SOMEWHERE IN THE ENGLISH CHANNEL, MAY 1917
It was colder than she had ever imagined cold to be, and wet and dark and almost impossible to swim with the lifebuoy and her skirts, but she managed arm over arm, frantically, screams and cries all around her and behind her, gradually dying away except for shouts and someone sobbing, far away. She felt the ship as it finally sank, as if it were trying to drag her into the vast silence where once there had been engines.
She kept on swimming, or at least struggling with the water, refusing to let it drown her as the waves dashed against her face or over her head.
Time vanished. Now and then people shouted orders in the distance, but gradually they faded. Either she had drifted further away, or they had drowned. She called ‘Alan!’ a few times, but there was no answer. She hadn’t expected one. The world had shrunk to darkness and the cold.
She struggled on.
Waves. Water. The cold became pain, then numbness. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep, and let the lifebuoy keep her up, but knew that if she did she would never open them again, never see her family. She would die before she had ever truly lived. She forced herself to glance up at the stars every so often, to see they had moved so she knew time was passing.
She laboured on. At least the swimming meant the cold could not take her quite as quickly, but the cold was winning now.
Then she saw it, a yellow arrow in the night. A torchlight, searchlight, but she had no machine to send an SOS. She vaguely realised voice would do.
‘Help!’
It was only after her third cry she realised she might be calling to a German ship, even perhaps the U-boat that had torpedoed them, come to the surface to hunt down survivors.
The light came closer. A man yelled, ‘Anyone there?’
‘I’m here!’ she screamed.
‘Blimey, it’s a woman.’
English, she thought with relief, then let her eyes close as the sound of water slapping on planking grew closer. Something hooked itself onto her lifebuoy, and then at last hands lifted her from the water.