The Last Lifeboat, page 18
The knocking comes again, followed by a voice through the letter box.
‘Hello? Mrs Nicholls? Are you there?’
The voice is clear and purposeful. It doesn’t belong in this place of dread and grief.
Lily drags herself up from Arthur’s bed. She feels as thin and hesitant as the strand of light that edges around the blackout screen at the window. She remembers the air-raid siren last night, remembers going to the shelter, remembers Mr Kettlewell’s sympathy and his anger at what the enemy had done. She doesn’t recall the all-clear, or coming upstairs, or unlacing her shoes, but there they are, neatly paired beside the bed. The covers on Georgie’s bed are disturbed, the pillow gently hollowed. Then she remembers. Elsie had brought her home. She’d insisted on staying until Lily fell asleep.
Head pounding, Lily pushes her feet into her slippers and makes her way downstairs, gripping the banister, not fully trusting her feet to find the next tread. At the bottom, she catches her reflection in the mirror beside the coat stand. The woman staring back at her looks so broken that she bursts into tears.
The knocking comes again. ‘Hello? Mrs Nicholls?’
Lily wipes the tears from her cheeks with the cuff of her cardigan and opens the door to a woman with green eyes, red hair, crimson lipstick. She is so vibrant and vital, a sharp contrast to the pitying looks and anaemic pies everyone else has arrived with. Lily is reminded of the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the film changed from black and white to Technicolor and the children shrieked with excitement.
‘Mrs Nicholls?’ The woman is speaking. ‘Lily Nicholls?’
There’s an intensity to her voice, an urgency in her manner. Something about her is familiar. Did she call yesterday?
Lily starts to close the door. ‘I’m not speaking to reporters.’
Elsie had warned her about that: ‘They’ll twist things you say. Be careful who you talk to.’
The woman places a hand against the door. ‘I’m not a reporter, Mrs Nicholls. I work for the Children’s Overseas Reception Board. We met yesterday, at the offices.’
The words land on Lily like a splash of cold water to the face. She remembers her now. A sultry June morning. A breezy smile. You’re lucky to have got ahead of the queue … The same woman whose arm she’d grabbed yesterday at the CORB offices. The best thing you can do for your son now is to go home and let us do our jobs. We’ll be in touch if there is any further news. Slowly, the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Lily understands why the woman is here.
‘They’ve found him, haven’t they? They’ve found Arthur!’ Her voice is thin; fragile. She holds her hand to her mouth to stifle a sob. ‘Is he safe? Is he hurt? Where is he?’
The woman looks at the ground and shakes her head. Why is she shaking her head? Lily grips the edge of the doorframe to steady herself.
‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Nicholls. I don’t have news of your son, but I am here about the Carlisle. My sister was also on the ship, as a volunteer escort. My sister is Alice King. She collected your children.’
Alice King. The name is so familiar to Lily. She has thought about her every day since the children left, and yet she knows hardly anything about her. Certainly not enough for her sister to be standing on the front doorstep.
‘You said something yesterday, at the CORB offices,’ the woman continues. ‘Something about a limit of convoy.’
Lily’s mind is a whirl. She can barely remember what day it is, hardly remembers going to the CORB offices yesterday. Everything is shrouded in a fog of grief. ‘Why are you here?’ She is too tired to be polite.
The woman steps forward. ‘It might be easier to talk inside?’
Too exhausted to question the whys and wherefores, Lily opens the door fully and stands to one side.
‘Thank you.’ The woman extends a hand as she steps inside. ‘Kitty King. Katherine, actually, but everyone calls me Kitty.’
Kitty King fills the narrow hallway of number 13 with the heady aroma of expensive perfume. Lily watches in a sort of trance as Kitty pulls off her gloves and hangs her coat on the stand with the confidence and familiarity of someone who visited her regularly.
‘I’m so desperately sorry about your son, Mrs Nicholls.’ Kitty places her hand on Lily’s arm. ‘Is it all right to call you Lily? Such a pretty name.’
Lily nods. ‘Your sister? Alice. Is she …?’
Kitty shakes her head and takes a deep breath. ‘Alice wasn’t listed among the survivors.’ All the colour drains from her face as she looks at Lily. ‘And she wasn’t among the names of those they … recovered.’
Lily notices the red tinge to Kitty’s eyes; the glisten of tears. ‘I’m sorry.’
Kitty dabs a handkerchief to her nose. ‘I keep talking about her, telling people, but I can’t believe it’s real. I don’t want it to be real.’
This, Lily understands. ‘You’d better come through.’ She leads the way through to the kitchen. ‘Ignore the mess. There was a fire.’
‘Incendiary?’
‘Toast, actually.’
The reply is so ridiculous that they both laugh. It is a tired attempt to conceal their pain.
Kitty sits in Peter’s chair and places her handbag on the table. ‘I’m so sorry to turn up like this in such awful circumstances. You must think me very odd.’ She takes a packet of cigarettes from her handbag. ‘Do you mind?’
Lily says she doesn’t mind, although she does, a little. She grabs a saucer for an ashtray.
Kitty’s hands tremble as she lights her cigarette. ‘I really shouldn’t, but in a time of crisis, and all that. You don’t smoke?’
Lily says no, and wishes she did. She fills two glasses with water from the sink and sits in the seat opposite Kitty at the table. She guesses Kitty is in her early twenties, although she carries an air of heaviness that seems to age her.
‘How did you know my address? And that I’d met your sister?’
‘I knew Alice had come here because I checked the records after we spoke yesterday. Georgina and Arthur Nicholls were listed as a home collection for Alice King.’ Kitty opens her handbag and takes out some papers. ‘I came here because of what you said about the limit of convoy. How did you know about that?’
‘A neighbour. Her husband is in the navy.’ Lily needs an aspirin. Her head feels like an iron bomb about to explode. ‘I just want to know if the Carlisle’s escort was with them when the U-boat fired the torpedo. I want to know if my children were sailing under the protection we were promised.’
Kitty blows a ribbon of smoke toward the charred ceiling and crushes her almost-full cigarette into the saucer. ‘Your question prompted me to look through the Atlantic shipping records for the past few days. I’m Mr Quinn’s private secretary now, since poor Gloria caught one in a raid, so I get access to lots of official records and reports.’
‘And?’
Kitty hesitates.
‘I’ve already been told my son is dead, Miss King. There isn’t anything worse you can possibly tell me.’
Kitty lets out a deep breath. ‘The naval escort for SS Carlisle’s convoy dispersed early on the morning of the disaster, at longitude 17 degrees west, around five hundred miles out, the range at which it is widely believed U-boats don’t operate. Also known as the limit of convoy. From that point on, all outbound convoys proceed unescorted.’ Kitty looks at Lily. ‘You were right. The escort ships weren’t present when the U-boat fired the torpedo.’
Lily’s head feels as if it will burst. ‘So they abandoned them. They sent our children halfway across the Atlantic and abandoned them.’ She stands up. She feels like screaming. ‘I wouldn’t have sent them if I’d known! I thought they were being escorted all the way to Canada. Protected until they arrived.’
‘I suspect everyone thought the same. Alice certainly did. We talked about it over dinner not long before she left. There will be dozens of grieving families who’ll want to know why the naval escort left, and why it took twelve hours for a rescue ship to reach survivors, and why the other ships in the convoy didn’t go immediately to the Carlisle’s aid. There are so many questions, Lily. I think we deserve some answers, don’t you?’
Lily hardly knows what to think, what to do with this awful new information. She sips her water and wishes she had something stronger.
‘I’m sorry to burden you with all this, Lily. I don’t know you at all, but when I saw you at the offices yesterday, I realized you were the first person I’d met with a personal connection to the Carlisle. I had to do something other than sit in my flat and cry. I came here purely on instinct. There isn’t any logic in grief, is there?’
Lily understands the need to act, to follow instinct. ‘I have to find Arthur,’ she says. ‘I should be doing something, not sitting here discussing naval escorts and longitudes.’
‘Did you know that only seven CORB children were picked up by HMS Imperial, your daughter included? Just seven out of the ninety who boarded in Liverpool.’
The number is impossibly small. Lily doesn’t know what to say. ‘I didn’t know that. I hardly know anything.’
Kitty pulls some more papers from her handbag and spreads them out on the table. ‘According to official reports, SS Carlisle was hit just after ten on Tuesday night. She sank within half an hour, with all lifeboats launched. A supply vessel in the convoy, HMS Eagle, was also hit, and the crew abandoned ship in a lifeboat. In the force nine gale that night, those who made it off the Carlisle faced terrible conditions and many of the lifeboats were capsized. One hundred and forty-eight survivors were picked up by HMS Imperial around noon the next day, close to the wreckage. They conducted a search pattern to check for other survivors, but without success. Two hundred and fifty souls were lost. Only fifty bodies were recovered.’
Lily absorbs the facts, stark and terrible as they are. Until Kitty arrived, it had been a tragedy of two. Now, it expands and amplifies, the scale of it overwhelming, the devastation immeasurable. She grabs the kitchen calendar. ‘What day is it today?’
‘Saturday. There’ll be an official announcement in the newspapers tomorrow, when they’re sure all the parents have been contacted. There are a few we are struggling to locate, having been bombed out of their homes. There’ll be a national outcry when people hear.’
Lily’s mind is a jumble of dates and times. Arthur has been lost for four nights. Starved of details, she is suddenly desperate for any information Kitty can give her. ‘You said something about a search pattern?’
‘Yes. When looking for survivors at sea, rescue ships use a grid system. They traverse back and forth over a set distance – a mile say – and then move onto the next one-mile square in the grid, and so on, sweeping the surface of the ocean.’
‘And when do they stop searching?’
‘When they reach a point beyond which a lifeboat or any wreckage could feasibly have travelled, given the tides and wind speed and direction. Things like that.’
‘So, if a lifeboat had drifted just outside that grid, it would be missed? The rescue ship wouldn’t see it, but it could still be there, just beyond the search pattern?’
‘I suppose so, but it’s extremely unlikely. The rescue ship wouldn’t have left the search area unless the captain was certain they’d accounted for all the lifeboats and, given the conditions that night, it seems improbable that anyone else could have survived beyond the twelve hours it took the rescue ship to reach the site. Impossible, even.’
Lily puts her head in her hands. ‘I still don’t understand why they’ve already given up looking. Why not search in a new grid? There must be other survivors; other children. And I know Arthur is alive. I can feel it.’
Kitty’s cheeks turn suddenly pale. ‘Do you mind if I use your outhouse?’ She rushes outside before Lily can answer.
When she returns, Lily refills Kitty’s glass of water. ‘You don’t look very well.’
Kitty says she’s fine. ‘Bit of an upset tummy, that’s all.’
‘It’s the shock. I’ve felt nauseous since I heard.’
‘Me too. Are you sleeping at all?’ Kitty asks.
‘Not really. You?’
Kitty shakes her head, takes a handkerchief from her pocket and dabs at her tears. ‘I can’t stop thinking about her. She was so proud to be accepted as an escort. She thought she’d finally found something she could do, and do well. Why did it have to be Alice’s ship that was hit? She wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
Lily looks at Kitty and feels so sorry for her. They are both as lost as each other.
Kitty starts to return the paperwork to her handbag. ‘I want to know why her ship was abandoned and why survivors were left in the water for twelve hours. I want to know who is responsible. When I saw you at the CORB offices yesterday and you asked about the limit of convoy, I presumed you were looking for answers, too. Perhaps I was wrong.’
Lily places her head in her hands. ‘I’m not interested in finding someone to blame, Miss King. I just want to find my son.’
Kitty leans forward and reaches for Lily’s hands. ‘Then perhaps we can help each other after all.’
27
Mid-Atlantic. 21 September 1940
Day Four
For the second day in succession, the survivors in lifeboat twelve are blessed with blue skies, calm seas and bright sunshine. The bone-rattling cold of the first few days slowly lifts and everyone uses the spell of calmer weather to rest and recover, to tend to minor injuries and ailments, to patch up their tormented minds and restore their fractured optimism. The strain of the confined space and lack of water is taking its toll in frequently cramping muscles and increasing aches and pains. Everyone has a headache. Everyone has cracked lips and a sore throat and a dry mouth. Several people are suffering from something Jimmy calls immersion foot, their skin withered and wrinkled, as if they’ve stayed too long in the bath.
The children are in good spirits, full of chat about the whales, and how they were certain they would tip the lifeboat over and how they’d never seen anything so big. They are now even more interested in the tale of Moby Dick and beg Alice to continue the story. It is almost impossible now, her memory increasingly foggy, her lips swollen and crusted with salt. But she knows how much they enjoy story time, so she does her best, even though she stumbles over her words and remembers things out of sequence. The children are enthralled, but the words that circle through Alice’s mind, over and over, are those that come towards the end. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. She looks around the lifeboat and wonders which of them, alone, will be left to recount their tale.
‘Do you feel sad today, Auntie?’ Arthur asks. ‘You look sad.’
He is a perceptive child, unusually concerned with how others feel. Alice wonders how you do that, as a parent. How you instil in your child all the good things, and avoid the bad.
‘I’m just tired, Arthur,’ she says. ‘That’s all.’
‘I felt sad in the night,’ Robert says, joining the conversation. ‘I cried a bit, but I didn’t want to bother anyone.’
‘You should have told me, Robert. You should never feel sad on your own.’
‘I didn’t feel sad for me. I was sad for my mother. She’ll be so worried about me and Tom and Mattie.’
Hamish agrees. ‘When our dog went missing for two weeks it was the worst thing ever. Not just that he wasn’t at home, but that we didn’t know where he was, or if he was hurt and frightened. My father cried every day. He went out to the shed, but I still heard him.’
‘Did your dog come back?’ Billy asks. ‘Pigeons come back all the time.’
Hamish nods. ‘Turned up one morning covered in mud. We all cried then. My father didn’t even go out to the shed.’
Alice wishes there was a shed she could go to, to process her emotions in private, although she barely has the energy to cry. She feels her despair as a deep, invisible melancholy, a quiet agony.
After story time and a short game of Simon Says, Alice reminds the children to wash their hands and faces in preparation for grace and the midday rations.
Owen finds it laughable the way she insists on these small mealtime routines. ‘They’re not exactly about to take afternoon tea at the Ritz, are they? Who cares if they have grubby hands?’
‘I care! And the children care, even if they don’t realize it.’ Alice understands that these small, apparently insignificant things have become big things, vital drops of oil to keep the mechanism of hope turning. ‘If we stop hand washing and saying grace before we eat, it means we’ve given up.’
Alice notices that Owen says grace with them all for the first time before their midday meal that day.
They each take a dipper of water and a slice of tinned peach in quiet gratitude, but the fact doesn’t go unnoticed that the minuscule amount of water they’ve tolerated so far has been further reduced since the loss of the canister. Jimmy has recalculated their rations. With the rainwater they’ve managed to collect, they have just enough for the remaining days he expects it will take to reach Ireland. Not for the first time, it strikes Alice how much effort and organization is involved in the act of survival. It is, in itself, a thing to be endured.
When everyone has taken their share, Owen peels off his clothes and, once again, dives into the water. To avoid the panic he’d caused previously, he’d announced his intention to swim twice a day, weather permitting, five laps around the boat, for as long as he is able.
‘Anyone who wants to join me is welcome. It’s a big pool for one.’
Alice leans against the gunwale and watches Owen as he swims around the boat, lap after lap, one arm over the other, slow and steady. He looks so peaceful and free. She envies the cleansing wash of water over his body, but the terrifying experience of falling in has left her increasingly wary of the ocean, and all she can think about when she watches Owen now is the cold and fear she’d felt.
‘Where do you find the strength?’ she asks as he swims past.
He taps his head. ‘Mind over matter.’
He is the only one among them still showing any real signs of vigour and, without doubt, is one of the most valuable people in the lifeboat. Where everyone else has become listless and weak, Owen has retained an air of stubborn resilience. Alice still finds him a curious man, certainly like nobody she has ever met before, but for all that he is opinionated and loud-mouthed, there’s an energy about him that’s impossible to ignore. His ability to get the children to snap out of a moment of despair or self-pity is admirable. His unpredictability, while unnerving, is exciting. What might he say next? What might he do? Sometimes, he turns around and lets out an almighty, ‘Boo!’ at the children, drawing them out of their stupor, bringing them back to life. He is the spark they all need, and although Alice finds him unfathomable and infuriating and argumentative, she also finds him impossible to dislike.
