‘I got such a fright. I forgot that you had her when I woke, I was in such a daze, and I thought I’d fallen asleep looking after her and that she must have fallen overboard and drowned. It was the most awful feeling.’

Shirley was crying now, and Iris patted her mother’s arm. ‘Dere, dere,’ she said, and we both laughed, Shirley laughing and crying at once. She never asked me to watch Iris again, and for many years I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand the sheer terror that comes with having children, the possibility of losing something much more important than yourself. The love so deep it defies logic, knowledge or reason.

•

When Jim showed us the radio and telegraph room he’d explained how only the most important messages could be conveyed this way, because they competed with maritime signals and other communications between ships. We were officially a US naval ship, and though the war was over, navy protocol remained.

In the week we’d been on board I’d only twice heard of brides receiving radio or telegraph messages. One was from a girl’s mother back in Sydney—her father had died. I saw the woman, slight and splotchy, weeping in the dining room. She was given the option of disembarking when we stopped in Suva, in Fiji, and taking the next ship home, but she decided to continue her journey to America.

Brynn said, ‘She’s scared if she goes back to Australia now she’ll never leave,’ and I understood completely.

The second message was for a woman who was not yet married—her fiancé was from New York. He sent a telegram saying that he no longer wanted her to come. She wasn’t the weeping kind. She lay unmoving on a deckchair, refusing to speak, until she left the boat in Suva.

Suva was all we had spoken of for days by the time we docked there; it was our sole chance to leave the boat during the journey, and we would only be allowed one day to walk around. None of us in our cabin had ever been outside Australia, so the chance to see a different country was a thrill I felt physically, a prickle on my skin. Min didn’t seem to understand why we were so excited.

‘It’s not as though it’s civilised,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ll even bother getting off. You never know what to expect from natives.’

Brynn rolled her eyes and I tried to suppress my snort. It was hard to say what you really thought of a person’s opinions when you shared a tiny cabin for three weeks. Certain words could not be retracted.