GIRL SAILOR

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 74, 20 December 1933, Page 5

GIRL SAILOR

To Work on Sailing Ship MISS PAMELA BOURNE •■Who is the girl with the goldenbrown skin, who carries her head as if she enjoys walking?” And tlie girl was Miss I amela Bourne, who has a record of seamanship unique in the records of Oxford undergraduates, and among the daughters of highly-placed officials in colonial Governments. A "Dominion” reporter bad lunch with Lady Bourne and her daughter yesterday, and, expecting to be enthralled by the latter and in her exploits, found the former equally charming tpid a no less interesting personality. . c , Lady Bourne is the widow of the late Sir Roland Bourne, who was Secretary of Defence in the Union of South Africa, and the right-hand man to General Smuts during the war. She looks astonishingly young to have achieved the notable war-work which gained her the M.8.E.; much more like the sister than the mother of this enterprising young sailor-lass. Miss Bourne was brought up a little

unusually—a woman with the original characteristics of Lady Bourne would have her own ideas on education and was taught mainly at home. After leaving school in England, she passed on to Oxford in the natural sequence of events. Her father’s family had always been closely connected with the university, and Dr. G. C. Bourne, the famous Oxford oar, who died last March, was her uncle. After Oxford She travelled, and then, settling down to journalism, was social editress of the “Argus” in Cape Town. At the beginning of this year Miss Bourne suddenly decided to travel again. “Come along, Mummie!” she said. Passage in Cargo Boat. But it was an expensive amusement, and took consideration. At last the idea of cargo boats took hold of them, and though their friends said “Impossible 1” they persisted with their nlans, and have had many month,s of the most delightful voyaging in consequence. They left South Africa in the Norwegian cargo motor-ship Thermopylae, bound for Australia. On the voyage Miss Bourne decided that what she really wanted to do was to work as a seaman. She coaxed the first mate, during a time when he was shorthanded through sickness, to let her play the part of bo’sun’s boy. There was never anything less like nlav. she says. Swabbing dorm the decks was the simplest part of it. At one time the inside of the ship was being painted, and the novice found the Indian Ocean swell a little uncomfortable from the cradle-plank on which she stood, lathering paint on the walls, the ceiling, and incidentally on herself.

“But the awful part,” she said, “was getting clean. We would troop along —the others and I—to the bos’un’s glory hole at the end of the day, and there he would deal out cotton waste and turpentine. I, of course, got particularly dirty, so the bo’sun, very offhand and resigned, but really very kind, would rub my arms down first with the rag and turps, and then with —sandpaper! It hurt considerably. But you had to be clean on a Norwegian boat. They’re the cleanest things anywhere. The paint simply had to be got off.

“Then lie would scrape the tar off my boots, ami reduce them to a state with which I could cope myself. “I never felt myself out of place among the sailors. They were all very young: mostly men working for master’s certificates. They were all educated, with extremely good manners, and most of them talked English. The bo’sun was only 25. a very hard-work-ing man, but in the evening when lie had finished the day’s labour he would sit. in his cabin and study English for two hours.

“They were solid, simple people, but not unhumorous. They must have found me a great nuisance, because I was always asking questions, and after a time they gave me the wrong Norwegian names for things. They got a lot of fun out of that. They accepted me as a boy, all as a matter of course, and called me Nils—Nils-Jacob, which is the name I shall be known by on the Finnish wind-jammer on which I am signed as an apprentice. Likes the Work. ••Going to really work? Of course! Down in the hold as a super-cargo; anywhere! I’ve never felt, so fit in my life as doing that work, and I love it!” Lady Bourne described their arrival in Australia, and the “terrible time” they had had. after an enterprising reporter had discovered her daughter in paint-stained overalls working Ihe winches. There were Reuter messages, so that their English and South African relations received shocks at their breakfast tables, and a barrage of photographers clicked their cameras at her wherever she went. They both have delightful stories tell of their wanderings round the Islands. whore everything was made comfortable for them by the Native Affairs Department of Fiji. One coul.l go on writing of their adventures for pages. To-morrow they leave for I’ietOn. and, after going for part of the way by service car. will walk down the West Coast to the Fox Glacier. Lady Bourne will go to Pembroke from there, where Miss Bourne, after a ten-days’ ride through the Haast Pass with a

guide, will join her, and they will go to Milford Sound, and walk or ride together over the Te Anau track. At the eud of January or the beginning of February these delightful trav ellers leave for Australia to wait for the Finnish cargo ship on which Miss Bourne will journey to Norway. Lady Bourne returns to England sedately by steamer.