The Last Lifeboat, page 1
THE LAST LIFEBOAT
Hazel Gaynor
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023
Copyright © Hazel Gaynor 2023
Jacket design by Claire Ward/HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Jacket photographs © Pat Whelen on Unsplash (boat), © Zoltan Toth/Trevillion Images (horizon) and Shutterstock.com (birds and handwriting)
Hazel Gaynor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008518660
eBook Edition © June 2023 ISBN: 9780008518684
Version: 2023-04-27
Dedication
For Tanya,
in memory of your dear mum,
Joan Flanagan
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Mid-Atlantic. 17 September 1940
Part One – Departure
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Two – Absence
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Part Three – Rescue
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Part Four – Recovery
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Epilogue
Historical Note
Reader Questions
Book Recommendations
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Hazel Gaynor
About the Publisher
3 September 1939
War! Listened to Chamberlain’s announcement over the wireless this morning. All very serious until the dog stood up during the national anthem, which made me laugh and then set everyone else off, too. Probably inappropriate to find humour at a time of national crisis, but it might be the last laugh we have for a while. Besides, it was a useful way to hide my tears. The children leave for the countryside today. I don’t know what else to say about that.
Mass-Observation, Diarist #6672
Mid-Atlantic. 17 September 1940
Alice can’t breathe. The wind snatches her breath away, leaving her gasping for air as she half-jumps, half-stumbles into the lifeboat and falls, face down, against the boards. She tries to pull herself up, but the lifeboat pitches violently as another monstrous wave smashes into them and throws Alice into a woman beside her. The woman loses her grip on the rain-slicked mast and tumbles, with extraordinary grace, into the dark ocean, her white nightdress unfurling around her as she spins and twirls like a ballerina in a pirouette. Too shocked to respond, Alice can’t look away.
‘Miss! Miss! Can you help the children?’
A tall man in plaid pyjamas emerges through the rain. He grabs the mast to steady himself as he points toward something at the other end of the lifeboat, but the storm steals his words and fear smothers Alice’s ability to respond. She clings desperately to the bottom of the mast and tries not to think about the falling woman as she searches for something familiar to orient herself amid the chaos, but there is nothing. No stars, no moon, not even the bright hue of the flares they’d sent up to alert the other ships in the convoy to their distress. Every source of light Alice has known during her five days at sea has been extinguished, leaving a darkness so intense that there is no obvious point at which the ocean ends and the sky begins. Everything is upside down. Upended. Destroyed.
‘Miss! The children!’
Through the roar of the wind, Alice hears a high-pitched mewling, but her attention is caught by an elderly man leaning dangerously out over the side of the lifeboat as he reaches for a hand in the water. Alice watches through the blinding spray from the waves as another man joins him, then a third, and then the man in the pyjamas stumbles forward to help, each of them reaching and grasping until one of them grabs the hand, but the heaving swell sends the lifeboat rearing up, and the pale fingers slip from his grasp. Again and again, they try. Twice, Alice thinks they have her – a woman in a white nightdress – but the ocean is in no mood for mercy. Another huge wave lashes the lifeboat and the woman is swept away. The men sink to their knees, their battle lost. The elderly man sobs like a child.
Amid the fury of the storm, and the chaos and noise of the two dozen or so terrified souls crowded into the narrow lifeboat around her, Alice tries desperately to remember her training. But the simple remedies for seasickness, the songs and games to keep the children entertained, the procedures to follow ‘in the unlikely event’ of an instruction to abandon ship are of no use to her now. There was no protocol to follow for when you found yourself in an open lifeboat in a furious storm, your ship torpedoed by a German U-boat and sinking fast, lifeboats all around you capsized, damaged and waterlogged, leaving desperate souls floundering in the raging water.
Alice crawls forward, infant-like, on hands and knees. Concealed iron rivets and hard wooden ridges dig painfully into her skin. The wind screams. Needle-sharp hailstones hammer against her forehead. She shuffles blindly on, bumping into huddled forms and clambering over bare feet and legs. All around her, male voices call out instructions she doesn’t understand. ‘Pull the Fleming gear.’ ‘Under the thwarts.’ ‘Lash him to the gunwale.’ There is so much noise, she can’t think straight. She lunges forward as the boat pitches sharply down and another wall of frigid seawater drenches her from head to toe, sluicing down the back of her thin cotton jacket and blouse, seeping into her torn stockings and forming lakes in her best leather shoes.
At last, her hands connect with a low bench-like seat. She hauls herself onto it, wraps her arms around her body and closes her eyes to the nightmare surrounding her, just as she had as a frightened child crouched at the back of her grandmother’s wardrobe, willing the awful noises downstairs to stop.
‘Miss! I need you to help them!’ The man in the pyjamas has returned. His eyes are wild, his voice urgent. ‘You’re with the seavacs – the evacuees. One of them escorts.’
It is a statement, not a question.
Alice nods as her eyes settle on a tangle of reedy arms and bare feet huddled against the thwarts behind her. Barely able to distinguish one child from another, she counts five boys and one girl. They are each bunched up into a tight ball, hands wrapped around their knees, heads bent against the wind and rain. She doesn’t recognize any of them.
‘They’re not from my group.’ She shouts to make herself heard above the storm. ‘I was assigned to lifeboat seven.’ There must be another escort in this lifeboat. Someone responsible for these children. ‘Are there any other children?’
The man grabs her shoulder. ‘No. And I don’t care which bloody lifeboat you were assigned to. They need you to help them, for Christ’s sake!’
His words swirl and snap at her as the lifeboat plunges violently down again.
Alice’s teeth chatter uncontrollably. Her entire body convulses with shock and fear and cold as the lifeboat rears and bucks wildly. She clings to the seat, too terrified to move. ‘Please, just leave me alone! Help will be on the way.’
The man stumbles forward so that his face is right in front of Alice’s, his eyes fixed on hers. There is an intensity to his stare, but there is also compassion. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Alice. Alice King.’ She can hardly speak she trembles so much.
‘Listen, Alice. I know you’re frightened. We’re all bloody terrified.’ He looks up as someone shouts for help from the other end of the lifeboat. ‘They’re crying for their mothers, and you’re the only woman in the lifebo at now.’ He stumbles away from her, responding to the panicked shouts and screams now coming from every direction.
She shuffles toward the bedraggled creatures. The five boys are dressed in their pyjamas. The girl wears a thin lace-trimmed nightie. Only one of them wears an overcoat. Only one is wearing shoes. ‘It’s all right, children,’ she says as the lifeboat plunges down. ‘Help is coming. Is anybody hurt?’
They all shake their heads. That is something, at least.
Alice peels off her jacket and drapes it around the girl’s narrow shoulders. ‘Does anyone have a coat, or jacket?’ she shouts out into the dark. ‘There are six children here. If you have anything, pass it down.’ If they don’t drown, they’ll surely all die of hypothermia before the night is out.
The boy wearing the coat tugs on Alice’s sleeve and grabs her hand. ‘Where are the others?’ He is barely able to get the words out, his teeth chatter so much. ‘Where’s everyone else?’
The wind screams and the lifeboat pitches wildly as Alice looks helplessly at the seething ocean and the dark that surrounds them before she turns to the boy. He is relying on her to have all the answers now.
‘I don’t know,’ she says, her voice heavy with fear. ‘I don’t know where they are.’
PART ONE – DEPARTURE
1
Four months earlier
Kent. May 1940
As she often did in a time of crisis, Alice King turned to books. While others were determined to dance and knit their way through the war, Alice intended to read her way through it, especially over the next few days during the annual family trip to Dover. The prospect of spending time with her awful cousins was bad enough, but it was the reason for the visit, the anniversary it marked, that filled her with dread. She was debating whether a second Dickens would see her through the ordeal, or whether Jane Austen was the woman for the job, when Maud said she would be off then.
‘Try to enjoy yourself, Alice. Even a little.’
Alice settled on Austen. She lifted the book from the shelf with a weary sigh. ‘Thank you. I’ll try. At least I’ll see Kitty.’ The thought of seeing her sister drew a smile from Alice’s lips. Dear Kitty. Alice wondered (and dreaded) what her latest news would be.
‘She’s dragging herself away from her beloved London after all then?’ Maud pulled on her coat, despite the warm day. ‘I can’t see the appeal. All that traffic and noise, and the possibility of air raids.’
Alice agreed. She much preferred the open spaces of Kent’s rolling landscapes, the big starlit skies, the audible breaths of the sea. ‘Kitty and London were made for each other. She only laughs when I worry about her being there, but you know what she’s like. She’s having a bit too much fun if you ask me, apparently oblivious to the fact that there’s a war on! Hopefully a weekend by the sea will blow a bit of sense back into her.’
‘And maybe Kitty will blow a bit of nonsense back into you.’
‘What do you mean?’
Maud hesitated as she turned in the doorway. As the former headmistress of the local school she knew Alice well, first as a pupil, and, more recently, as one of her teachers. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, dear, and I know it’s a difficult occasion for you, but maybe a weekend with your sister is exactly what you need. I remember a time when it was you who was the adventurous one, always with a plan to go somewhere and do something. Everything doesn’t always have to be so serious, even if Hitler is breathing down our necks.’ She offered an encouraging smile and buttoned her coat. ‘Anyway, I’ve said my bit. See you in a few days. And don’t forget to leave the key under the geranium.’
As the bell above the library door settled, Maud’s words niggled and nagged at Alice. She was the serious, sensible one, reluctant to step outside the familiar, while Kitty lived such a vibrant, almost fictional, life in comparison. And Maud was right. It hadn’t always been that way, but Alice rarely thought about the girl who had been full of wild ideas and plans for great journeys – and wasn’t even sure she’d recognize her if she met her now.
Alice took longer than was necessary to finish up, finding any number of ways to delay the journey to Dover. Her brother, Walter, was driving, and their mother wanted to be away before three. She shelved the last of the day’s returns and tidied the display of Ministry leaflets. Her hand stilled for a moment as she considered the grim progress of war. Their array of advice on all manner of things, from how to identify different types of poison gas to the unbearable business of how to humanely exterminate the family pet, was increasingly alarming. Alice remembered how appalled everyone had been when the first leaflets were issued after the announcement of war. Now, eight months on, and with the threat of Nazi invasion drawing ever closer, war had crept into every corner of life until Ministry leaflets were ten a penny, and the once unimaginable had somehow become the inevitable.
Before she left, she put up the blackout screens and took a moment to savour the musty silence. She loved this little library with all her heart, loved the brackish breeze that whispered through the gaps in the rotten old woodwork of the mullioned windows, loved that it was now home to a small collection of literary treasures sent secretly from London for safekeeping until the war was over. She wished she could put herself in safekeeping in the library until the war was over, burrow between shelves heavy with books whose endings were long imprinted on her. Yes, books were safe and certain. The world beyond the library walls was anything but.
Alice’s stomach churned as Walter turned the car into the familiar driveway of their grandmother’s house in St Margaret’s Bay. She loved her grandmother dearly, but hated this forced occasion of sombre remembrance. She didn’t need to come here to remember her father. She remembered him – thought about him – every day. The particular date and circumstances of his death were something she wished she could forget.
‘We’re going down to the beach,’ Kitty announced, grabbing Alice’s hand as they stepped out of the car. ‘We’ll be back in time for dinner.’
Before their mother could reply, and with Walter happy to leave his sisters to catch up on the latest gossip, the two of them ran off, just as they had as young girls, the sea breeze tying knots in their hair as they’d pulled off their shoes and socks and ran to the water. Alice was relieved to escape the stuffy formalities of the house and head toward the small beach a short walk away. Her heart felt instantly lighter at the sight of the sea ambered by the afternoon sun, at the sense of possibility and freedom she always felt when she was near the water. ‘Imagine where we might go, Alice! Imagine where all the world’s oceans might take us!’ As she recalled her father’s words, spoken over their last game of chess, she heard the echo of a life that wasn’t hers anymore, and as she looked toward the coastline of France, clearly visible in the distance, she imagined Hitler looking back at Dover’s majestic white cliffs, carefully working out the next move in his own sinister game. His recent invasion of France and the Low Countries had brought the war terrifyingly close to England’s doorstep.
‘Do you really think he’ll invade?’ Alice aimed a pebble across the unusually calm water of the English Channel, but her technique was terrible, and rather than skipping across the surface, it sank without trace. ‘I know everyone’s expecting it, but I still can’t believe it will happen. Not here. Not to us.’
Kitty laughed at her sister’s pitiful attempt. ‘You need to get down lower and flick from the wrist as you throw. Look. Like this.’ Kitty’s pebble skipped elegantly, six times, across the water. ‘See. It’s easy.’ Kitty made everything look easy. She was the swan of the family, effortless and graceful. Alice had always felt like a waddling mother duck beside her. ‘And, yes. I suspect he will invade,’ Kitty continued. ‘The question is: When? Hopefully not tonight anyway. Invasion would be bad enough. Getting stuck here with Cousin Lucy would be truly horrifying.’
Alice soon tired of skimming pebbles and looked for shells instead as they started to walk along the shoreline together. ‘I hate being in this constant state of almost-war, always wondering, always on high alert.’ If Hitler did invade, the south coast counties of Kent and Sussex would be the first to see the Nazi flags. Her stomach heaved at the thought. ‘It’s so awful, isn’t it, to think that just twenty miles of sea separates us now.’
