Making It Up by Penelope Lively Read Free Book Online Page A

young officer was calling out, was everyone okay?
    Well, no. There was the woman with the broken arm, and someone else who had a badly gashed leg. And Mrs. Leech wasn’t making sense anymore, apparently. Mrs. Stannard, who had had VAD training, had a look at her and said she was in deep shock. She looked at Jean too and thought that she was probably concussed, and that there was nothing to be done but just to keep her warm and still and she should come round in time.
    People were quiet and calm now, on the whole. Scared—you could feel the fear running from person to person like a current. And then suddenly there was something else—gasps, someone saying “Oh, my God . . .”; they were all seeing what was happening, that the ship was going, the bow tilting up, the whole great shape sliding away, in slow motion it seemed, upending into the sea.
    It was there, and then it was not. In darkness and in silence, it went. They sat watching, twenty-five people in the rocking boat; someone was crying, someone else prayed out loud: “Our Father, which art in Heaven . . .” One of the lascars made a kind of wailing noise, and then fell silent.
    Just the sky and the sea now, a vast surrounding space with nothing visible but here and there the flashing light from another of the boats. The officer was counting heads and checking names, calling out from a list. He was trying to keep people’s spirits up: they’d be picked up, no question, the signals would have been heard, the flares seen, there was water on the boat, and rations. Shirley knew him well by sight; he had been one of those life-and-soul-of-the-party chaps from the bar, of an evening, and he had dressed up as Neptune for the crossing-the-line ceremony. She had helped to arrange his frayed rope wig and beard, and had made his robe out of an old sheet. Now, he was somberly brisk and controlled, but he looked younger, somehow; he was probably her own age, she saw, around twenty-four. Two of the lascars were just boys, another was almost an old man. The rest of them were . . . women and children.
    As daylight came you could see faces. The Stannards were all there, and the teacher from the English School, and Mrs. Hope with that tiny baby. It was the teacher who had a broken arm. She sat, white-faced; Mrs. Stannard was trying to fix up a splint.
    First of all there were streaks of light to one side, and then the whole sky gradually lightened and you could see the rim of the horizon all around, and then other lifeboats—some quite far away, others near enough for the officer to shout across to them. They were trying to stay together, but the wind had picked up now and the sea was choppy, so that the lascars had to row to keep within the ring of boats. They were being flung about by the waves; people were starting to be sick.
    Later, it became calm again. But now the sun was right up, and inescapable. No shade, the heat beating down, the light hitting back up off the water. Shirley had one of the Armenian girls next to her on the seat, and they laid Jean out on both their laps with her head on Shirley’s arm and Shirley’s jersey arranged so as to keep as much sun off her as possible. She was moving a little, occasionally; at one point her eyes opened, and then closed again.
    Measures of water were given out, and biscuits. Shirley tried to trickle water into Jean’s mouth, but she wouldn’t swallow. They had now been hours and hours on those hard wooden seats, sitting bolt upright, with only each other to lean against—you ached all over. People had made handkerchiefs into hats—anything to keep the sun off; the children were getting frantic. Mrs. Stannard tried to get up a sing-song, but that soon petered out; nobody had the heart for it.
    The hours inched by. In the middle of the day, the sea was like molten metal. Shirley’s head was pounding; her mouth was dry and parched. There would be another handout of water