Millions Like Us (14 page)

But the fear never entirely left her. She knew that while he was at sea he was in constant danger. And in August 1940 she received the news that he was lost.

Cruelly, she only found out through the unluckiest of circumstances. Employed by a small social work charity in Bootle, Helen’s job was to assist bereaved wives and the relatives of missing or drowned sailors claiming pensions. That morning there was the usual queue of widows in the waiting room, and Helen saw them one by one. Eventually it was the turn of an older woman, who explained her business; her son Harry, a merchant seaman, had gone missing with his ship in the Atlantic, and she now wished to make a claim so that at least she would benefit by his death. She gave her name as Mrs Maureen O’Dwyer.

I thought I would faint …

Helen quickly referred Mrs O’Dwyer to a colleague and fled to the building’s basement.

In the clammy grime of a disused coal cellar, I stood shivering helplessly, so filled with shock that I hardly knew where I was.

Convulsed, but as yet dry-eyed, Helen was still just sufficiently composed to be sickened by the woman who could throw out her own son, yet still try to gain financially by his death. It seemed impossible to say or do anything that would make sense of her loss, or bring reconciliation. To have held out a hand to Mrs O’Dwyer would have seemed a betrayal, while to speak to her own parents would have subjected her to outright derision. How could she bear to have Harry scorned by them? He was a sailor, but he was the man she had loved. She stayed silent.

It took Helen superhuman efforts to contain the grief which now threatened to overwhelm her; unarticulated, it worked away like a poison, ravaging her from within. Ill health, hunger, parental neglect, poverty and fear had already wrought great damage; now the blow of Harry’s death took away the one prospect of happiness in this lonely life. Out of her mind with sorrow, she sobbed through the night, her sister Fiona sleeping in tranquil contentment beside her. Walking home from work after dark, she cried in the blackout when nobody could see her tears. At her office, Helen realised she was not alone in her suffering. Death had come to Merseyside. Day after day she sat at her desk, working her way through the rows and rows of weeping wives clutching tear-stained children. Often it was her job to break the news to them. Sometimes a seaman would come to her, sobbing, sent ashore on compassionate leave to discover that his family had been killed in an air raid. Consumed by her own pain, the distress of these others was almost too great to bear. One dreadful Saturday Helen’s controls collapsed: tears sprang to her eyes as she cried out, full of pity and anger, ‘It’s madness to send men to certain death like this!’ Rage possessed her. What right did Harry have to die? Why had he left her? Why had he got himself killed? ‘We could have been married by now.’

Part of Helen Forrester’s terrible anger stemmed from the feeling
that Harry’s death had robbed her not just of love, but of the chance to escape from her home, and from her mother. Marrying Harry would have meant trading the thankless task of cleaning up after her own family for more of the same work – but at least under his roof it would have been done with love. Now, at the age of twenty-one, Helen saw her youth, her happiness stolen from her. She felt trapped for ever in her loneliness. ‘I wanted to die.’

*

Between September 1939 and May 1943 over 30,000 Allied servicemen and merchant seamen would be engulfed by the grey waves of the Atlantic. Helen Forrester’s premonition of Harry’s horrible death, of his struggle and choking by icy water, was true for thousands of individuals, forgotten among the tally of losses. For the women of the SecondWorld War, torpedoes were the intangible agents of grief and bereavement. But a few experienced them at first hand.

This is not primarily a book about heroines, but it is a book about women who rose to the demands of history, and in 1940 those demands were becoming increasingly extortionate.
The story of Mary Cornish
is only one example of an ordinary, frightened and unprepared woman who, at a time of extremity, responded gallantly to the calls of duty and responsibility.

As the danger of enemy attacks intensified, so did the importance of sending children to safety, and the government decided to extend its evacuation plans to enable school-age children to be received overseas as well as in far-flung areas of Britain. The Children’s Overseas Reception Board (‘CORB’) was formed, and anxious parents applied by the thousand to send their children to safety in South Africa, Australia, Canada and the USA. Known as the ‘seavacuees’, the children would be travelling without their parents, under the care of appointed guardians.

The piano teacher Mary Cornish was one woman who volunteered to work in this capacity. Mary was now forty-one, an intelligent, confident, self-sufficient spinster; until the war her job, her friends and music had been her life. She volunteered; but the summons to sail to Canada was slow in coming. While waiting to depart, Mary spent the summer holiday haymaking and fruit-picking on a Sussex farm. Finally, in late August, her instructions arrived.

On Friday 13 September 1940 a convoy of ships including the SS
City of Benares
set sail from Liverpool with ninety excited child evacuees and a number of such escorts on board. It was crewed by British officers and lascar seamen. Mary, along with her allocated batch of girls, was familiar with the emergency drill. After their departure the children settled into enjoying themselves. There was delicious food to eat, and a party atmosphere; the girls had started a choir and were learning to sing ‘In an English Country Garden’ for their Canadian hosts. Four days out to sea the convoy of destroyers, required elsewhere, returned to British waters. The liner was now accompanied by a motley fleet of merchant ships, incapable of giving naval protection. A storm blew up, and that day a lot of the passengers were suffering from sea-sickness, but by evening the ship was tossing less, so after dinner Mary and two of the other escorts took a stroll on the deck. They were in good spirits, and Mary – perhaps with the girls’ choir in mind – led the group singing Christmas carols and verses from ‘Greensleeves’. At about 10 o’clock she decided to go below. It was then that the torpedo struck. Aboard U-48, Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Bleichrodt had no idea that he had fired it at a liner carrying children.

It took just fifteen minutes for the SS
City of Benares
to sink. The missile had ripped a giant hole in the stern. The U-boat also sank the two ships that flanked the
City of Benares
, and the rest of the small fleet dispersed to avoid being sunk in their turn.

The engines died, the ship filled with the acrid smell of cordite, alarm bells rang. The children got dressed and hurried to their muster stations. Mary knew it was her job to get her group of girls into a lifeboat, but when she tried to reach their quarters she found the corridor blocked by debris; lacerating her hands, she pushed a gap through the mound, struggled through and got help to pull the children out of their cabins and up on deck. The only soothing words she could find to say to them were: ‘It’s all right, it’s only a torpedo.’ The crew started loading children into the boats. Mary returned below to see if any had been overlooked, but an officer ordered her back on deck. Having now become separated from her group of girls, she was hastily told to join a boatload of thirty lascar crewmen, a couple of British officers and six small boys; she never saw the girls again.

A long night passed; the storm was rising. Mary – like the boys, many of whom were barefoot and in pyjamas – was inadequately
dressed in a short-sleeved silk blouse, a skirt, a jacket, stockings and sandals. When dawn broke over grey foam-crested waves, the occupants of lifeboat number 12 realised they were alone in the middle of the Atlantic.

Meanwhile, in West Sussex, Mary Cornish’s beloved younger sister Eileen Paterson and her husband received a letter from CORB informing them, as her next of kin, of the sinking of the
City of Benares
, explaining that Miss Cornish had not been reported rescued, and conveying the Board’s ‘very deep sympathy in your grievous loss’. Their daughter Elizabeth still remembers ‘finding my mother weeping in my father’s arms in the garage at the bottom of the garden … he was trying to comfort her’. Letters of sympathy poured into the Paterson family, who tried to take consolation in the thought of a valiant sister and aunt who had died carrying out her duty to the children in her care.

Far from any communication, the ordeal that played out on the cold waters of the Atlantic ocean is a tale of almost incredible endurance. The few British officers took charge, organising crew members to crank the propeller, rigging a sail and a tarpaulin to shelter the stern of the boat, distributing rations. The food they had was carefully eked out, as was the water, which was in much shorter supply. On two small beakers of water a day, everyone suffered from terrible thirst. It was cold too: September was not a time to be afloat on the Atlantic in an open boat dressed in cotton pyjamas. Mary, the only woman on board, now demonstrated unexpected fortitude, stamina and imagination. She herself was suffering as badly as the rest of them from thirst and exposure; in addition sanitary arrangements were a particular trial for her, since there was no possibility of concealing her occasional need to use the one and only bucket on board. But as day followed day, and their plight became worse, Mary’s relationship with the six young boys became the key to their survival. They relied on her not only for her kindness – she would massage the circulation back into their frostbitten feet, wrapping anything she could find round them to ease the pain – but, crucially, for her ability to raise morale. At first, while the boys were still lively enough to believe they were having a great adventure, she got them singing. ‘There’ll Always be an England’ and ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’ were favourites. She invented games and boosted their sense that they were brave and
plucky. But before long they came to rely on her to distract them from their misery. When spirits dropped, it was Mary who rebuked them: ‘Don’t you realise that you’re the heroes of a
real
adventure story? There isn’t a boy in England who wouldn’t give his eyes to be in your shoes! Did you ever hear of a hero who
snivelled
?’ Something in the schoolboy psyche craved such reminders, and the schoolmistress in Mary understood this. From the depths, she dredged up memories of adventure tales like
The Thirty-Nine Steps
and
Bulldog Drummond
. Every night, before the children settled for a few hours’ sleep, Mary’s tales of Captain Drummond’s exploits persuaded them to forget, for a little while, how hungry, thirsty, cold and cramped they were. Because her memory of the original stories was a little faulty, she embroidered. With his lean jaw and fearless demeanour, Captain Drummond soon found himself in danger from a Nazi spy ring, braving submarines, parachutes and fighter planes. There were hair-raising escapes and dramatic rescues from the edges of precipices. The boys loved it. Nothing else came near in giving them what they now most wanted: forgetfulness. ‘Aunty, Aunty, please go on,’ they begged, as each instalment came to an end. So, like all the best storytellers, she promised more for the next day.

On Sunday, after five days at sea, hopes of rescue suddenly soared when the crew sighted a steamer. Mary’s petticoat was commandeered, and they ran it up the mast to signal distress. With wonderful certainty now, they watched as the outline of the steamer became more distinct and swung around, growing closer till they could see the sailors on board – only to turn to shocked dismay at the last moment as the vessel slowly and decisively resumed its course in the opposite direction. Later it appeared that the ship’s skipper must have feared that the lifeboat was a German submarine decoy; this sometimes happened, luring unwary ships to their doom.

By now the occupants of lifeboat number 12 were near to exhaustion. With their water ration down to half a beaker a day, their lips and tongues were cracked and distended. On the eighth day everyone was becoming lethargic, and even Mary was too depleted to tell stories. Hopes were beginning to die; there had been disappointments and false alarms. So when one of the boys cried out ‘There’s an aeroplane!’ nobody took much notice. But this time it wasn’t a freak. The plane was a Sunderland, it had seen them, and a signal was immediately
sent that it was going for help. Within an hour another Sunderland appeared and let down supplies. They were still feasting on tinned fruit when HMS
Anthony
was sighted. One by one, more dead than alive, the survivors were helped on to the rescue ship. Mary was almost past reason. They settled her in; her throat was so badly swollen she could barely eat, and she could not imbibe hot drinks. She was dazed, dizzy, couldn’t stand and couldn’t remember how to undress. She was obsessed with one thing: her responsibility towards the boys. What had happened to them, and were they all right?

Thirty-six hours later HMS
Anthony
docked in the Firth of Clyde. On 27 September, in their country home near Midhurst, the Patersons received a telegram. It read simply: MISS M C CORNISH SAFE AND WELL.

CORB looked after Mary when they arrived and brought her to a hotel, where WVS ladies arrived bearing clothes. Even in her confused state, she was aware that the garments were peculiarly ill-assorted: a pink petticoat, a purple dress, yellow gloves. Almost immediately she was surrounded by journalists desperate for her story. When they interviewed her, there was the shock of hearing that many of the children and most of her fellow escorts on board the
City of Benares
had not survived. She ate a little, slept a little, drank and drank again. A dozen times in the night she woke convulsed with fear lest the glass of water by her bed had been removed. Beneath her, lifeboat 12 seemed still to roll and pitch, heave and drop; as she dipped in and out of sleep, her only thought was ‘the boys – were they all right?’