Torpedoed: Chapters 9–13

Others were injured from falling debris, some of them so seriously that they would not recover.

The noise was overwhelming: the loud alarm bells, more glass shattering, and people screaming and shouting.

There was a dense blue haze filling the air and a terrible acrid odor. It was cordite, used to make explosives, bombs, torpedoes.

In a drugged and leaden state, he pulled himself up and walked around the dark cabin, looking for his raincoat and his life jacket.

She made sure that Ailsa and Patricia put on their life jackets, too. These weren’t fitted kapok ones, but the big, cumbersome ones with huge cork panels in the back and front.

The cork swelled up in the water and kept you from going under. That would come in handy later, but now they were unwieldy. Once the girls had them on, it was even more difficult to move, the three of them in those big cork life jackets, with furniture tumbled all around.

Some of the crew were searching for people belowdecks, trapped in their cabins or behind debris in the corridors. Especially the CORB children, whose section of the ship had been devastated by the torpedo.

Help had to be sent with utmost dispatch.

Earlier in the day, the Winchelsea had rescued the captain and crew from the British merchant Crown Arun, a straggler from an incoming convoy that had been torpedoed.

Ailsa was still bleeding profusely.

Of course, he knew that if the weather was bad where he was, it was likely to be bad where the survivors of the Benares were, presumably in open, exposed lifeboats.

Beth could see the remnants of the little nook where she and Bess used to talk. Soon that would disappear, too.

She was desperate to find Gussie, Violet, and Connie Grimmond; the lovely art student, Rosemary Spencer-Davies; impish Maureen Dixon; little Ann Watson, with her blond corkscrew curls; Eleanor Wright; the two pairs of sisters; all her girls.

The high waves and strong winds and the tilt of the sinking ship, which was still moving, made the launching of the lifeboats precarious.

Even in the dark Bess could see that people were bewildered and confused, running here and there.

Even once a ship’s engines are stopped completely, momentum will keep a vessel moving, and ocean currents propel it along, too. Unfortunately, the continued movement can cause a ship to sink faster because a moving ship takes on water more quickly than a stationary one.

The crew was working against the wind, the rain, and the ship’s movement; most of the time they couldn’t see what they were doing. Although their actions would later be questioned, the consensus was that they worked well and diligently.

The crew was working against the wind, the rain, and the ship’s movement; most of the time they couldn’t see what they were doing. Although their actions would later be questioned, the consensus was that they worked well and diligently.

The boat was tilting and wavering.

Also at play were the vicissitudes of fate, human error, accident, and bad luck.

Had he died slowly from exposure to the cold water and air?

Perhaps he fell asleep, perhaps he passed out. Maybe he repressed what happened.

But Bess’s ghastly nightmare continued. All of a sudden a huge wave hit their boat. Some of the passengers were flung into the ocean.

I mustn’t panic, he told himself. I must think this through rationally.

After what seemed like a long time, his lifeboat came down abreast the ship rail. It was banging backward and forward against the ship’s side.

They managed to get into their lifeboat, but it capsized. Pat surfaced and made it to Colin’s lifeboat, but her mother didn’t.

Pat was inconsolable, certain her mother had drowned.

His life jacket, the one his mother had made for him, might be too buoyant, he realized.

Although it was too dark to see them, he knew there were people stranded in the water. He heard their plaintive cries: Can we get on your lifeboat?

But she managed to climb up the rounded side of the boat and grab hold of the keel, which ran along the center of the boat’s bottom.