeat for Germany. But it wasn’t the controversy itself that I wanted to write about. I wanted to know about the passengers, about why they were on the ship, about their stories.
Then, by happenstance, I came across the remarkable story of how, three hours after the ship went down, one of the rescue boats from Kinsale, out searching for survivors, had come across the grand piano from the dining room of the ship floating on the ocean, and on it a survivor. I could not discover who this was, nor actually whether it was a survivor or a body. But it was the image of this unknown passenger lying there on the piano that I could not get out of my head. Now my dream could begin. My survivor would be a girl from New York crossing the Atlantic with her mother to see her father, a Canadian soldier, lying wounded in hospital in England. Whoever she had been, I would rescue her, tell her story.
And into this dream, and this always happens in my story-making, other stories wove themselves in, other places. I had read that, at the time, it had been often reported that German submarines would not sink passenger ships without warning. It was quite common practice for a submarine to surface, to warn the ship that she was about to be sunk by torpedo, but then to leave time for passengers and crew to leave the ship safely. There were even stories of enemy submarines, after a ship had been sunk, towing lifeboats full of surviving sailors nearer to the safety of the shore. There were still, it seems, even in the middle of this terrible war of attrition, instances of great humanity.
Then, looking at a map one day of the seas off the south coast of Ireland, I noticed that the nearest landfall in England was the Isles of Scilly. Well, I know the Isles of Scilly really well, every island almost, and some of them are uninhabited. One, St Helen’s, has just one building still standing, clearly visible from the sea. It could be easily mistaken for an inhabited island. But it isn’t. The building was put up two hundred years ago as a place of quarantine. Sick passengers with infectious diseases would be dropped off there, to recover, or often die, before the ship docked on the mainland – this to avoid the spread of disease. I’ve been in that roofless pest house, walked the island, eaten the blackberries, climbed the rocks, found the well. Someone could survive there for weeks, months even, undiscovered. I might have to research how it was to be a passenger on the Lusitania, sailing from New York to Liverpool that May, how life was on board a German U-boat, but the Scilly Isles I knew well, and I’d been longing to set a story there again.
As I get older, I understand more and more how essential memory is to our lives, to our sense of who we are, who we once were. It can be in old age that we begin to lose our memory – that is, after all, quite common – or it can be some grief or trauma that shuts ourselves off from our past. I wanted to explore this, to find out more about the healing of the mind, the rewiring of lost memory. Is memory once lost, lost for ever, or is there hope of recovery? And if so, in what circumstances is this truly likely to happen? So, tell the story, I thought, in such a way that the reader knows the past of the survivor of the Lusitania, the child found on that piano floating on the ocean, but she herself does not. The horror of the sinking has traumatized her, frozen her memory of all that happened, all she has seen and indeed who she is. My whole story would be her search to remember, to find herself again.
But she will need help in this. So who might there be to offer this help? Reading the history of Scilly at the time of the First World War, I came across the story of a doctor on St Mary’s, a man universally loved and respected because of his care for his patients at such a difficult time. This doctor would have his part to play in my story, so would a fisherman’s family on Bryher, so would the school at Tresco. So would a horse. I knew how well horses can heal, how strong trust and affection can be between horse and rider. I have witnessed it. I have written about it in other stories.
Thinking around the subject, deep in my dreamtime, before I ever put pen to paper, I happened to be listening to a CD of a favourite piece of music: Mozart’s “Andante Grazioso”. I was thinking: Piano, piano, floating on the sea, a lifesaver for my survivor, but perhaps not only in the way I had first imagined. What if she played the piano? What, I wondered, might be her favourite piece to play on the piano? This! What would she want to hear and play over and over again, what would stay in her memory when all else seems to have been lost? Mozart’s “Andante Grazioso”, without any doubt.
That was it! I would have this supremely beautiful piece of music in her head, have it permeate her story, become essential to the healing of her memory, to her finding of herself, the key to the unfolding of her entire story.
As Alfie stepped tentatively through the doorway into the ruins of the Pest House, the whimpering stopped. There was no sign of anyone inside, nothing but bracken and brambles. At the far end of the building, in under the chimney, there was a fireplace, covered in dried bracken, a thick carpet of it, almost as if someone had been making a bed.
A sudden bird flew up out of a niche in the wall, an explosion of fluttering that set Alfie’s heart pounding. He pushed his way through the thick undergrowth that had long since made the ruins their own, brambles tearing at his shirt and trousers as he passed. Jim held back at the doorway. “No one here, Alfie,” he whispered. “You can see there isn’t.”
But Alfie was pointing into the corner of the fireplace, and waving his hand at his father to be quiet.
“Don’t you worry none,” Alfie said, treading softly as he went, and slowly. “We’ll have you out of here and home before you know it. We got our boat. Won’t hurt you none, promise. S’all right, honest. You can come out now.”
He had seen a face, a bone-white face, peering through the bracken, a child, a girl, hollow-cheeked, and with dark lank hair down to her shoulders. She was cowering there in the corner of the building, her fist in her mouth, her eyes staring up at him, wide with terror. She had a grey blanket round her shoulders. Her face was tear-stained, and she was shaking uncontrollably.
Alfie crouched down where he was, keeping his distance – he did not want to alarm her. He did not recognize her. If she had been from the islands, he would have known her for certain – he knew all the children on Scilly, everyone did, whichever island they came from. “Hello?” he said. “You got a name then, have you?” She shrank from him, breathing hard, coughing again now, and shivering under her blanket. “I’m Alfie. You needn’t be afeared of me, girl.” She was staring at Jim now, breathing hard. “That’s Father. He won’t hurt you any more’n I will. You hungry, are you? You been here long? You got a terrible cough on you. Where d’you come from then? How d’you get here, girl?” She said nothing, simply crouched there, frozen in her fear, her eyes darting wildly from Jim to Alfie, from Alfie to Jim. Alfie reached out slowly, and touched her blanket. “It’s wet through,” he said.
Her bare feet were covered in sand and mud, and what little he could see of her dress was nothing but tatters and rags. There were empty limpet shells scattered all about her feet, and a few broken eggshells, gulls’ eggs they were. “We got mackerel for tea back home,” he went on. “Mother does it beautiful, rolled in egg and oats, and we got bread-and-butter pudding for afters too. You’ll like it. We got our boat down on the beach. You want to come with us?” He inched his way towards her, holding out his hand. “Can you walk, girl?”
She sprang up then like a frightened fawn, leapt past him and was stumbling through the bracken towards the doorway. She must have tripped because she suddenly disappeared into the undergrowth. Jim found her moments later, lying face down, unconscious. He turned her over. There were scratches and cuts all over her legs. One ankle was swollen and bruised. She wasn’t breathing. Alfie was there on his knees beside her.
“Is she dead, Father?” he breathed. “Is she dead?” Jim felt her neck. He could feel no pulse. With panic rising in his chest, he remembered then how Alfie had fallen once down on to rocks when he was little, how he’d run all the way home with Alfie in his arms, quite sure he must be dead. He remembered how calm Mary had been, how she had taken charge at once, laid Alfie out on the kitchen table, put her ear to his mouth and felt his breath on her skin. He did the same now, put his ear to the girl’s mouth, felt the warm breath, and knew there was life in her yet. He had to get her home fast. Mary would know what to do with her.
“You get to the boat, Alfie,” he said. “Quick. I’ll bring her.”
He picked her up, and ran out of the Pest House, along the path to the dunes. She was light and limp and damp in his arms. He could feel she was little more than skin and bones. By the time he got there, Alfie had the boat in the water. He was standing in the shallows, holding it. “You get in, son,” Jim said. “You look after her. I’ll row.” They wrapped her in Jim’s coat, and laid her down with her head on Alfie’s lap. “Hold her close,” Jim told him. “We got to keep her warm as best we can.” He pushed off then, leaping into the boat and gathering the oars almost in one movement.
Jim rowed like a man possessed out into the swell of the open ocean past the lighthouse on Round Island, and at long last into the calm of Tresco Channel. Every few moments as he rowed, he’d glance down at the girl as she lay there in Alfie’s arms, her head bleeding, her eyes closed. Jim could see no life in her. She was sleeping as if she would never wake.
Alfie talked to her all the time; he hardly stopped. Holding her tight to him as the boat reared and rolled through the waves, he kept calling to her, willing her to wake up and open her eyes, telling her it wouldn’t be long now, that she’d be all right. And sometimes Jim would join in too, whenever he could find the breath to do so, begging her to live, pleading with her, yelling at her even. “Wake up, girl! For Chrissake, wake up! Don’t you dare go and die on us, you hear. Don’t you dare!”
In the early part of the First World War, most people in the United States were convinced that Europe’s war was not their fight. President Wilson did not believe that America’s interests were threatened by a European war – as long as trade was allowed to continue unhindered.
In May 1915, 20 kilometres off the coast of Ireland, a German U-boat sank the British liner, the Lusitania. There were 128 Americans among the 1,198 casualties. With the benefit of hindsight, the attack may be seen as one of Germany’s biggest mistakes of the war, because, afterwards, American attitudes to involvement slowly changed. President Wilson repeatedly warned that the US would not tolerate unrestricted submarine warfare and demanded an end to attacks on passenger ships. Germany complied for a time.
Germany needed to prevent goods from America being imported by Britain, while also placating the US, keeping it neutral and out of the war. Britain wanted equipment and money from the States, and, ideally, Britain wanted the US to join the fight against Germany. Following the sinking of the Lusitania, a propaganda war ensued for the hearts and minds of the US people and government.
The Germans argued that they had given fair warning that ships travelling to Britain were in danger. On 1 May a small notice, placed by the German Embassy, appeared on the shipping page of the New York Times, directly under the announcement of the sailing of the Lusitania. The notice warned that Germany and Britain were at war and that a war zone existed around the British Isles. British ships were “liable to destruction”, and people sailing in them “do so at their own risk”.
Previously, U-boat captains had often surfaced and allowed crews and passengers of unarmed boats to take to lifeboats before the vessel was sunk. What the British public were not told was that the British Admiralty had recently issued orders directing merchant ships to escape from U-boats when possible, but “if a submarine comes up suddenly close ahead of you with obvious hostile intention, steer straight for her at your utmost speed…” Armed steamers were instructed to open fire on a submarine, even if it had not yet fired, which therefore meant U-boats would be less likely to surface and give warning before attacking. After the sinking, the British press made much of the fact that the Lusitania was torpedoed without warning.
Of course, the British press put the blame firmly on the Germans. The Liverpool Courier wrote: “The disaster to the Lusitania, in which helpless non-combatants were foully murdered, has affected Liverpool in particular. By one coward blow hundreds of homes in the city have been bereft.” There were riots in Liverpool and other British cities. Germans and their businesses were attacked.
The Germans blamed the British for taking passengers on board ship when it was “known” there were 5,400 crates of ammunition in the hold of the Lusitania. The claim that the Lusitania might have been carrying shells and cartridges was not made known to the British public at the time. After the single torpedo struck, there was a further explosion, which many believe was caused by other illicit munitions cargo (military equipment), such as guncotton or aluminium powder.
The captain of the U-boat was awarded a medal by the German Kaiser (the Emperor). This further inflamed passions in Britain and the US, as did an (untrue) rumour that German schoolchildren had been awarded a day’s holiday to celebrate the sinking.
Some see the incident as a turning point in the rules of war. Britain and the US certainly used the tragedy as a hugely successful propaganda campaign. When the US eventually declared war on Germany in April 1917, recruitment posters urged: REMEMBER THE LUSITANIA! A poster showed a mother submerged in blue-green water with a baby clasped in her arms, above the single blood-red word: ENLIST. The British also had a recruitment poster: TAKE UP THE SWORD OF JUSTICE – AVENGE THE LUSITANIA.
Successive British governments denied that there were munitions on board. But in 1982, the British government warned divers that there had been explosives on board. An estimated four million bullets were found in the wreck, but no evidence of other munitions. What else was on board we may never know. The British government still keeps secret some of the documents from the incident, including some of the signals passed between the Admiralty and the Lusitania. Such records as are available are often missing critical pages, so the idea of a conspiracy, or cover-up, will continue. The Lusitania herself is unlikely to give up any more of her secrets. She will soon disappear as time, tide and rust take their final toll.
