December, 1942
My Christmas Shopping List By JULIA LAKE KELLERSBERGER
were we to know about the little Chinese boy and girl in the steerage who slept on the upper deck at night to keep cool, and the little Belgian girl who spoke only French, and the three Dutch children and the two Brit ish babies whose father’s ship had been torpedoed at sea and he had floated for days on a raft before being rescued? I looked at my husband and he looked at me. There was but one thought in the minds of both. Then I became a p r o f e s s i o n a 1 beggar. I begged, ties and pocket knives from the men, and costume jewelry, artifi cial nosegays, and used bottles of per fume from the women, and fruit, nuts, and candy from the dining-room stew ard in first class. I begged enough to fill ten little stockings—but for my husband I had nothing. We who were
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I T WAS CHRISTMAS EVE. We did not know where we were. We only knew that the Spirit of the Prince of Peace' whose birthday we were ap proaching was brooding over a war- torn, sin-sick world and that we were abiding in Him on a storm-tossed sea. We had already had weeks of black outs, and we knew that more weeks of blackouts were yet to come. 1 still have in my possession a small round disk of heavy black cardboard just the size of our portholè, but large enough to shut us out from light and. air and shut us into a hot little cabin where only a dark blue globe, half painted black, sent a weird gleam to show us the whereabouts of our tooth brushes at night. We stumbled on the stairways, and when the tropical moon had com pletely waned, we felt for empty chairs on deck. One night a hand touched my shoulder and fingers ran lightly over my face. “I’m looking for my wife,” a'deep voice explained. “She’s not your wife. She’s mine,’’ promptly answered my husband. All of us were one big family by that time, so we did hot mind. How-
ever, when a lighted A m e r i c a n freighter passed close by with the Stars and Stripes painted boldly upon her sides, and our boat ran from her •as fast as- she could, we did mind. OUr captain'explained that he pre ferred darkness rather than light, for he did not wish our whereabouts to become known since we. were flying thé flag of a belligerent nation. Shopping Not Done There were little children on deck in the dark. We would gather them
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a b o u t us and -tell them s t o r i e s and t e a c h them songs. One of them said to me, “Do you t h i n k S a n t a Claus could find his way to this boat out at sea?” My thought turned to lost opportunities, to t h e big Woolworth store in Durban where toys might so easily have been p r o c u r e d for just s u c h an emer gency as this. But how
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