Blitz Kids (14 page)

As the CORB children gathered at their lifeboat stations, the private passengers waited in the lounge, Colin Ryder Richardson among them. Eventually he moved out on to the decks. At first he hadn’t been frightened, but once on the deck the situation changed as he looked out to sea and thought to himself: ‘It’s going to be difficult for the lifeboats to get through that lot.’ What also struck him was the sight of the other children: ‘These little kids beside me – some of them were only five years old. They were in their dressing gowns with no life-belt, clutching teddy bears. They’d just woken up.’ In the commotion not all the lifeboats could be safely lowered. Lifeboat No. 8 was the first to go. As it slipped down towards the water, the boat lurched, one end jerked downwards and was smashed by a wall of water. Passengers were thrown into the water and scattered by the swirling sea. In seconds, they were gone.

As he waited to board his lifeboat, Colin was reunited with Mr Raskai, his Hungarian guardian, who was told for the moment it was ‘women and children first’: ‘Mr Raskai bravely helped me into the swinging lifeboat. This thing was crashing about against the ship and I had to climb over the rail. They didn’t have anyone at the ends holding it steady.’ Once filled, the lifeboat was quickly lowered into the raging seas. Whilst other boats were overturned, Lifeboat No. 2 stayed upright. However, it was soon filled with water as waves crashed over the bows and, as they tried to escape from the stricken ship, more poured in until the escaping passengers were sitting up to their chests in water. Only the lifeboat’s buoyancy tanks prevented it from slipping completely beneath the waves. As Colin later recalled, it was like sitting in a giant bathtub filled with freezing water.

An elderly nurse called Colin to her side, hoping to protect the small, lonely child. However, the situation soon became desperate. The heavy seas soon washed away the mast and oars. The sailors attempted to get the handle working to start the propeller designed to move the boat to safety. However, with so much water in the boat, the handle was of little use except to give people something to hang on to.

Lifeboat No. 5 seemed to keep level during its descent to the sea, but this was an illusion. It was level with the side of the ship, not with the water. With one lurch twelve passengers were thrown from the boat and lost in the darkness. Other lifeboats surrendered people to the ocean, leaving children floundering in the waters. They were terrified as they treaded water and looked up at the steel sides of the ship as the waves battered them. A few were lucky to reach out for rope ladders lowered down to them, climbing back to the decks where they shivered in their sodden clothes before being wrapped in blankets by crew members. However, the less fortunate were soon lost in the storm.

Once among the waves, the sturdy lifeboats were soon shown to be vulnerable to the power of the ocean. Having already lost some of its passengers, Lifeboat No. 5 soon took on water before being upended and its passengers were cast into the storm. In seconds many disappeared, scattered by the surging waves. Two among them, the evacuees Bess Walder and Beth Cummings, found themselves struggling to stay afloat just yards from the upturned keel. The desperate girls reached out for the boat, grabbed the keel and hung on for dear
life. As they took stock of their surroundings they could see they were among a group of about a dozen survivors.

Those adrift in the waters were in immediate danger. At this temperature they might be expected to survive no more than three hours before hypothermia would set in and hasten their death. Some of the children kicked out, swimming towards the lifeboats and the twenty-two rafts that had been released from the decks. A few clung to driftwood in the hope it might keep them afloat. One desperate boy called out to his mother, seated safely in a nearby lifeboat. Others tried desperately to tread water before surrendering to the freezing water, their bodies washed away in the chaos. A fortunate few of the children were saved by adults who dived from the safety of their lifeboats, swam swiftly through the waves and pulled them to safety. One man alone pulled thirteen evacuees to safety. Colin’s escort, Laszlo Raskai, swam to safety with a child clinging to him. He then struck out to rescue another child but soon disappeared in the swirling seas.

Children joined in the rescues, with one thirteen-year-old boy helping to haul a child into the boat. Seconds later the boat was hit by a wave, throwing the boy overboard. As his fellow passengers reached out, more waves crashed against the boat and the hero disappeared from sight. As the survivors scrambled for lifeboats, clung on to rafts or desperately tried to steer the lifeboats away from the stricken liner, the
Benares
finally slipped beneath the waters. From the half-submerged Lifeboat No. 2, Colin Ryder Richardson watched the scene:

It was a staggering sight for the children who had expected the ship to sweep them over the sea to safety. The liner groaned and stood almost vertical, its bow rising from the water; the emergency lights went out and then it was gone. The survivors were all alone in the storm.

Colin took stock of his situation. He was on a lifeboat submerged up to his chest in freezing cold water. At first those onboard had tried to bail out the water, but it was hopeless: as soon as water was thrown over the side, more crashed back in with the waves. The one consolation was that the water in the boat helped keep it steady, so it was not tossed as roughly as it might have been. Colin also realized he was better off than some of his fellow passengers, who were poorly dressed for their circumstances. He had his life jacket, with its buoyancy device sewn within padded silk, a balaclava that had been specially knitted for him and he had even found a pair of gloves his mother had put in his pockets. These would be essential in the hours ahead as he gripped the gunwales of the half-submerged boat.

As the night engulfed them, Colin noticed some of the Indian sailors shaking from the cold, their thin cotton uniforms doing little to protect them from the storm. The situation on the lifeboat seemed hopeless, they were all freezing and soaked to the skin. As Colin recalled, comfort only came from urinating in the water: for a few brief seconds he could feel a bit of warm water swirling around his legs. ‘We couldn’t sing at all. You couldn’t communicate – you had to keep your mouth shut because of the water. The waves were pouring over us.’ Within half an hour, Colin watched as four sailors slipped into unconsciousness and died. Now a grim task awaited the young boy as he helped release the corpses, pushing them quietly from the lifeboat and consigning them to a watery grave.

With the corpses pushed out, Colin turned his attention to a woman beside him: ‘This elderly nurse sitting next to me – that had earlier been comforting me, as an elderly lady would do – became distressed. I realized she was sinking into the water so I put my arm around her and tried to keep her head above the water.’ Colin held on to the nurse, comforting her in her hour of need. Stroking her hair and lifting her head, the brave boy did his best to preserve her morale and her life. He whispered to her, telling her that they would soon be rescued but he couldn’t really do much for her. He was freezing cold, his balaclava helmet had slipped from his head and he couldn’t pull the sodden wool back in place: ‘I couldn’t do much for her, I was only eleven and I had my own problems! Luckily I had string gloves so I could keep a grip.’ Grip was exactly what he needed, as being a small child the waves were
threatening to pick him up and wash him out into the sea. If Colin didn’t hold on tightly he knew he would soon be lost.

During the night Colin looked out to sea and spotted a light. His spirits immediately lifted: surely it was a rescue boat. He was wrong. What he had seen was the conning tower of the submarine, which had surfaced to catch sight of the damage it had caused. As the night progressed, many of those who had escaped the sinking ship succumbed to the elements. Sitting in their sodden clothes, body temperatures began to fall. Those who succumbed to sleep soon joined the growing numbers of dead whose bodies were cast overboard. Aboard one of the lifeboats a freezing boy drifted into unconsciousness, lost his grip, and somehow slipped into the sea as the boat rolled on the waves. He was saved by a fellow passenger who, summoning up energy from somewhere, leaned over the boat’s edge and dragged the boy to safety. However, his efforts were wasted, as within minutes the boy died. In a touching scene on another lifeboat, a sailor and one of the adult passengers were each seen bouncing some small children on their lap but it too was an illusion. The children had been travelling with their mother who was on the same boat. As the mother reached the end of her endurance, and appeared to give up the will to live, the men were attempting to raise her spirits. By seemingly playing with the children they hoped it might give the woman strength. She could not be allowed to know the truth: the children on the laps of the men were already dead. The ruse was unsuccessful, too, as the mother joined the growing list of the victims.

In some life boats children drifting into unconsciousness were revived with a nip of brandy. Soaked to skin, battered by the winds and on the verge of freezing to death, this might have been just the thing to keep them alive. The spirit had an instantaneous effect, rousing them from their dangerous slumbers and giving them brief hope. Yet the change was fleeting: almost as soon as the brandy had brought them back from the verge of death, it helped magnify their exhaustion. Instead of shivering and shaking as they froze to death, they were soothed into a deadly sleep in an alcoholic haze.

As the hours passed and dawn finally broke, somehow Bess Walder and Beth Cummings had managed to cling on to the upturned lifeboat. Out of the dozen or so souls who had clung on to the keel the previous
evening, just the two girls and two sailors remained. As every second passed it seemed it would be easier just to give up, let go and drift off to sleep in the water. However, between them their spirits helped maintain their strength, preserving their morale. It was clear to both girls that if one died, they would both die and somehow they maintained their grip.

As dawn rose Colin Ryder Richardson was still comforting his neighbour who was now silent and one of the sailors quietly told the boy the woman was dead. Eventually he realized there was nothing more he could do for her:

In the end he realized he would have to let her go:

It was time to push the old lady overboard to join those who had died in the night. The boy was hardly able to move. As he had gripped the woman his arms had stiffened leaving him with hardly enough strength to move himself, let alone shift the woman. Somehow, aided by one of the sailors, he was able to lift her from the water, edge her corpse over the edge of the boat and into the sea. With so many bodies around them, the sailor in charge eventually asked Colin to help him with the other corpses. The eleven year old was worried about letting go of the lifeboat but also knew they had to get rid of the dead. Not only were they a nuisance, but their close proximity was affecting the survivors’ morale. So Colin helped the sailor push the rest of the corpses from the boat, and tried to get them far enough away so they wouldn’t float back
in again: ‘We were all becoming very sleepy, delirious, just mentally drifting. This was dangerous. I had seen this happen to others, who then succumbed.’

For Colin, this was a sudden and violent introduction to the realities of life – and death:

With the numbers of dead growing, the survivors clung to whatever small hope they could muster. Above all, it was the growing light of dawn that lifted their spirits. As the horizon slowly became clearer, Colin told himself he would live. Surely now a ship would save them. Yet the dawn brought something else: a clear knowledge of how perilous was their situation. In the light of day it was easier to see who was alive and who was dead. More than that, the lifeboats were drifting on a sea that revealed the true nature of the previous night’s tragedy. There was wreckage floating in the water amidst swirling patches of oil. Worst of all were the floating corpses all around the lifeboats. Where the sea took the boats, so it took the bodies. Just to add to their misery, hail and rain continued to fall.

In this gloomy world, Colin’s conviction they would be saved suffered many blows. The dawn saw just fourteen living souls in his boat, which had begun its journey with thirty-eight. They remained half-submerged with no way of bailing out the water. In the distance he could see other lifeboats, and he watched as one young man descended into madness, threatening his fellow passengers, screaming at those around him. Then finally, and mercifully, the man threw himself overboard.