The Last Lifeboat, page 12
Another huge wave hits them sideways. Alice gasps, certain they are going over this time and that this is how she will die. Not by a bomb from the Luftwaffe’s air raids, but by drowning in the mid-Atlantic. At the front of the lifeboat, a man stands up and grasps erratically at the iron handles that are used to steer the boat. He shouts something about going back to help. As those closest to him scream at him to sit down, the lifeboat lists heavily and he loses his balance and falls overboard. He is instantly swept away by the swell. The first thought that crosses Alice’s mind is that he was wearing an overcoat and hadn’t offered it to the children when she’d asked. Behind her, another man clutches his chest and slumps to his knees saying he can’t breathe. A well-spoken man attends to him as best he can in the cramped conditions. The bulky life jackets they all wear make movements clumsy and awkward. To Alice’s right, an American man says something about keeping the children warm and throws a knitted sweater to her. Two of the boys huddle inside it.
Amid the chaos and the dark, Alice searches for memories of her quiet gentle life; precious moments she wants to remember if this is where it all ends: jumping over the waves with Walter; her cheek resting against her father’s shoulder as he pointed out the constellations in the inky blue skies of late summer; Kitty helping her to save a baby bird thrown from its nest in a spring storm.
Billy Fortune wraps his arms around Alice’s legs and sobs. ‘When will it stop, Auntie? Please make it stop.’
‘Soon, Billy. Very soon.’ Help will arrive at any moment. She is sure of it. The other ships in their convoy will rush to help them.
The girl starts to cry.
A bigger boy tells her crying isn’t going to help anyone.
The boy in the coat tugs on Alice’s sleeve. ‘I’m afraid of the dark, Auntie.’
Alice had found it endearing the way the children called the escorts ‘uncle’ and ‘auntie’. It had lent a sense of family and familiarity to the unsettling business of evacuation, but now she feels suffocated by the word ‘auntie’, smothered by the profound responsibility it carries in the face of such danger.
We can’t save everyone. We can’t save them all …
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try …
A rush of nausea washes over her. She turns away from the children and retches violently over the side of the lifeboat.
Conditions worsen as the night presses on and the storm intensifies. Alice wraps herself into a tight cocoon, her body wracked with convulsions, her mind a jumble. Still, nobody has come to their aid. Still, the ocean threatens to capsize them with every thunderous wave. She thinks about Kitty and Walter, Maud, her mother, the girls in her group, none of whom are in this lifeboat. She prays that Eleanor and Beryl and the other escorts are safe. And what of Howard?
To her right, someone whimpers. To her left, someone prays. Behind her, someone inexplicably plays a harmonica. Just ahead, two men attend to another who is injured. In front of them, the same scene is repeated. The man she’d seen clutching his chest seems to have recovered a little and is being reassured by the well-spoken young man in evening dress. At the other end of the lifeboat, the man in the plaid pyjamas, and three other men, search through the emergency supplies beneath the thwarts. There is a sense of urgency and industry, a lot of movement and noise, scraps of shouted conversation that are snatched away by the wind before Alice can make any sense of them, and all the while, the children cling to her, only the whites of their eyes visible through the murk. They remind her of a sack of kittens waiting to be drowned, all tangled up in each other in their narrow space at one end of the lifeboat. Prow? Stern? She can’t remember. It’s hard to believe they are the same children who’d galloped about the boat deck earlier that day, finally free of the seasickness that had plagued them since they left Liverpool. They are such frightened things now, their prize marbles lost, their mothers many hundreds of miles away, all talk of their Canadian adventure forgotten.
Alice tells them to hold hands, to link arms, to sit close together. ‘Help is on the way. They’ll be here soon.’
Several of the children are seasick. The girl vomits onto her nightdress, and then onto Alice’s shoes. Two men have an argument which ends in one punching the other. People step on each other’s hands and feet, elbows and knees knock awkwardly into those of strangers, legs are buckled and bent in what small scrap of space people can find. The smell of brine and vomit sticks to the back of Alice’s throat and all the while the storm rages and wave after wave smacks into them with such ferocity that she wonders how much longer the lifeboat can withstand it.
There is a small moment of relief when the man in the plaid pyjamas brings the children an emergency blanket each. ‘There aren’t enough for the adults,’ he explains, noticing Alice’s disappointment. ‘We’ll have to take it in turns.’
Like Alice, most of the adults in the lifeboat are still dressed in the clothes they’d eaten dinner in shortly before the torpedo strike. Others are in flimsy nightclothes. There hadn’t been time to return to the cabins for sensible things like overcoats and shoes.
The man grabs the gunwale to brace himself. ‘How are they doing? The children?’
‘Well. Considering.’
‘And you? How are you?’ His manner is brusque, but his intention is kind.
‘I’m fine.’
He nods, understanding that Alice is far from fine but is doing her best to hold it together. He places a hand on her shoulder. ‘We’ve eight of Carlisle’s crew on board, and a dozen or so reasonably fit men. Only a handful of casualties. We could be in worse shape.’
She nods. It is something, at least.
‘Jimmy,’ he says. ‘Ship’s cook.’
‘Alice,’ she replies. ‘Why aren’t the other ships coming to help us? There were eighteen ships in our convoy. Where are they?’
Jimmy glances at the children before responding. ‘Rules of convoy.’
‘Rules of what?’ Alice can hardly hear him above the roar of the wind.
‘Convoy. Following orders to scatter. Ships in convoy can’t attempt a rescue while there are U-boats in the area. Normal procedure.’
‘Normal procedure?’ Alice repeats. ‘You mean, they deliberately left children to drown?’
She can’t believe this is happening. Can’t believe they’ve been abandoned.
Jimmy runs a hand through his sodden hair and shakes his head. ‘Rules of convoy,’ he repeats. ‘They’ll come at first light, as soon as it’s declared safe.’ He staggers and stumbles his way to the other end of the lifeboat.
Behind Alice, the man with the American accent says exactly what she is thinking. ‘We’ll all be dead by first light. They’ll be too late.’
17
London. 20 September 1940
The olive-green front door of number 13 shines in the soft sunlight of early morning. The stained-glass sunburst in the fanlight reflects the light back so that it shimmers on the flagstones at Lily’s feet.
As she picks up the milk, Mrs Hopkins’s cat appears, winding around her ankles, looking for food.
‘Come on then,’ she says, glad of the company. ‘Let’s see if I can spare a drop for you.’
Inside, things aren’t as awful as they’d first seemed when she’d popped over a few days earlier. There is still a lingering smell of smoke, and the kitchen is in a sorry state, but it doesn’t overwhelm her. She sees manageable individual jobs rather than the dark unwelcoming mess the house had become in her mind. She pours a splash of milk into a saucer, rolls up her sleeves and gets to work, making her way methodically around the house, taking down the blackout blinds, opening windows to let in some fresh air. The cat trails around after her, until it finally settles on Arthur’s bed.
Hours pass in busy concentration. Around mid-morning, Lily hears the squeak of the front gate and the snap of the letter box. She spends another twenty minutes tidying the front bedroom before she makes her way downstairs and picks up a single buff-coloured envelope from the doormat. She kicks the draught excluder back against the bottom of the front door, and straightens the lace curtain.
The cat follows her as she walks into the kitchen and sits down at the table. That is when she notices the black edges of the envelope.
She falters.
The cat miaows.
Hands trembling, Lily opens the envelope and removes a single sheet of paper, neatly typed. She glances at the official crest at the top of the page, starts to read, and stops. All the air seems to be sucked from the room, words and sentences blurring on the page as she tries simultaneously to grasp their meaning and throw them away – very distressed … the Carlisle … torpedoed … your children … It is a horrifying, terrifying muddle of things she can’t understand, doesn’t want to believe.
A rush of blood fills her ears. White spots in her eyes distort her vision as she stands up and backs away from the table, from the letter, distancing herself from the unbearable news sitting there in black type. A high-pitched ringing in her ears grows louder and closer as she lifts her hands to her face, but it is more than her hands lifting up, it is her soul, her whole being, pulling away from the kitchen, from number 13, from Elm Street, because she doesn’t want to be there, doesn’t want to be Mrs P. Nicholls who has just read the devastating news that the ship carrying her children to safety has been hit by a torpedo and has sunk in the Atlantic.
She leans forward against the table and reads the letter again, absorbing the impossible information with a gut-wrenching gasp as everything she’s ever known comes crashing down around her and a terrible, unimaginable future roars into her present.
She sinks to her knees, unable to breathe, unable to draw air into her lungs. She claws desperately at the floor, grasps at the chair leg, but she can’t get up. She is made of lead, and the floor is cold against her cheek. She is made of liquid, drowning in grief as the cat dabs playfully at the frayed ends on the ties of her apron.
Later, Elsie Farnaby will tell Lily that the sound she heard through the open window of number 13 that morning was like no human sound she’d ever heard before. What Lily hears in the moment is a bellow, a deep guttural roar as her heart shatters and a smothering suffocating darkness engulfs her.
18
Mid-Atlantic. 18 September 1940
Day One
The power of the open ocean is shocking, the ferocity of the wind appalling as it tosses the lifeboat around like a child’s toy. It is nothing like the winter storms Alice has felt batter the north Kent coast. This storm is a monster. It cares nothing for her distress.
Even the first hint of daylight on the horizon seems afraid to show itself too clearly as Alice watches the ominous sky. With so little in their favour, there is relief and hope in the faint smudge of grey. They’ve survived the torpedo strike and the awful hours in the lifeboat through the violent black of night. Today, they’ll be rescued and their ordeal will be over.
Wide awake despite her exhaustion, Alice rubs Billy Fortune’s bare feet. She’d been around all the children several times during the night, warming frozen fingers and toes, remembering her father doing the same after she’d played too long in the snow.
‘Look, Billy. Daylight. It’s the morning.’
The boy’s eyes flicker open. ‘Will they rescue us now? Can we go home?’
He wheezes when he talks, the cough he’d carried with him from Liverpool still evident in the catch of his voice. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘They’ll rescue us now and then we can go home.’
In front of Alice, in a space no more than three feet across, the children huddle beneath the tarpaulin canopy Jimmy had put up in the night to give them some protection from the storm. They cling to each other as one miserable mass, lurching and swaying as the ocean rises and falls, so that one minute the lifeboat seems to be touching the sky, and the next it is plunging down into a deep trough, surrounded by curtains of seething water. The tarpaulin and blankets that were found in the emergency supplies in the night, and the heavy sweater the American man had given them, offer meagre protection for children dressed only in their nightclothes and with iron-hard rain landing on them like nails. Alice asks again for everyone to give the children anything they can manage without. An extra layer, a pullover, a hat. Anything. She has already given Molly her jacket.
The boy in the coat says he wishes his sister were here. ‘Have you seen her, Auntie?’
Alice peers at him through the rain. His cheeks and lips are horribly pale. He resembles a sliver of ice that might melt at any moment.
‘Have you seen her?’ he repeats.
Alice shakes her head. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t, but I’m sure she’s safe in another lifeboat, no doubt wondering where you are. Try not to worry.’ She attempts a reassuring smile, but her face is frozen with cold and guilt. His sister is one of the girls in her group. She should be here, with her. All the girls in her group should be with her.
The boy tucks his knees up to his chest and starts to sob. ‘I want my mother. My hands are cold.’
Alice takes the boy’s frozen hands in hers and rubs vigorously, first his left hand, then his right. ‘You were very sensible to wear your coat.’
He rubs water from his eyes. ‘Mother made us promise. She said it would keep us warm if we had to go outside in the night.’
‘Then your mother was very clever, Arthur.’ Alice thinks about his mother’s devastating composure as she’d kissed him and his sister goodbye.
Arthur nods firmly, as if it is the only thing of which he can be certain. ‘Do you think she’ll mind if I share my coat with Billy?’
‘I think your mother would be very proud to know that you offered to share.’
Alice sees Lily Nicholls so clearly: a tall, narrow-framed woman, mahogany hair pin-curled into waves, olive-green eyes that matched the colour of her front door. A look of Katharine Hepburn about her. She’d given Alice an envelope. Something about a white feather. ‘A lucky talisman,’ she’d said. A silly superstition, to keep the children safe. The envelope was still in the pocket of Alice’s jacket, the jacket which was now draped around the young girl.
In scrappy fragments of conversation, shouted between the crash of the waves and the howling wind, Alice learns that in addition to Arthur Nicholls (seven and a half, from Clapham) and Billy Fortune (six years old, from Poplar, in the East End), the other boys in the lifeboat are Brian Walsh, Robert Beck and Hamish Mackie, that they vary in age from nine to twelve, and come from Liverpool, Sunderland and Scarborough. Brian is in shock and can only offer these essential bits of information about himself. Hamish considers it all a great adventure and asks Alice if the newspapers will want to take their picture when they get home. She says she doesn’t know, and silently hopes not. Robert is desperately worried about his two brothers, having promised his mother he would look after them. The girl tells Alice that she is nine years old, from Richmond in London, and was travelling in first class with her nanny, Birdy.
‘And what’s your name?’ Alice asks.
‘Molly Carr. I should have been in Canada weeks ago with my sisters. I shouldn’t have even been on that stupid ship. My father will be furious.’
She bursts into tears and buries her head between her knees.
Billy stares at Molly for a moment and announces that his father keeps pigeons. ‘One’s a British champion. Our Tom says they might use her to send secret messages into France.’
Every minute feels like an hour as the first fragment of daylight slowly expands, and the wretched survivors gradually unfurl from their hunched, cramped forms. Alice counts thirty people in total, excluding herself and the children. It is a fraction of the several hundred who’d boarded the ship in Liverpool. Some exchange words of reassurance or share concern for loved ones, several quietly pray together, others are too distressed to interact at all. Six men busy themselves with tasks to keep the lifeboat seaworthy.
‘Where’s everyone else, Auntie?’ Arthur peers out at the vast expanse of ocean. ‘Where’s Georgie, and all the other lifeboats?’
His question echoes Alice’s own, because for all the relief daylight has brought, it has also confirmed the terrible fact that they are entirely alone. There are no other lifeboats nearby. No other ships from their convoy. Not one bit of debris. It’s as if the Carlisle had never existed. Ninety evacuees had boarded SS Carlisle in Liverpool. Ninety hopeful faces had stared up in wonder at the magnificent ship that would take them to Canada, far away from Hitler’s wicked bombs and the looming threat of invasion. Alice looks at the six children in front of her now and tries to ignore the sickening sense of dread that sits in her stomach.
‘I’m sure we’ll see the other lifeboats soon, Arthur. When the sky brightens a little more.’ And yet Alice had seen many lifeboats quickly overturned by the strength of the waves, and so many poor souls thrashing in the water, crying for help. ‘How about a game to pass the time – Simon Says? Molly, you can be Simon.’
As the children play a half-hearted game, Alice fixes her gaze on the horizon, lost in her thoughts, until a voice behind her catches her attention.
‘Anyone order a Scotch? Neat?’
The harmonica-playing American is holding a bottle of whisky toward her. He resembles a slab of rain-soaked granite, chiselled from the contours of the murky morning light. He is dressed in summer slacks and a knitted polo shirt. Water drips from the brim of his tweed cap.
‘Found the liquor in the emergency stores,’ he says. ‘Or should I say, “booze”. Captain Nemo over there says we’re each to take a wee dram to warm us up.’ His voice is deep; gravelly. It reminds Alice of pebbles washed by the tide.
