Word: lifeboat
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week the crudest episode in the war against civilians had a happy sequel. A lumbering Sunderland flying boat on convoy duty sighted a lifeboat 600 miles off the Irish coast. Aboard were 46 survivors of the City of Benares, in the sudden sinking of which fortnight ago 83 children and 210 adults were thought lost. The 20-ton flying boat, running short of fuel, signaled her relief plane, which in turn signaled a warship...
...explosion. As I seized my coat and life belt, water was entering the cabin. I dashed to the children's quarters and found them still asleep. . . .An officer shouted to the children to hurry on deck, and we started, with the children behaving magnificently. . . .We clambered into a lifeboat but it had shipped much water and its rudder was gone. . . .The children were singing Roll Out the Barrel. As they came to the part that goes 'We'll have a barrel of fun,' the ship sank. . . .The darkness was terrifying. There was no disorder- only...
Even more dramatic was the tale of twelve-year-old Elizabeth Mary Cummings: "When I got to the lifeboat muster station the boat was gone. It smashed as it struck the water with some men, women and children in it and I could see the people struggling in the water. . . . We got into another lifeboat, but there was a terrible crowd aboard. The sea was very stormy and waves were coming over our lifeboat, and I was certain that I would die. . . . Suddenly one big wave, and the lifeboat tumbled over. I never swam in my life...
...help thinking how funny it was. The sailors gave us rum to drink. It was horrible stuff, but I suppose it did us good." Already safe aboard the destroyer was the fourth member of the family, her four-year-old sister Barbara, who had been picked up from a lifeboat...
Miss Lane escapes too. Inhumanely dislodging a lion from her lifeboat, she reaches shore. But so do Mr. Ciannelli, the lions and the leopards. They track Miss Lane, pausing only to devour two of her party, right up to the village where Mkwawa's skull is tucked away (in a volcano). Next day with the help of the Sultan (who has a strong German accent) Miss Lane traps enough animals to stock a zoo. It does her no good because Mr. Ciannelli lets them all out again the same night. There is another bedlam of leaping lions, snarling leopards...