Their names were really Anna-Rose and Anna Felicitas; but
they decided, as they sat huddled together in a corner of
the second class deck of the American liner St. Luke, and
watched the dirty water of the Mersey slipping past and the
Liverpool landing-stage disappearing into mist, and felt
that it was comfortless and cold, and knew they hadn't got
a father or a mother, and remembered that they were aliens,
and realized that in front of them lay a great deal of grey,
uneasy, dreadfully wet sea, endless stretches of it, days and
days of it, with waves on top of it to make them sick and
submarines beneath it to kill them if they could, and knew
that they hadn't the remotest idea, not the very remotest, what
was before them when and if they did get across to the other side,
and knew that they were refugees, castaways, derelicts, two
wretched little Germans who were neither really Germans nor
really English because they so unfortunately, so complicatedly were
both, - they decided, looking very calm and determined and
sitting very close together beneath the rug their English aunt
had given them to put round their miserable alien legs, that
what they really were, were Christopher and Columbus, because
they were setting out to discover a New World.
From Christopher and Columbus - Elizabeth Von Arnim