"It's over, for now," Angus told Barbara. "We'll be close to Liverpool in a few hours. I don't think we'll be a target anymore, the Lord willing."
Barbara had never experienced anything like the raid, and could not speak.
Seeing the young sailor needed to be reassured, the old-timer thought of something.
"Like they say happens in a hurricane... funny things sometimes happen in bombing raids... I was aboard the Expositor off Iceland last year... A bomber dropped one so close, the concussion ripped the pants right off one of our crew. He was on a ladder, his arms full of ammunition. He fell off and dropped the ammunition, but wasn't hurt. Just stood there without a stitch on his lower half, or a scratch on him."
Relief that the raid was over, coupled with the funny story, and having witnessed the sinking of one of the convoys ships with most of its crew lost, first made Barbara laugh, then cry.
Under darkness of the night, with no one nearby to see, the old merchantman held Barbara and comforted her.
"It's all right, Lass. You'll be home safe soon, or wherever you're going. You must have had a good reason to sign on a merchant ship carrying oil."
She looked at him in surprise, not pulling herself out of his fatherly embrace.
So you know? She didn't say it; her eyes did.
"I've known since you first came aboard. You can't fool a father of six girls. It's all right. I won't tell. I won't even ask why. I've come to learn not to ask. It's what happens in war."
It's what happens in war.
Barbara never told Angus her story, and never asked his. She just learned from some others that he and Colm Fraser were among only five Scotsmen rescued by the Buckingham. Their own ship had been sunk by a submarine while enroute from Glasgow to New York on the previous run. A father of six must have a good reason to be a merchantman, too, she thought. Maybe it was just that the pay was good, even though the work was dangerous.
Like a test pilot's.
Barbara waved good-bye to Angus the day after the Buckingham docked in Liverpool and she had peeled her last potato and washed her last pot and pan. The last thing she did aboard ship, when the cook was in the freezer, she returned the meat cleaver to the mess hall table where she had borrowed it.
She carried something else with her after her adventure on the ocean as a Merchant Marine: