Another day dawns and I know it’s going to be like all the others. Nothing different. Nothing remarkable. I know that when it’s over it will simply slip away and blur into all the other dreadful days we’ve already endured. I’m too bone weary to even think about what will happen next. And besides, I already know. Today, more of us will die in this wretched lifeboat.
The boat is 30 feet long and painted grey. It’s really a very big rowing boat made of timber. A clinker hulled, open-whaler type of boat. A dirty sheet of yellow canvas is hanging motionless on an oar that the bosun erected as a makeshift mast. We’re drifting on a calm sea, going God knows where. And going there slowly.
‘What day is it?’ a weak voice croaks unexpectedly, without any real interest, as if there is no particular need to know. It’s a question asked for the sake of asking, an idle curiosity. I wonder what difference it could possibly make, knowing the date.
‘It’s October the second,’ someone answers after I’ve forgotten the question. But the words send a signal into my jellied brain, a faint pinprick of recognition.
October the second. I know that date. I connect it to the year, 1942. Suddenly it makes sense.
‘It’s my birthday,’ I announce, surprised at my own discovery. Then I think to add: ‘My twenty-first birthday.’
There is a long silence. Eventually the British nurse, who is sitting near me, says: ‘Well, that calls for a celebration.’ Her smile, as always, makes me feel better. It gives me hope.
There is a strange stirring around me that I don’t immediately connect with the announcement of my birthday. Then I see something being passed along from person to person, unsteady hand to unsteady hand. And then I’m holding it, looking at it rather stupidly. It’s an oblong ration tin. Sparkling in the bottom is an unbelievably precious and generous gift of two tantalising tablespoons of water. A double ration. Because I’m 21.
I tilt the tin so the water runs into one corner, and fool myself into believing that I’ve been given even more than a double ration. I bring the tin to my lips and drink my birthday present, one jealously guarded sip after another, stretching out the moment, willing it not to end. But it does. The tin is empty. And that’s my party. Over before it even begins. No one sings Happy Birthday. No one suggests I’m a jolly good fellow. No one has the strength.
I look around me. This is a very strange place to be spending my birthday, in a lifeboat somewhere in the Atlantic with a most peculiar bunch of party guests. They seem to have come in tattered fancy dress decorated with encrusted salt. Their lips are grotesquely swollen and split. Their faces are festooned with ugly strips of peeling skin.
How odd that there are mostly old people at my birthday party, and all uninvited come to think of it. More people should have been here today, but they’ve gone. Some left willingly. Others, I’m not so sure.
The morning is already hot, and I know it will get hotter. The sea looks oily, slick and unfriendly. The only thing on it is this lifeboat, and as my mind fades in and out of reality I become convinced that the world I once knew was nothing more than a figment of my imagination, that there has only ever been this boat and this place. We are deserted souls adrift on a deserted sea on a deserted planet. The loneliness is appalling. I’m now certain this dreadful isolation will be the death of me. If the sea isn’t the death of me first.
Will I get to be 22? I can’t concentrate long enough to answer my own question. In a strange way I don’t care about my own suffering, but I worry greatly that my family will be tortured by grief when they hear of my fate. Perhaps they’ve been told already, told I’m dead when I’m not. Not yet, anyway. The thought of causing them anguish grinds away at my insides, doubling the dull ache of hunger.
How did I come to be here? What twists and turns of fate brought me to this moment, to this unknown spot in the Atlantic, to this sad and desperate little boat?
I know the answer to this only too well. I’m here because of Liverpool. Liverpool and the ships. It was always the magic of the ships pulling me to this point. I couldn’t have resisted even if I’d tried.