When the Train Started for Liverpool, I Counted my Pennies while
my Aunt Wept Bitterly
I settled myself back against the leather back of the seat wondering why my aunt was crying so, and then I began to count the pennies with which I planned to purchase some oranges in Liverpool.
Our night in Liverpool, our last night on English soil, is summed up in a memory of a cheap hotel, a stuffy room, and a breakfast on an uncountable number of hard-boiled eggs. In the morning, early, we left that place and were taken on a tram-car to the dock. There I did purchase some oranges from an old witch of an orange woman, big football oranges, which when peeled were small enough, for they had been boiled to thicken the peel, so Aunt said.
On the steerage deck we were jostled by Jews with their bedding and food supplies. At ten o’clock, after we had stood in the vaccination line, the ship sailed from the dock, and I leaned over the side watching the fluttering handkerchiefs fade, as a snow flurry fades. Then the tugs left us alone on the great, bottle-green deep. There was a band in my heart playing, “I’m going to the land of the free and the home of the brave!”
When one makes a blend of bilge-water, new paint, the odor of raw onions, by confining them in an unventilated space under deck, and adds to that blend the cries of ill-cared-for babies, the swearing of vulgar women, and the complaining whine of sickly children, one knows what the steerage on the old “Alaska” was to me. The Jews owned the warm, windswept deck, where they sat all day on the tins which covered the steam-pipes, and munched their raw fish, black bread, and flavored the salt air with the doubtful odor of juicy onions. I heard the English forswear the bearded tribe, denounce them for unbelievers, sniff at the mention of the food they ate; but after all, the English had the wrong end of the stick; they had to stay below deck most of the time, and sicken themselves with the poor, unwholesome fare provided by the ship.
My aunt said to me, one day, “Al, I’d give the world for one of them raw onions that the Jews eat. They’re Spanish onions, too, that makes it all the more aggravating.”
“Why don’t you ask them for a piece of one?” I inquired innocently.
“What,” she sniffed, “ask a Jew? Never!” But when I begged one from a Jew boy, she ate it eagerly enough.
The height of romance for me, however, was in the person of Joe, a real stowaway. He was found on the second day out, and was given the task of peeling the steerage potatoes, a task that kept him busy enough throughout the day. My mouth went open to its full extent, when, after helping him with his potatoes, he would reward me by paring off thick slices of callouse from his palms. Joe said to me, “Never mind, lad, if I work hard they’ll sure land me in Boston when we arrive. I’m going to wark hard so they’ll like me. I do want to go to the States!”