What Was Rescued Read online

  That first night on board there was bombing again. Bombs were landing in the Mersey, in the harbour all around our ship. We were a floating target. I don’t know how we slept, but we did. Everyone was relieved when we set sail the next day on the early evening tide, even though, by then, the weather had turned to rain. We just wanted to get moving and out of that estuary. All the children were waving and cheering at the other boats as we left.

  It did feel odd leaving England, watching the land recede and become a scrawl of ships and tall buildings along the horizon. I wondered when I’d next see Mum and Dad. For a moment, it felt as though I were on a giant elastic band pulling me back. It’s just as well I had Philip to take care of. I don’t think I could’ve got through that bit on my own.

  I was very aware of Pippa, even then. We were segregated – boys on one side of the ship and girls on the other – but we all used to get together every moment we could. There were ‘lessons’ arranged for each age group and rooms allocated for them, but even these classes were segregated, and frankly a lot of us bunked off. There was a pretty impressive children’s room with a rocking horse in it, so some of the younger ones went there, but the rest of us spent our time avoiding the escorts. We boys used to play Postman’s Knock with the girls in Pippa’s corridor. Pippa never kept the same number twice, so I never got to kiss her. Not that she was remotely interested in me then. She seemed to be a bit sweet on one of the private passengers, an older boy called Graham who used to come down from the top deck and hang about with us. I used to watch her flirt with him and I’d feel embarrassed for her. She would throw sponges at him or scream and run away from an imaginary lunge of his. It was mortifying. Graham took it all in his stride, and I’m not sure he even cared – that was the most aggravating part of it. He seemed more interested in filling us boys in with the latest news about the convoy. I was both relieved and angered by Graham’s nonchalance. I loathed his common sense and his sangfroid. I envied his Fair Isle tank top and his long trousers.

  Graham had found out from the crew, who had found it out from the captain, that being now so far from a German base and less likely to be torpedoed, the Royal Navy escort was turning round at this point in the Atlantic to accompany some incoming cargo ships back through the treacherous waters to Britain. At this point too, the convoy of smaller vessels was meant to disperse because they slowed us down and made us a sitting duck that could be seen for miles. ‘You wait and see,’ one of the lascars told us. ‘We’ll be streaking ahead now the navy escort has gone. There’ll be no stopping us. And you won’t notice any of this bad weather because we’ll be going so fast!’ We were all in a good mood that day, because we were out of danger and because a noticeboard informed us that our air force had downed one hundred and eighty-five German planes in the Battle of Britain.

  Well, the convoy did not disperse as they were supposed to. According to Graham, the ship’s admiral did not want to relinquish his position as commodore (which he had only as long as there was a convoy) and insisted the convoy stay together. Since he happened to be on our ship, there was a real clash of power between the captain and the commodore, and the commodore, being an admiral, pulled rank. Captain Taylor was officially in charge of our ship, and he wanted to break away (as originally instructed by the navy) and go full steam ahead to Canada on our own. This rapid pick-up in speed would also protect the passengers from the terrible buffeting of the ship in the building storm.

  My interest in Graham’s theories was really sparked on that fourth and last day on board, Tuesday the 17th of September. The ship was pitching and wallowing quite a bit, and the grown-ups had retreated to their cabins, seasick. We were over in the girls’ passageway, racing around and playing ever more reckless games. Graham came down from the top deck to join us. Pippa noticed his arrival with delight, and my heart sank; but then he began telling me the news with a very sombre look on his face. The new zig-zag course the admiral insisted on taking to help fox any U-boats was simply slowing us down even more. He reckoned the captain was furious, and some of the crew were talking mutiny. For the first time, I began to feel very uneasy about our safety.

  Mr Dent eventually appeared to disperse us, as usual, but he looked even leaner and paler than normal.

  ‘Come on, lads, back to your side of the ship.’ He waved his thin, elbow-patched arm at us, and seemed about to faint. ‘People are ill; they don’t need this noise. Early bath and bed. You can sleep in pyjamas tonight.’

  Pippa said, ‘Oooh! A bath!’ and gave such a flirty, wide-eyed look of pleasure that I was condemned to spending the next few hours imagining her naked, soaking in a tub of hot sea-water and sponging herself down somewhere within walking distance of my cabin.

  Mr Dent, a volunteer escort with the CORB, the Children’s Overseas Reception Board, was a teacher in real life. How he controlled the children at school we couldn’t imagine, and we assumed he must’ve been driven to this escort job as a desperate escape from the classroom. He seemed a quiet, underfed man, of no interest to anyone. We rarely paid any attention to what he said, and it was cruel, really. That evening, however, the ship was getting a bit too rocky for comfort. We felt as though we were in a recalcitrant lift that couldn’t decide which floor to stop on. So we went back to our cabins and took advantage of the first bath on offer that trip and the first opportunity to wear pyjamas instead of outdoor clothes to bed. We were supposedly outside the torpedo zone and therefore out of danger. Graham and I knew different. We would wear our coats over our pyjamas anyway.

  I saw Phil hanging about with Dora, and I told him to get a move on. I remember her beautiful clear blue eyes turned on me, and they seemed sort of reproachful, as if I’d interrupted something. They both looked like that. It’s an awful thing to say, but it irritated the hell out of me. That was probably the last time I had a good long look at my brother, and all I could think was that he irritated me. God.

  By the time he went to bed, he wasn’t feeling too good and refused to wear his coat because it made him feel hot and worse. I should have insisted. If he’d been wearing his coat . . . Well, I didn’t. And he wasn’t.

  SINKING

  4

  DORA

  It was the fourth day out, and the morning was stormy. Loads of the adults were seasick, but most of the kids were fine, although we were told to stay off the decks because they were getting wet and slippery. By teatime things had calmed down, so everyone cheered up a bit. A group of us younger children were playing hide-and-seek in the cabins after tea. We were making a terrible noise, squealing and laughing, I suppose. The grown-ups used to get cross when we made a racket, and you weren’t meant to run in the passageways. Mr Dent came down and told us, ineffectually, his hands clasped together, that we should stop, because we were upsetting the other passengers. We ignored him, like we ignored everything Mr Dent said, and carried on playing as soon as he had retreated apologetically up the stairs. But when we started playing again, we did so at least a bit more quietly. As I stood on deck, counting to a hundred and looking out at the sunset spreading beneath some black clouds, I didn’t move my lips, and anyone going down to our cabins below might have thought them deserted.

  I didn’t say ‘Coming, ready or not’. I didn’t even get as far as the top of the stairs. I was making my way across the deck when Philip came rushing towards me, out of breath. I could see from his face that something was very wrong.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s been nicked!’

  ‘What has?’

  ‘The concertina!’

  I made for the steps, but he pulled me back.

  He said, ‘It’s not there. I know where it is. I saw who took it!’

  It seems he had been hiding in my cabin, under the bottom bunk. It wasn’t a very sophisticated place to hide, because it was the first place you looked: under the bunks, then in the wardrobe. There wasn’t anywhere else. In fact, the whole game was a bit daft; we only did it to pass the time of day and to have a giggl
e. I suppose we were all getting to know one another, and that was the fun of it. Well, according to Philip, this is what happened. He was under the bunk; the door opened. He thought it was going to be me, but a pair of smart shoes walked in, and he could tell it was Pippa. He lifted the bedspread, which he’d optimistically pulled down a bit to hang over the side of the bed and conceal his position, and he was about to say ‘hello’ to Pippa, when he saw her open the cupboard. He ducked back and waited, hearing her rifle about in the wardrobe. Then she put the concertina box beside the bunk and closed the wardrobe door. After that, she picked it up and left.

  He couldn’t imagine what she wanted with the concertina (unless it was for the diamonds, but she was too rich to need those), and so he crawled out and went after her.

  ‘What are you doing with Dora’s concertina?’

  She turned in the passageway, startled, and he could see straight away that she looked guilty.

  ‘It’s not Dora’s. It doesn’t belong to her.’

  ‘It doesn’t belong to you. You’ve stolen it! I’m going to tell her!’

  And it seems she really frightened him then, because when he ran into me on the deck, he was afraid for his life. When he told me what had happened, I thought there must’ve been some misunderstanding. I said, ‘I’m going to go and find her and tell her to give it back.’ But he put his arm out to stop me and looked at me pleadingly.

  ‘Please, please don’t say anything.’ He was in a state of genuine panic, so I sat him down on deck. The boat was swaying quite a lot, which added to the surreal quality of the news.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said if I told you, she’d . . .’ Then he did a cut-throat gesture with his hand across his neck. ‘That means she’ll kill me, doesn’t it? And she looked at me like this . . .’ He squeezed his eyes into slits. ‘Don’t tell her you know, Dora. We’ll get it back.’ Then he looked very brave and very indignant. ‘I’ll get it back for you. I’ll get it back tonight.’

  ‘And I won’t tell anyone – not even Arthur.’

  The storm was beginning to whip up again. Our feet on the deck would be suddenly weightless, and the next moment the floor would press up beneath us. Nothing felt very real any more, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find it was all a dream.

  Then we were told to go below because the decks were getting wet again and it was dangerous. I said to Philip, ‘We’ll sort it out in the morning.’

  We went down the stairs, holding on to the rails, and then Philip put his arm around me as we walked down the passageway. I remember Arthur came and found us and urged Phil to get back to the cabin. He asked if I knew how to get back to mine, and I said I did. We must’ve looked quite comical, a seven-year-old and a six-year-old, standing like tragic lovers, because Arthur smiled and said something like, ‘Say goodbye to your girlfriend, then, and look sharp.’ I remember I felt embarrassed when he said that.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Philip, giving me a proprietorial squeeze as we parted. ‘I’ll get it back for you.’ That’s what he said, love him. ‘I’ll get it back for you.’

  It’s hard, now, to distinguish between that feeling of nausea and the dismay at stumbling upon Pippa’s betrayal. She knew so much about everything and was like a grown-up to me. She wasn’t supposed to break the rules. Then I remembered her mother. The world seemed suddenly unstable, and the pushing and pulling of the deck beneath me only reinforced this sense of unease.

  I kept trying to work out why Pippa had done it. It would bother me for many years, until I eventually understood. But lying there in my bottom bunk, listening to Janet talking quietly to herself as she read, I simply couldn’t figure it out. However, we’d just had our first bath of the trip, so when the torpedo struck, I was, at last, luxuriously asleep.

  I thought someone was shaking me awake, but then I heard a thud as Janet’s life jacket fell to the floor, and then the alarm bell went off. I was confused. Janet had been almost hurled from the top bunk, but we couldn’t see anything in the dark. She said we must’ve hit something.

  The alarm was punishingly loud as we got out of our bunks wearily. We’d had enough of drills, but this seemed suddenly, scarily, like it might be the real thing.

  ‘Janet, turn the light on.’

  ‘I have.’

  Nothing happened. It was pitch black and we had to try to find our shoes in the dark.

  ‘Take your coat,’ said Janet. ‘It’ll be cold up on deck.’

  It chokes me to remember her saying that.

  I scrabbled for my coat at the end of the bed and put it on. I remember my feet were wet. We thought the sea had come in, but in fact it was just burst water pipes. That feeling that the sea was already at our feet spurred us on though. My socks were tucked into my shoes, and I remember trying to pull them on over sodden feet. I reluctantly shoved my feet into my brand-new lace-ups, but didn’t try to do them up. I remember this strange smell – a sort of sulphurous smell – which I later learnt to be cordite from the explosion. It was already seeping into the cabin before we opened the door. Janet took my hand and told me to put my life jacket on. ‘It’s no good carrying it,’ she said, ‘you have to put it on.’

  She didn’t make it, Janet. But she made sure I did.

  Now, in the passageway, we began to hear screams above the alarm bell. Water was everywhere under our feet, and all sorts of debris seemed to be across the floor, making it hard to walk along in the dark. I just held on to Janet and we shuffled in the direction of the stairs. Eventually some blue emergency lights came on, and we could see the true extent of the chaos. Bits of wall panel had fallen through, the air was blue and smoky and debris formed drenched obstacles underfoot. Girls in pyjamas were appearing at all the doors, some with cuts and grazes, some calling the names of friends or sisters, but all filing obediently out into the passageway and joining a strangely orderly queue to get up on deck. We might have been queuing for our dinner at school.

  At one point we had to crawl on our hands and knees over fragments of wall and ceiling, and Miss Prendergast was on the other side, covered in cuts, ready to help us out.

  When we reached our muster station – which was the playroom – there was nothing but a giant precipice. You could look down and see the bottom of the ship. The playroom floor had become a huge hole. That was when I began to feel really frightened. I still have nightmares about that missing playroom.

  Miss Prendergast made us walk along the promenade deck directly to our lifeboat. We passed a pool of blood on deck, and some of the girls started to cry. The emergency lights were dim, but the low blue gleam made that pool of blood even more eerie. I resented those crying girls. I envied them too. No one ever cried in our house – at least, not in front of anyone else. You just didn’t. It was a private thing, like going to the lav, it was. You would’ve felt ashamed to do it in front of anyone. I held on tight to Janet’s hand instead.

  By now the ship was clearly listing. We grabbed on to each other when it swayed to stop us falling back towards the stern. The escorts were busy counting their protégés, and we stood and waited like children on a school outing. Some of the boys on the port side were even singing ‘Roll out the Barrel’. We watched one of the other lifeboats being lowered. The ropes, or ‘falls’, at one end didn’t unwind as fast as the ropes at the other, so the boat hung at an angle, and the children were clinging on and shouting. Then it tipped the other way. Back and forth it went, rocking like a fairground contraption, and we watched as it reached the sea, which was a huge way down – it must have been at least forty feet below. The final movement tipped the boat at a dramatic angle and tossed out half of its passengers like little dolls. We could hear their screaming but could do nothing except gawp as the boat careered away on a wave when the falls were detached.

  Our boat was on the starboard side. This wasn’t good, as the ship was tilting the other way, towards port, making the distance to travel down to the sea much further than it had been on our drills. A
lso, the boats hit the side of the ship as they were lowered. I didn’t want to get into our boat when it was time, but a large seaman picked me up and practically threw me in. I landed on a lascar who was shivering – or trembling – in his thin cotton gear. There must have been nearly forty of us when we were launched, but Miss Prendergast didn’t get in. She went to find a missing girl. Instead we had another woman, who said she’d take care of us and reassured us that Miss Prendergast would be all right.

  Having seen what happened to the previous boat, the chaotic lowering of our boat made everyone panic. We were hurled towards the stern end, grabbing on to the falls or to each other, and then hurled back towards the bow. Several children fell out less than halfway down to the sea. Janet and I clung on to the gunwales and I closed my eyes tightly when the boat jerked and pitched, but as soon as it righted itself, it seemed to swing back in the other direction.

  Just before we reached the water, the stern ropes became stuck and the bow ones lengthened suddenly, pitching us all forward into the sea.

  All I remember is the boat practically standing upright and then being swallowed by this dark wave. I didn’t drown, like I thought I had, because the life jacket sent me bobbing up to the surface. What I know now is that when the engines cut out, the deceleration of a big ship is very slow, and we were caught in the bow waves as it still ploughed forward. I could see the upturned lifeboat and lots of other children in the water, but the waves were taking us further and further away from the boat and the ship. It had a life of its own, that sea. I felt it suck me one way, then hurl me another, pull me up on to mountains and push me down into dark valleys. It mauled me and wouldn’t let me go. There seemed no point in struggling against it, but struggle I did. Strange how that will to survive defies all the odds. I didn’t think I was going to die, at least not in the sea. I just thought, Our Mam’ll kill me when she sees the state of these new shoes.