by Bodie Thoene
Another male figure was wearing top hat, tail coat, and…pajama bottoms.
A cabin door snapped open. A woman in bare feet, with her hair in curlers, wearing a silk gown and a thick layer of cold cream on her cheeks, demanded to know what we meant by making so much noise.
Where had she been in the minutes since the torpedo struck? How could she still be so ignorant of the danger?
“Torpedo. Get dressed. Get to your lifeboat,” I snapped.
“Impossible,” the woman protested. “They told us we were safe. Besides, the steward promised he would alert me personally if there were an emergency. I shall certainly complain to the management of the shipping line.” And she slammed the door.
There were many arguments about whether the emergency was real or not. Some thought it was a singularly inconvenient drill. Others said with authority that we had been struck by another ship in the blacked-out convoy, but that the damage was slight. One of these proposed returning to the salon to resume an interrupted game of bridge.
A white-uniformed steward added to the incongruity of the scene by striding along, striking a dinner gong. “Go to your lifeboat stations.” Clang! “To your stations, please.” Clang! “Have your life vests with you. Go to your stations, please.” His voice was as calm as if he were announcing afternoon tea.
What cut through all the confusion at last is forever frozen in my memory. A mother with a girl and a boy huddled together berated her son for having left his overcoat in their cabin. “Now I’ll have to go back and get it,” she said with exasperation.
A ship’s officer bellowed at her, “No! Under no circumstances may you go back anywhere. Get to your evacuation station. Don’t you understand? We’re sinking!”
With that official pronouncement there was a concerted movement toward the boat deck.
I came out into the wind and suddenly realized how bad our situation truly was. A 30-mph wind was whipping the sea into long streamers of white foam. Twenty-foot-high rollers crashed into Newcastle from an angle behind us, making the ship lumber and wallow. The dip toward the bow and the tilt to starboard continued to increase.
I reached the launch station for Lifeboat Number 4…and it was already gone!
Peering over the side, I saw it. My imagined rescue was hanging near the end of its cables. The craft capable of carrying twenty evacuees to safety had been launched with only ten on board, and none of them were children.
I shouted at them to stop, to come back. Foolish of me, I know. Whether they heard me or not made no difference. They were intent on escape. Perhaps they could not have rehoisted the boat anyway.
Soon enough they must have wished they could.
One of the cables, the one supporting the stern of the lifeboat, jammed in its pulley, while the one on the bow continued to unspool. Angled steeply into the surf, with Newcastle still moving forward into the towering seas, the boat was dragged directly into the waves and instantly submerged.
All but one of those aboard was washed out.
The remaining occupant, a sailor, tried to save himself by climbing the hoist, but a wave slapped him and batted him against Newcastle’s hull. He sank out of sight.
There was no way to rescue any of those who went into the water and no way to retrieve the sunken lifeboat. All I could do was dash toward the stern in hopes of finding another place of safety.
Where were my girls?
The davits that suspended Lifeboat Number 6 were also empty. Despite my own urgent need to get off the Newcastle, I looked over the side of the Newcastle for Mrs. Pike and her charges. I spotted them at once in Lifeboat 6, recognizing the chaperone by the scarf still knotted over her brow. All around her clustered a bevy of smaller figures wearing life vests.
Were my girls also among them?
The frail boat bobbed just alongside. A sailor in the bow and an officer in the stern used oars to push Lifeboat Number 6 away from the doomed ship. I did not stop to count the girls. As Lifeboat 6 rode up the face of a twenty-foot swell and disappeared behind it, I could not be certain if they had all made it. Perhaps it was better to believe they were all safely aboard. Breathing a prayer for them, I lunged farther along the rail.
As I passed a stairwell, there came a cry for help. On the landing at the bottom was Robert, the boy everyone called Robin Hood. He was dressed in his forest-green life jacket and hooded cape.
Between Robert and safety was the lashing serpent of a live, severed electrical cable. With Newcastle corkscrewing in the surf, the thick wire appeared alive with malevolent intent. Its coils crisscrossed the steps. Each time the head of the snake hit a railing or steel support member it exploded with a shower of sparks. When the ship swung back to an even keel, there was barely a moment when the cable lay quiet.
“Jump over it!” I shouted to Robert. “You can do it.”
“I’m scared!”
“I’ll help you,” I said, wondering to myself what I could possibly do. “Throw something across it to weight it down.”
“What? I can’t find anything!”
Beside me was the cabinet of a fire hose. I smashed the glass with my elbow, grabbed the heavy spiral of canvas-covered tubing, and yelled to Robert, “Watch out!”
Yanking the hose free of its housing, I slung it down the steps. The tube unrolled as it traveled, falling across the electrical cable and pinning it down.
“Now!” I yelled.“Jump over it.”
Robert backed up, took a run at the stairs, and leapt over the angry, hissing wires with three feet to spare.
“What lifeboat?” I asked.
“Number 6,” he said. “Mum and Dad must already be there. Can you help me find it? I’m all mixed up.” His voice trembled, and he blinked rapidly.
I had to tell him that Number 6 had already left.
I did not tell him that all on board had been swept away. Perhaps Robert’s family was safe on some other craft. “Come with me. We’ll find them again later,” I said.
He let me take him by the hand, and we set out farther toward the stern. Newcastle stood more and more upright, and I feared she would slip beneath the surface at any moment.
The davits for Number 8 were also empty, but Number 10 was still in place and being loaded. “Take any boat available,” a man I recognized as Third Officer Browne shouted. “Women and children first. Here. Let me help you.”
Sweeping Robert up in his arms, the officer lifted the boy toward the railing of the lifeboat.
A trio of lascar sailors rushed up out of the darkness. One of them cannoned into Browne, sending him and Robert sprawling into me, and all of us to the deck. The native servants clambered into the boat and set about releasing the supports and paying out the lines.
Once again, rescue was slipping away.
“Stop!” Browne demanded. “There’s room for many more.”
The panicked group ignored him and continued their descent.
Robert’s sharp eyes picked out a problem with the bow cable. “Look out,” he called, “that end’s loose.” The front of Number 10 dropped rapidly seaward while the rear was still suspended high overhead.
The men in boat Number 10 heard his shrill cry and added their shrieks to the night as they desperately tried to catch the unspooling support rope. A lascar lunged for the free end, caught it, then was smashed headfirst into the pulley as the weight of the boat dropped free. His body cartwheeled into the waves.
With the bow now dangling straight down, all the occupants were pitched out except one. He stood upright, clinging to the stern support and shouting for help.
There was nothing any of us could do.
As Newcastle wallowed into another swell, the swing of the ship tossed the lifeboat against the steel hull like the clapper of a bell. The last man catapulted into the air and disappeared in the darkness.
“Come on,” Browne said, grabbing me by one hand and Robert by the other. “We’ve got to cross to the other side. Quickly. No time to lose.”
Third
Officer Browne led us from one side of the ship to the other, using narrow service passages known only to the ship’s crew. I would have been hopelessly lost in moments, but Browne’s sense of direction was unerring.
We emerged again into the night air directly beside Lifeboat Number 7. Miraculously, it was still suspended at the proper height for boarding, and it was being filled in an orderly manner.
“Elisa,” I heard Mariah cry. “Get in! Get in! You and Robert.” I breathed a sigh of relief. Surely the worst was over now.
I boosted Robert into her arms. Though I needed no urging to hurry me along, a muffled explosion shook Newcastle, and she heeled ever more sharply to starboard.
“One of the boilers,” Browne muttered. “Can’t last long now.”
Robert was pressed between Mariah and me. In all there were more than twenty passengers and crew crammed into the open, wooden-planked vessel.
“Where’s your sister? Where’s Patsy?” I asked Mariah, glancing around at the mix of children and adults. Instantly I clamped my mouth shut on my foolishness, but it was too late.
“We got separated.”
“She…she and your niece and nephew must be on another lifeboat,” I said awkwardly. How many times had I repeated that hopeful saying to myself and others? For how many hours had this tragedy been unfolding?
I spotted Raquel. Beside her was the oldest of the evacuee girls, but not the other two. Raquel was frantic with worry, standing up and leaning out of the lifeboat to call for “Simcha! Yael!” Then she added tersely, “Angelique, stay here. I must go look for the others.” She put a foot on the gunwale in preparation for jumping out.
“No, you don’t, miss,” Browne corrected, barring her way. “We’re about to launch. You’d have no boat to come back to. Anyone missing most likely got put into another craft.”
Raquel sat back down, trembling in every muscle. Her eyes darted ceaselessly up and down the deck. Angelique hugged her fiercely.
“It’s true,” I said. “The officers are making a thorough search to make certain everyone is off the ship.”
“You there, Wilson. Take charge of those boys.”
The English sailor addressed as Wilson loaded a file of boys over the stern. Among them I recognized Connor, whose birthday celebration had saved me from death. With him were the Apostles. I felt a rush of warmth at seeing them safe.
The sailor wore a wristwatch at which I could not help glancing. I thought it must be broken. Quarter ’til eleven? It had been only minutes past ten when the torpedo struck.
Forty-five minutes! Everything that had happened, from the instant the torpedo detonated, through all that had occurred since, had transpired in less than an hour. It did not seem possible.
Suddenly every light on Newcastle blazed into life. Like the last surge of energy in a dying beast, the ship poured its heart into that illumination. “No one else coming,” Browne noted, scanning the brilliantly lit decks. “Right. Stand by to lower away.”
Wilson, the burly crewman in the bow, and a lascar sailor at the stern, stood by the cable releases.
“Everyone hold tight,” Browne added. “Carefully, now. Not too fast. Have to keep the angle right or we’ll swamp her.”
As we descended and all hope of anyone else joining us disappeared, I heard Raquel and Mariah both groan deeply, as if their souls were being wrenched from their bodies. Beside me Robert shivered, despite his cloak.
The back of Number 7 had to drop slightly ahead of the front to compensate for Newcastle’s angle. As the rear paid out too fast Robert shouted in terror before the sailor choked off the cable. The bouncing and jolting that followed were just as unnerving. I wrapped my arms around Robert and tucked my legs under the bench seat, fearful that what I had seen elsewhere would happen to us and we would be dumped into the sea.
“Gently! You in the middle there. Stand by with the oars to fend us off.”
The center ranks of the lifeboat were occupied by lascar crewmen. Prompt to the order, they held the long wooden paddles at the ready to keep us from being smashed into Newcastle’s hull.
Under Browne’s careful management, our lifeboat approached the waves on an even keel. Twice he ordered Number 7 hoisted partway back up until he was satisfied with the angle.
As we neared the sea, the wind whipped spray over us, and breakers coasted by beneath us like moving black hills. The momentary relief I had felt on reaching Number 7 and getting away from Newcastle dissolved. Being in a lifeboat in the midst of these towering seas and gale-force winds would be as terrifying as my earlier escape.
Because Newcastle was leaning toward us, we swung farther out from the side than other boats. The doomed ship drifted broadside to the waves, but her looming bulk provided some protection. Because of that circumstance and Officer Browne’s careful attention to detail, we landed on the ocean with scarcely a splash…and were instantly jostled and rolled like a matchstick in a flood.
“Right! Cast off,” Browne ordered. “Ship the oars and row us away from the hull.” Newcastle’s towering hulk loomed over us, as if a city block had been turned on edge and was about to crush the passersby on the sidewalk beneath.
As we drifted away from the doomed ship, the inky, featureless night was suddenly punctuated with riotous explosions of color. From the bridge and the ever-rising stern, flares shot skyward. Orange and scarlet and brilliant blue-white signals of distress burst overhead. The howling wind instantly stretched them into streaks of color—banners illuminating the underbellies of the racing clouds.
Beneath the moments of glare I got fragmented glimpses of other survivors struggling to keep afloat. Bright amber life vests dotted the water with those who had fallen from capsized boats. A pair of sailors clung to a drifting raft. In the distance was a lifeboat sunken to its waterline, yet still afloat. The occupants sat stiffly upright, bracing themselves against the waves. As the flare’s brilliance faded, they seemed to be sitting without support on the surface of the sea.
Blackness descended again as the beacon was extinguished. By the time the next one detonated above us a breaker had rolled across the swamped craft. Like a magician’s trick, now it was empty…the survivors had disappeared.
15
LIFEBOAT NUMBER 7
NORTH ATLANTIC
AUTUMN 1940
I could not make out how all the flurry of escaping from belowdecks and shuttling from place to place fit into three quarters of an hour. Time must have been standing still for me. As we rowed farther from the side of the ship, it felt as if I must be among the very last passengers to get away.
Yet I was wrong. Robert, sandwiched tightly between Mariah and myself, waved toward Newcastle’s railing. On the deck there a lone man struggled with a heavy life raft that was the last resort now that all the boats were gone. Single-handedly he muscled the wooden frame attached to metal pontoons up to the barricade, then heaved it over. It tumbled into the water, disappeared, then bobbed up again.
“Hurry, man!” Browne yelled. “There’s not much time!”
But instead of jumping for the raft, the man turned away and disappeared from sight. When he returned, he held a struggling, life-jacketed child under each arm, as if taking a pair of frenzied hens to market.
Raquel shrieked, “Simcha! Yael!”
In the two wrestling bundles I recognized the Jewish girls.
While we in Number 7 held our breath and prayed, the lone rescuer stepped over the rail with his charges and plunged into the sea. Even before they struck the surface our officer was yelling to the sailors to, “Pull, boys, pull!” He laid the tiller hard over to direct our course toward the trio bobbing between Newcastle and the raft.
Since I was neither rowing nor steering, I watched the man in the water with apprehension and hope. Mariah and I had to hold onto Raquel to keep her from jumping in the water.
The rescuer seized one child and tossed her onto the raft, then swam back and grabbed the other and did the same, before pulling himself ont
o the floating platform.
That was when I noticed the gaping hole in Newcastle’s flank, where the torpedo had entered and detonated. The rent in the ship’s skin climbed three decks upward from the keel past where my cabin used to be. While narrowing at the top of the wound, it was as broad as the length of a double-decker bus at its base.
How did the ship still stay afloat? How had it lasted so long and not pulled all of us instantly to the depths?
How had I and my girls survived the blast?
Mariah screamed and pointed. The water rushing into the cavernous mouth of the fissure had a tremendous suction. The raft with its three occupants was being drawn into the surging torrent and certain death!
We all knew death awaited the three on the raft. If they disappeared into the jaws of the cavernous chasm, they would either be dashed to pieces, crushed against the steel, or drowned when Newcastle slipped beneath the waves.
Raquel called the names of the children over and over again. While Mariah held Raquel’s shoulders, and I her legs, we could not stop her from digging her fingernails into the wood of the lifeboat’s gunwale.
Our officer urged the men to row harder, to put their backs into it, to break themselves with effort, but the waves breaking against Newcastle’s hull flowed backwards toward us, pushing us away.
I saw the man on the raft lift his head, facing the cauldron just before him. He knew the danger they were in. He was a strong swimmer; we had seen that when he retrieved the children from the water. If he abandoned them to their fate, perhaps he could save himself.
He made no move to do so. Instead he hugged the children closer and instructed them to wave at us. Look there, I saw him say, though I could not hear. Look there. Rescue is on the way.
Could we possibly reach them in time? Already the raft had bumped one corner against Newcastle’s hull, bare yards from the chasm. The rush of water was sweeping them closer with each passing swell. With no oars and nothing to use for paddles, there was no way to maneuver out of danger.