TALE OF THE SEA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25458, 12 February 1944, Page 6

TALE OF THE SEA

HOW TWO GIRLS SURVIVED A dramatic tale of the sea was told by a 15-year-old London school girl in a letter to her classmates after her rescue from the open ocean following a torpedo attack by a German Üboat. , , , The writer, who signed herself Bessie, told how she got one of two small girls in her cabin out to the boat deck and was then trapped in a rapidly-filling cabin with the other, Aisla, who was badly injured. A heavy wardrobe had moved into the doorway, blocking it, but Bessie hacked a hole through it to call for help. The lifeboat to which Bessie and Aisla originally had been assigned had been “smashed to smithereens.” The boat into which she was placed contained 70 people. “ The boat became water-logged, and soon we.were sitting in water up to our chests,” she-wrote. After a wave the size of “an average-sized house had hit the boat there were but 20 persons left in it. The boat, not being content to be water-logged, decided to do acrobatics with the waves and started to roll first on one side and then on the other. The boat overturned, and all were thrown into the a sprained ankle, Bessie swam back to the storm-tossed boat, where she helped.another girl, “my pal, Beth,” to Jiang on. They spent the night holding the keel. “At first there were eight people on the boat, but they did not seem to have the will to live,” she said. “At last the waves calmed a bit and we were able to see by moonlight the other people. To our horror we (Beth and I) found that our only companions were two Indian seamen! One was dead. The other was half alive, and murmured, ‘Allah! Allah! ” Before dawn the sea lashed the overturned boat again, and the letter indicated that only Bessie and Beth were still there when a British destroyer came to the rescue. J , , Sailors from a landing boat took the two girls aboard and delivered them to the destroyer, where the crew lined the rail. “They gave us such a cheer ” Bessie wrote. “My goodness, if the U-boat commander had heard it he would have shivered in his ersatz shoes! ”