The RMS Carpathia was soon moored, bobbing amidst many others, and the passengers were being herded from its decks like a flock of muddled sheep.
“Women to the right, men to the left,” a man barked, and when Ellen made to follow her father, he pushed her none too gently in the back, to the other side. “Women to the right,” he snapped, and Ellen stared at him, fear turning her speechless.
“It’s all right, lass,” Da called with a cheery wave. “I’ll see you on the other side, after you’re through.” He called to a young woman they’d befriended on the ship. “Annie McCready, see to my girl, won’t you?”
“Aye, I will,” Annie promised, and hustled Ellen along with her four other children. Her oldest girl clutched Ellen’s hand and gave her a reassuring smile, but Ellen didn’t feel much better.
She barely had time to register the huge hall filled with a dense, heaving mass of humanity. Huge, grimy windows streaked the dusty floor with sunlight.
Ellen looked for her father, but she couldn’t see him anywhere. Around her a dozen different languages were being spoken, shrill voices raised in anger or fear or just plain impatience. People clutched bundles and children, guarding against the worst: deportation. For some, who would face war or poverty, it was a fate as good as death. Although Springburn held neither for Ellen, she could not contemplate returning to their dark little flat, the life of solitary drudgery that she’d endured for the last few years.
Annie McCready threw her a quick, harried smile. “It will be all right, lass. You’re little, but you’re strong enough, aren’t you?”
Ellen didn’t know how strong she was. She’d hefted iron wash tubs and sacks of potatoes, wound wet sheets through the mangle in the courtyard back in Springburn and climbed flights of narrows with a basket balanced on her hip, but in that moment she felt like a little child, lost and afraid. Then she recalled Da’s cheerful optimism on board the ship and she squared her small shoulders. Da had said deportation wasn’t for them. Her future was here, and a customs officer couldn’t change that.
Even so her heart beat fiercely as she clutched the tatty carpet bag that held her most dear possessions, her old rag doll, a silver-plated brush and her mother’s Bible. The one trunk she and her father had between them would be unloaded from the ship once they’d passed through.
“Come along, lass,” Annie said, jiggling her baby on her hip. “Stay with us, now. Though I imagine it will be a while.”
They waited four hours standing in that hot, crowded hall, before it was finally their turn in front of the customs officers. By that time, it was nearly noon and the immigration hall was stifling. Ellen felt sweat trickle down her back, and she knew her face was flushed with heat. Her legs ached from standing so long, and she swiped at a damp tendril of hair.
“You!” A surly man in a blue serge suit pointed at her. “Come up,
then.”
Ellen glanced at Annie, but the older woman just gave her a little push in the back. “Go on, then. Families go separate. Your da’s on the other side, remember.”
Ellen walked up to the officer. He eyed her in an unfriendly way. “You alone?” he demanded and she shook her head, her throat suddenly too dry and tight to speak. His mouth curled in contempt. “Do you speak English?”
Ellen prickled at that. “I’m Scottish,” she said proudly, but her burr must have been too much for him to understand, for he rolled his eyes.
“Someone waiting for you, then?”
“My father.”
He understood this much, for he made a mark on her card. He jerked a thumb and a doctor scuttled up to her. Ellen flinched in surprise as he flourished a buttonhook to pull her eyelids up and check for trachoma. He slapped at her cheeks. “Flushed, isn’t she? Feverish, I’d say. Was there illness on the ship?”
“Not so as I heard,” the customs officer said in a bored voice, and the doctor pursed his lips.
“Still, she’s a scrawny little thing. I don’t like that brightness in her eye at all.”
The customs officer shrugged. The doctor took a piece of chalk out of his pocket, and Ellen grabbed his arm.
“Please, sir, it’s just the heat. I’m perfectly well—”
He shrugged her off as he marked a large ‘x’ on the shoulder of her worn dress. “Go to the desk there, girl. They’ll see to you.” There was the merest flicker of pity in his eyes before he moved on.
Ellen tasted fear, cold and metallic, on her tongue. She swallowed, watching as streams of people flowed by her, people who did not have chalk ‘x’s on their shoulders, people who were heading towards the large double doors that led to the outside, to freedom and sunshine and the rest of their lives.
She didn’t know what the ‘x’ meant, but it could be nothing good. At best, a delay while she suffered through another physical exam. At worst, passage back to Scotland and her da’s dreams lost again.
Ellen took a deep breath and looked around. The McCreadys were gone, prodded onwards by the officers, no doubt assuming Ellen was already on the other side, reunited with her father.
No one was watching her. And no one, she thought, was going to keep her from joining Da on the other side of this wretched hall. Quickly, her fingers trembling, she licked her hand and rubbed at that awful chalk mark. After a moment the ‘x’ was no longer visible. Her heart thudding so fast and hard she felt dizzy, she moved towards the double doors. A customs officer squinted at her suspiciously, but Ellen lifted her chin and gazed evenly back, the blood pounding in her ears, and he looked away.
She walked with her shoulders stiff, her whole body quivering with tension, expecting at any moment the meaty hand of a customs officer to grab her, turn her around, and demand for her to return. What was the punishment for what she’d done, she wondered sickly. Deportation? Prison?
Still she kept one foot in front of the other, oblivious to the sweaty, heaving crowd around her, everyone desperate to be released from this place, to the promise of freedom and hope.