Bleck, Basil "Humiliation on the Mary."

This World War 2 tale is probably closer to "faction" than clear-cut fiction. A missing top secret dispatch pouch causes a reluctant Commander Bisset, real-life captain of the liner-turned-troopship QUEEN MARY and commodore of the Cunard fleet, to stop his ship off Bayonne, N.J. where he'd just taken aboard as passenger British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill had been attending the 2nd Quebec Conference for Allied leaders (held in Sept. 1944) and, after having spent a long weekend at Hyde Park with President and Mrs. Roosevelt, embarks aboard the QUEEN MARY for a fast eastbound trans-Atlantic run home.

The story's narrator, a Royal Navy officer serving as liaison based in New York City with the Third U.S. Naval District, had been summoned aboard the QUEEN MARY to bring off a top secret dispatch pouch just before the liner sailed. A mishap causes him to leave the ship sans the pouch (his humiliation, clearly and not the QUEEN MARY's!) and a seemingly fruitless pursuit of the liner by pilot boat as the QUEEN MARY gathers speed would appear to settle the narrator's fate (he fears disgrace for having let the dispatch pouch stay aboard the liner). But at the last moment the great ocean liner stops, the pilot boat catches up with her and the missing pouch retrieved. Later that night, at home, his wife, with "the proper display of feminine curiosity," wonders just what might have been in the pouch. Our Royal Navy man won't venture a guess other than that the pouch had seemed rather light in weight. He supposed it probably didn't contain more than a letter or two. "I expect one was Mr. Churchill's bread-and-butter letter to Mrs. Roosevelt" observes his wife. And, in closing, Bleck's narrator himself observes: "To this day, I find it hard to convince myself that she wasn't right."