THE DISCOVERY OF CUBA
THE DISCOVERY OF CUBA
Little Alice Riordan was an only child who had no father, only her mother. The two lived in a poor part of Gateshead, in a flat on the top of a three storey building opposite the vinegar factory and the Mission Hall just off the main Bensham Road. At night the rumble along this road of huge trucks carrying steel from the Consett blast furnaces to the new Tyne tunnel sent the pair to sleep. Mornings usually broke to the dim wail of ships' sirens as they navigated past the Swing Bridge on the Tyne. The school and Bensham Road were the limits of Alice's play world during the day. She wasn't supposed to go across either barrier. School allowed a further venture of about half a mile but the longer journey was not matched by further reaching thoughts. In fact the school offered less stimulation or scope for the little girl's imagination than her meagre home situation. At least at home she got to talk to her mother about days gone by when mum had been young and had travelled the length and breadth of the country during the war as an officer in the army. They would consult a tiny RAF book which contained an atlas to check mums journeys.
Alice had always loved maps. For as long as she remembered they had held a fascination for her unrivalled by anything else on the bookshelf or in the toy chest. At school the best lessons were the geography half-hour each day, which went all too quickly. In the public library she always headed for the atlases, while her mother selected yet another cowboy book by Zane Gray. In the newsagents her eyes wandered over the folded road maps of various counties. When the results of the football matches were announced on the radio on Saturday evening and mum checked the pools entry she'd sent in the previous Wednesday, Alice loved to check the location of the different towns in the Royal Air Force dictionary-atlas. Her mind wandered constantly from the confines of Bensham Road to the limitless space of the Pacific, and the endless variety of strange names in Japan or Siberia.
When she wasn't looking at maps she was drawing them. She had a good memory for the shapes and sizes and positions of countries, and seemed to have a knack of learning their capitals and rivers easily. Alice spent many happy evenings drawing sketchmaps of India or Europe or the United States, while mum immersed herself in Zane Gray's stories of the West. The little girl had a collection of such maps in a folder in the bottom drawer.
Occasionally the vinegar factory and the Mission Hall seemed to close in on Alice's mother, and the pair would take a seven-mile bus ride across the sprawling smoke-filled industrial slumland of inner Tyneside to visit Auntie Mary in Wallsend. These trips were the nearest thing to a holiday for Alice and her mum: they were the only times the pair ever escaped the humdrum existence of Bensham Road. The Wallsend house had a small vegetable garden and Alice loved exploring it. Mum's sister Mary was older than Alice's mum, and her six children were of great interest to the little girl. First, there were so many of them, and she found it a continual revelation how they all fitted into the house. Second, these offspring were older than Alice she found the idea of "children" being old quite a strange one. The oldest was indeed in his late twenties, and then there were steps and stairs of them until the youngest, Eileen, who was, at thirteen, a full five years older than Alice. Three huge boys, well, young men really; and three big girls, who had almost nothing in common with an eight year-old. They were friendly enough, and Alice's favourite, and mum's too, was the youngest of the boys, Leslie.
At nineteen he was already a fine strong fellow, and had been in the merchant navy for two years. Mum was his godmother and that was enough to explain to Alice why he was her favourite. But Alice was attracted to him because he actually went to all the strange places that she only imagined and marked carefully on her sketch maps in the folder in the bottom drawer. Leslie was proof that the wider world really existed and was not merely a made-up elaborate fairy tale, the scant evidence for which was limited to a Royal Air Force dictionary-atlas and a collection of NAAFI stories from a lone parent living under the shadow of the vinegar factory. He could tell stories of sandstorms over the Suez Canal, and icebergs in the wintry North Atlantic. He knew how to pronounce Port Said properly to rhyme with "you're a seed", and not as the teacher at school pronounced it to rhyme with "short dead". Leslie could even produce foreign coins and stamps as hard, real evidence, if any were required, of these places' existence. And Leslie gave Alice a little pocket money too, when he was home on leave, and came to visit mum on his huge motorbike.
The noise was enough to attract a small crowd of the neighbourhood children when Leslie arrived from Bensham Road one day. By the time Alice had jumped down the last few stairs to answer the loud knock on the door two storeys below, the bike was already wheeled up the front path and parked up on its stand. It filled the entire path width and Alice could hardly squeeze out into the street. In any case she needn't have tried because she was whisked off her feet and high into the air above the shiny machine by the tattooed arms of cousin Leslie. Laughing all the time he teased her about where she thought she was running away to, and why she wouldn't give a big hug to her favourite sailor. She threw her thin arms around his sunburnt neck and closed her eyes as he skipped up two concrete steps and strode into the dim hall, hooking the door closed behind him with his foot, and leaving the audience of local children to stare in adulation at the shiny motorbike.
“Mum, mum, it's Leslie come to see us, Mum!”
The announcement was hardly needed because visitors were all too few to the upstairs rooms, and the noise of the bike told Alice's mother who it was.
“Well, Leslie, it's ages since we saw you! Are you home for long?”
The fro forma questions disguised the warmth of affection mum had for this young man. He reminded her so strongly of the young American airmen of long ago. He resembled the young man who had never returned from Africa to reclaim his wife to be, and his daughter he had never seen, and his dictionary-atlas. As it always did, the affection showed itself in food prepared for a young man who must always be starving after the wind on the motorbike. And his affection showed in the game of cards lasting for hours where he lost a good sum of money, mostly to Alice, at the table in the tiny living room. Alice never stopped to wonder how a sailor with experience of gambling houses from Hong Kong to San Francisco could be so inept at rummy as to lose such a lot of money. And it was such a simple game really. His pockets finally empty, he looked at the clock and accepted another cup of tea before he had to set off back across the city to Auntie Mary's.
Mum and Leslie enjoyed an easy familiarity in chatting over their cups of tea about places and sights he'd seen, and Alice got out her favourite pastime, her sketchmaps. She leafed through a number of good, recognisable outlines of the Atlantic Ocean she'd been working on over a few days. Alice eavesdropped on Leslie's derring-do while she crayoned Mexico yellow, then Brazil brown. The fire began to fade and Leslie began to prepare to go. He got up slowly and stretched so that his brown arms reached almost to the ceiling.
“Well, how's my little navigator getting on? Let's have a quick look at what you're doing....”
Leslie knew she had the strange passion for maps. He strode across the tiny room and leaned over the child busy crayoning Argentina. Leslie jabbed a finger at the map on the left side.
“That's lovely work, pet. What's this?”
Alice was pleased to show off her knowledge.
“That's Florida, and that's Mexico, and that's Brazil, the brown one.”
Leslie was impressed and stroked her hair encouragingly. He reached over to the pencil and picked it up thoughtfully.
“You've missed out a big island just here, pet lamb. It's called Cuba. I was there last month. They say it’s where Columbus first landed in the New World. You know about Columbus, don’t you ?” and he nudged her with his elbow, smiled and winked one eye.
“Yes, Columbus.....Oh - I never knew it was such a big island, I must have just missed it out every time.”
And he drew the correct elongated banana-shape just in the right spot below Florida. Then he put the pencil down, kissed her on the cheek, and was off out of the room and down the stairs with a cheery goodbye to both of them. They stood at the door, arms folded in the cooling evening air, and waved bye bye to him. And the roar of the engine and the brightness of the headlight as he shot off along the street past the vinegar factory was something the neighbours’ kids wouldn't forget in a hurry.
Every time Alice Riordan drew the Atlantic Ocean from then on, she never forgot to draw in the coastline of the new world of Cuba.
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