She wasn’t sure. Mrs. Leech had talked about this pension she had heard of that sounded perfect—“Marvelous food, and run by an English couple.” Shirley would try to get the name of it tomorrow.
“That’s good.” His arm was round her. There were people not far away along the deck, but it was so dark you couldn’t tell who anyone was until you were close up. And anyway, even if Mrs. Leech appeared—so what? I’m doing nothing wrong, she thought, I’ve a perfect right. It surprised her that she could think like this.
The feel of him was all over her, later on, when she got into her bunk. His voice was still in her head, so that she hardly heard Nanny Clavering nattering away about the state the toilets were in. He said, “Good night,” again and again, as she lay there on the brink of sleep. “Good night. Take care. Tomorrow—yes?”
She dreamed. She dreamed of porpoises, slicing through the dark water, and of a mermaid on a rock, like in Jean’s book, and of Alan Baker. And then something invaded the dreams—a crash, a great distant rumbling noise, she was being shaken around, her body was juddering.
The alarm bell pitched her wide awake. She seemed to have slept for no time at all, but her watch said half past three. The bell was loud, penetrating; Nanny Clavering was sitting up in her bunk saying it was perfectly disgraceful having a lifeboat drill in the middle of the night.
As soon as Shirley was standing she felt that there was something not right; the throb of the ship’s engine felt urgent, erratic, and the slant of the floor was odd.
She said, “It’s not a drill. Get dressed. Get Jamie dressed.”
They had had lifeboat drills several times. You knew what to do. You knew where your lifeboat station was; you knew that you had to dress in warm clothing, put on life jackets, take only essentials with you. You knew that you had to move quickly and calmly to the correct station. She dressed Jean first, then herself, putting on their thick jerseys. Then she got their life jackets on, properly tied. She had to help Nanny Clavering, who was getting in a state. She took Jean’s little seed-pearl necklace, which she wore to parties, and her own charm bracelet and her silver filigree brooch from the Mouski, and her passport, and put them in her bag along with the Nivea cream and the bottle of Milk of Magnesia and the iodine and the mercurochrome and some handkerchiefs and a box of plasters. When the others were ready she opened the cabin door and got them all out into the corridor.
It was filling up with people, everyone trying to get to the stairways. Some people had suitcases. Mrs. Leech’s cabin was back toward the end, and to get to it they would have to push against the crowd, so Shirley decided they must go straight to the boat station on the promenade deck and meet up with Mrs. Leech and Mrs. Clavering there.
They were on the stairs when there was a tremendous thump. The ship lurched and all the lights went out. There was a series of muffled bangs, and now this pungent, acrid smell. People fell against each other; there were screams and shouting. There was a great crush on the stairs, with people barging and shoving; an officer at the top was calling out to stay calm, not to push, to take it easy. He was telling the people with suitcases that they must leave them, they couldn’t take them on the boats. Shirley was jammed against the people in front of her, she was clutching hold of Jean, and someone behind had a case knocking against her legs. Just ahead, one of the Armenian girls was weeping and wailing, the Hamilton baby propped over her shoulder.
They got to the upper deck, but then there were more stairs up to the promenade deck, and more people. She kept looking back to see if she could see Mrs. Leech, but no sign, and anyway it was too dark to make out faces. Everyone was shouting out names, trying to find each other. Jean was terribly confused: “What’s happening? Where are we going? Why aren’t there any lights?” The officers were flashing torches to help people find the way, and when at last they were up on the top deck it was easier to see, with some moonlight. But the deck wasn’t level, it was sloping, so that there was a pull up toward lifeboat station number six, by the rail, which was theirs—and then she realized that the whole ship was listing over to one side.
They were lowering the lifeboats from the boat deck—lascars swarming around on ropes, sailors hurrying to and fro. As more people came out of the stairway onto the deck, she spotted Mrs. Leech and Mrs. Clavering—Mrs. Leech with her dressing case, which she must have got past the officers somehow, and her silver fox fur cape.
Mrs. Leech was hysterical. Mrs. Clavering wasn’t much better. They were relieved to find the children, but it made Jean even more upset, seeing her mother like that. Shirley tried to distract her, getting her to look at the lifeboats coming alongside the rail. The next station was already getting into their boat—about thirty people, with an officer in charge and several lascars. There was a lot of shouting from the seamen and the boat was lowered, but not gradually, it went in fits and starts, something kept getting stuck it seemed, and the people in the boat were being thrown around. She heard screams. Because of the ship’s list, the side was like a great cliff and the sea far below, dark as anything, glinting here and there in the moonlight. Shirley didn’t want to look. It would be them next.
Each lifeboat station was alongside one of those stretches of rail that were made to be opened, as though the ship had always been waiting for this. She had stood with Alan Baker against one of them, only hours before.
Now it was their turn to get into the lowered boat, the officer helping them on one by one, telling them to go to the end quickly, make room for the next person. Mrs. Leech was saying, “Oh, no—no, no,” again and again. Shirley had to manhandle her into the boat and onto a seat. She said, “Shut your eyes now,” and Mrs. Leech did, obedient, like a child.
When they started to lower the boat, Shirley took Jean on her lap and held her tightly—she’d seen how those other people had been pitched about. And it was horrible. They hung there rocking, in midair, and then the boat began to go down, slowly at first, and then it dropped, and they hit the sea with a wallop, water surging over the sides, people falling off the seats.
At once, the lascars were rowing. She saw why. They had to get away from the ship. Another lifeboat was banging up against the soaring hull, sucked in by the current, desperately trying to get clear. And up above more boats were coming down—there was a confusion of ropes and flashing torches and shouting and children crying. Shirley had to watch, she couldn’t take her eyes off the sight of it—the great leaning ship, with smoke billowing up now from somewhere, and the little boats coming down into the heaving sea. And so it was that she saw one boat tip up at one end and hang there crookedly with people falling out, dark shapes pitching into the water. And another smashed into the side of the ship—planks flew apart and dropped, people were falling again, and then down in the water there were heads bobbing, and someone trying to get into the broken boat. She sat rigid, watching; suddenly there were lights—the emergency lights on the decks must have come on—and you could clearly see figures moving about, and piling into the boats that still hung up there.
The lascars were struggling to get the boat away from the side of the ship, pulling frantically on the oars. They managed to open up quite a gap, and then there was a surge that washed them back toward the hull. Up above, another boat was just starting the descent, packed with people. It swung, lurched, and then crashed hard into the side. Someone fell—Shirley saw the tumbling body, only yards away. There were other things falling—ropes, bits of wood—and then an oar came crashing down into their boat.
It knocked several people off their seats. There was screaming. The officer was shouting to the lascars to pull harder.
Jean was sitting close up against Shirley. The oar caught her on the side of the head; she fell across Shirley’s lap like a little rag doll.
Shirley clung on to the child. She lifted her up on her knees and cradled her head in the crook of her arm. She couldn’t see or feel blood, but she knew that Jean was unconscious. The people who had been knocked into the well of the boat w
ere trying to get back onto their seats; someone was moaning “My arm—oh, my arm.”
The lascars had opened up a gap at last. There was clear water between the boat and the side of the ship, but it was water littered with debris, with people in life jackets, with bobbing heads. A lifeboat had capsized, Shirley now saw; everyone in it had been thrown into the water. There were flares going up from the ship—amber, red, and white distress flares that threw a momentary lurid light on the sea, and lit up the blackness of the sky.
She held Jean. She ran her fingers around her head and could feel a bump now, and the stickiness of blood, but there didn’t seem to be much. It hadn’t been so very hard a bang—surely she would be all right? A woman on the bench behind was saying that she thought her arm was broken. Shirley could see Mrs. Leech, leaning up against Mrs. Clavering, looking dazed; she wanted to tell her about Jean, but could only have done so by shouting across the people in between.
They were getting farther from the ship all the time. The shapes of other lifeboats were dotted about on the sea, all trying to pull away from the ship. The seamen were flashing torches, to keep in contact. There were figures still visible on the ship, moving about on the deck, and a lifeboat coming down; Shirley thought she could make out the shapes of two or three more, hanging there waiting to go. What was happening seemed to have been going on for hours, but she realized that in fact it had only been minutes—half an hour, perhaps—since they left the cabin, since they made their way up to the deck, since the torpedo hit them. The second torpedo—because she now knew that the first one must have been when they were still asleep, when her dream had seemed to roar and heave.
Where was he? Where was Alan Baker? She stared at the listing ship, and she knew that he was still there, still on board, because he would have been helping the soldiers to get up on deck, those men without a foot or a leg, or unable to see, and he would not leave until the very last one of them was on a lifeboat.
She looked down at Jean. Her eyelids seemed to flutter, which must be a good sign, and Shirley could feel her breathing. They were well away from the ship now, and the lascars were resting on their oars; the young officer was calling out, was everyone okay?
Well, no. There was the woman with the broken arm, and someone else who had a badly gashed leg. And Mrs. Leech wasn’t making sense anymore, apparently. Mrs. Stannard, who had had VAD training, had a look at her and said she was in deep shock. She looked at Jean too and thought that she was probably concussed, and that there was nothing to be done but just to keep her warm and still and she should come round in time.
People were quiet and calm now, on the whole. Scared—you could feel the fear running from person to person like a current. And then suddenly there was something else—gasps, someone saying “Oh, my God . . .”; they were all seeing what was happening, that the ship was going, the bow tilting up, the whole great shape sliding away, in slow motion it seemed, upending into the sea.
It was there, and then it was not. In darkness and in silence, it went. They sat watching, twenty-five people in the rocking boat; someone was crying, someone else prayed out loud: “Our Father, which art in Heaven . . .” One of the lascars made a kind of wailing noise, and then fell silent.
Just the sky and the sea now, a vast surrounding space with nothing visible but here and there the flashing light from another of the boats. The officer was counting heads and checking names, calling out from a list. He was trying to keep people’s spirits up: they’d be picked up, no question, the signals would have been heard, the flares seen, there was water on the boat, and rations. Shirley knew him well by sight; he had been one of those life-and-soul-of-the-party chaps from the bar, of an evening, and he had dressed up as Neptune for the crossing-the-line ceremony. She had helped to arrange his frayed rope wig and beard, and had made his robe out of an old sheet. Now, he was somberly brisk and controlled, but he looked younger, somehow; he was probably her own age, she saw, around twenty-four. Two of the lascars were just boys, another was almost an old man. The rest of them were . . . women and children.
As daylight came you could see faces. The Stannards were all there, and the teacher from the English School, and Mrs. Hope with that tiny baby. It was the teacher who had a broken arm. She sat, white-faced; Mrs. Stannard was trying to fix up a splint.
First of all there were streaks of light to one side, and then the whole sky gradually lightened and you could see the rim of the horizon all around, and then other lifeboats—some quite far away, others near enough for the officer to shout across to them. They were trying to stay together, but the wind had picked up now and the sea was choppy, so that the lascars had to row to keep within the ring of boats. They were being flung about by the waves; people were starting to be sick.
Later, it became calm again. But now the sun was right up, and inescapable. No shade, the heat beating down, the light hitting back up off the water. Shirley had one of the Armenian girls next to her on the seat, and they laid Jean out on both their laps with her head on Shirley’s arm and Shirley’s jersey arranged so as to keep as much sun off her as possible. She was moving a little, occasionally; at one point her eyes opened, and then closed again.
Measures of water were given out, and biscuits. Shirley tried to trickle water into Jean’s mouth, but she wouldn’t swallow. They had now been hours and hours on those hard wooden seats, sitting bolt upright, with only each other to lean against—you ached all over. People had made handkerchiefs into hats—anything to keep the sun off; the children were getting frantic. Mrs. Stannard tried to get up a sing-song, but that soon petered out; nobody had the heart for it.
The hours inched by. In the middle of the day, the sea was like molten metal. Shirley’s head was pounding; her mouth was dry and parched. There would be another handout of water later, they said. How much water was there? No good thinking about that. She tried to think about nothing at all, to focus on sounds—the creaking of the boat, the slap of water against the side—or just to stare at the back of the person in front of her, the paisley pattern of a blouse, the texture of the material. Now and again she changed Jean’s position a little; sometimes the little girl would whimper, which seemed promising.
Occasionally she heard Mrs. Leech talking incoherently. People said she was hallucinating—didn’t understand where she was or what was happening. Which could be a mercy. For the rest of them, who understood only too well, there was nothing but the grim passage of time. The officer was constantly watching the sky and the horizon, his eyes screwed up against the glare; you knew what he was searching for.
The sun crept down the sky. The water ration came round again. The teacher had been given some brandy; she was in a lot of pain from her arm. At one point, a girl passed out; they managed to lie her down for a bit in the well of the boat, but you couldn’t do that for long—they were so tightly packed, there simply wasn’t room.
In the early evening, Jean died. Shirley knew at once: the stillness, the sense that something vital was gone from the body across her lap.
She sat on, as the sun sank, as the light began to drain from the sky, as the moon’s disk rose above the horizon. She was so tired that she felt numb; sometimes she drifted into a kind of floating state, and then would come to with a lurch, aware again of the people crowded around her, of Jean inert across her knees.
In the wastes of the night she must have slid deeply into this condition—some sort of mockery of sleep. And then people’s voices came rooting in—she heard them but seemed unable to respond, to feel anything at all. They were saying that there was a destroyer, that it had seen them. It’s over, they were saying, it’s over, we’re going to be picked up.
But it isn’t over, she thought. It has only just begun. She knew that the sinking ship had taken with it a whole life that she would never live, a time that would never be. Jean’s cold little body lay across her knees, and all she could think was that Jean hadn’t known about death, she didn’t even know what death was.
Thi
s never happened. Or rather, it did not happen to me—to us, to the triumvirate of my mother, my nanny, and myself, who did indeed flee Egypt during the run-up to the battle of El Alamein, but not to go to South Africa. We went to Palestine, and that is another story, part of the indestructible fabric of my life, of our lives. The fate of the sunken ship is confabulation, and so are all who sailed in her. Shirley Manners is not Lucy, my real-life nanny; but there was a girl in Cairo in the early 1940s whom the other nannies called Film Star, and by some perverse quirk of memory I know this still, though I don’t remember her at all. I have given her a fictional reincarnation, for her to speak for a time, and a place, and a climate of opinion and of behavior.
There were Japanese U-boats active in the Mozambique Channel in June and July of 1942. Twenty Allied ships were sunk by these before they withdrew at the end of July. Shipping traffic was dense up and down the east coast of Africa, with most vessels sailing independently, since antisubmarine escorts were not available. One of those sunk ships could have been carrying British civilian passengers, along with military personnel. For some reason, my mother had decided to head for Palestine, rather than South Africa, thus twitching me away from that particular whirlpool, or rapid, or treacherous rock.
The Albert Hall
I came to England at the age of twelve, just before the end of the war, to an alien place of astonishing cold and a social system that was mysterious to me. I had spent my childhood in African sunshine, in the polyglot and cosmopolitan ambience of Cairo. The next few years were a time of grim adjustment, passed mainly at a boarding school on the south coast. I remember a fair amount about that stultifying institution, but for the most part those adolescent years are long periods of darkness, into which occasionally a light shines.
I am lying on the veranda at my grandmother’s house in Somerset, trying to get a suntan. Doves coo, someone is mowing the grass; the day is stationary, time itself is at a halt. I am fifteen, and waiting to grow up.