The Last Lifeboat

THE LAST LIFEBOATHazel Gaynor CopyrightHarperCollinsPublishers Ltd1 London Bridge Street,London SE1 9GFwww.harpercollins.co.ukFirst published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023Copyright © Hazel Gaynor 2023Jacket design by Claire Ward/HarperCollinsPublishers LtdJacket photographs © Pat Whelen on Unsplash (boat), © Zoltan Toth/Trevillion Images (horizon) and Shutterstock.com (birds and handwriting)Hazel Gaynor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.Source ISBN: 9780008518660eBook Edition © June 2023 ISBN: 9780008518684Version: 2023-04-27 DedicationFor Tanya, in memory of your dear mum, Joan Flanagan ContentsCoverTitle PageCopyrightDedicationMid-Atlantic. 17 September 1940Part One – DepartureChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15Part Two – AbsenceChapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19Chapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22Chapter 23Chapter 24Chapter 25Chapter 26Chapter 27Chapter 28Chapter 29Chapter 30Chapter 31Chapter 32Chapter 33Chapter 34Chapter 35Chapter 36Chapter 37Part Three – RescueChapter 38Chapter 39Chapter 40Chapter 41Chapter 42Chapter 43Part Four – RecoveryChapter 44Chapter 45Chapter 46EpilogueHistorical NoteReader QuestionsBook RecommendationsAcknowledgementsKeep Reading …About the AuthorAlso by Hazel GaynorAbout the Publisher 3 September 1939War! Listened to Chamberlain’s announcement over the wireless this morning. All very serious until the dog stood up during the national anthem, which made me laugh and then set everyone else off, too. Probably inappropriate to find humour at a time of national crisis, but it might be the last laugh we have for a while. Besides, it was a useful way to hide my tears. The children leave for the countryside today. I don’t know what else to say about that.Mass-Observation, Diarist #6672 Mid-Atlantic. 17 September 1940Alice can’t breathe. The wind snatches her breath away, leaving her gasping for air as she half-jumps, half-stumbles into the lifeboat and falls, face down, against the boards. She tries to pull herself up, but the lifeboat pitches violently as another monstrous wave smashes into them and throws Alice into a woman beside her. The woman loses her grip on the rain-slicked mast and tumbles, with extraordinary grace, into the dark ocean, her white nightdress unfurling around her as she spins and twirls like a ballerina in a pirouette. Too shocked to respond, Alice can’t look away.‘Miss! Miss! Can you help the children?’A tall man in plaid pyjamas emerges through the rain. He grabs the mast to steady himself as he points toward something at the other end of the lifeboat, but the storm steals his words and fear smothers Alice’s ability to respond. She clings desperately to the bottom of the mast and tries not to think about the falling woman as she searches for something familiar to orient herself amid the chaos, but there is nothing. No stars, no moon, not even the bright hue of the flares they’d sent up to alert the other ships in the convoy to their distress. Every source of light Alice has known during her five days at sea has been extinguished, leaving a darkness so intense that there is no obvious point at which the ocean ends and the sky begins. Everything is upside down. Upended. Destroyed.‘Miss! The children!’Through the roar of the wind, Alice hears a high-pitched mewling, but her attention is caught by an elderly man leaning dangerously out over the side of the lifeboat as he reaches for a hand in the water. Alice watches through the blinding spray from the waves as another man joins him, then a third, and then the man in the pyjamas stumbles forward to help, each of them reaching and grasping until one of them grabs the hand, but the heaving swell sends the lifeboat rearing up, and the pale fingers slip from his grasp. Again and again, they try. Twice, Alice thinks they have her – a woman in a white nightdress – but the ocean is in no mood for mercy. Another huge wave lashes the lifeboat and the woman is swept away. The men sink to their knees, their battle lost. The elderly man sobs like a child.Amid the fury of the storm, and the chaos and noise of the two dozen or so terrified souls crowded into the narrow lifeboat around her, Alice tries desperately to remember her training. But the simple remedies for seasickness, the songs and games to keep the children entertained, the procedures to follow ‘in the unlikely event’ of an instruction to abandon ship are of no use to her now. There was no protocol to follow for when you found yourself in an open lifeboat in a furious storm, your ship torpedoed by a German U-boat and sinking fast, lifeboats all around you capsized, damaged and waterlogged, leaving desperate souls floundering in the raging water.Alice crawls forward, infant-like, on hands and knees. Concealed iron rivets and hard wooden ridges dig painfully into her skin. The wind screams. Needle-sharp hailstones hammer against her forehead. She shuffles blindly on, bumping into huddled forms and clambering over bare feet and legs. All around her, male voices call out instructions she doesn’t understand. ‘Pull the Fleming gear.’ ‘Under the thwarts.’ ‘Lash him to the gunwale.’ There is so much noise, she can’t think straight. She lunges forward as the boat pitches sharply down and another wall of frigid seawater drenches her from head to toe, sluicing down the back of her thin cotton jacket and blouse, seeping into her torn stockings and forming lakes in her best leather shoes.At last,