Some children, on the other hand, were at first quite unaware either of the fatal extent of the damage or, indeed, of the fact that there had been any damage at all. Among the unsuspecting ones were Colin Richardson and Kenneth Sparks.
Colin was in his bunk at the time, alone in his cabin, reading a comic. He felt a heavy bump, but paid no attention to it — we can only assume that he found the contents of his comic singularly engrossing — and carried on reading. Not until the alarm bells started ringing did he reluctantly abandon his comic, don a pair of slippers, put on his dressing gown over his pyjamas, his vivid red kapok life jacket — given him by his mother with the instructions that he should wear it always, and of so eye-dazzling a colour that he was already known throughout the ship as Will Scarlet — over his dressing gown, a cork life jacket above that and made his way to the ship's restaurant where he found all the passengers lining up to go to their boat stations.
Kenneth was in bed at 10.00 p.m., and sound asleep. The insistent clamour of the alarm bells brought himself and his two cabin companions — both of whom were to die during the darkness of that night — to their feet, struggling into coats and life jackets before hurrying to their boat positions on the upper deck.
Newly awakened from the soft blanketed warmth of their beds, most of them still half-asleep, the children shivered and tried to crouch more deeply still inside their thin night clothes as the bitter night wind, blowing a full gale now, knifed through their pathetically inadequate garments, drenching them with driving rain and icy hail, blinding them with the bulleting spray whipped off the wave-tops as the already sinking ship, losing way rapidly, began to wallow helplessly in the deep troughs between the seas.
It was not until then that Kenneth Sparks realized what was happening, not until he saw the blown hatch-covers, the snapped and splintered mast, the debris lying everywhere, the dazed and fearful lascar crew members that he understood that the ship was sinking beneath his feet. Both he and Colin Richardson remember clearly that there was no panic, no fear at all among the children, nothing except the lonely sobbing of one little boy, crying quietly in the darkness, his voice carrying only faintly in the sudden moments of silence when the CITY OF BENARES listed far over to one side, momentarily blocking the sound and the power of the gale.
One by one the lifeboats were lowered — a difficult and often dangerous task in a wickedly rolling, all but stopped ship in those wild and pitch-dark seas. Some of the lifeboats capsized immediately, throwing the occupants into the water — few of these were ever seen again. Some were swamped and cut adrift. Others came alongside the foot of rope ladders, and women and children clambered down over the side towards them, as often as not to find that the boats were no longer there. And then they would find that they no longer had the strength to climb back up on deck again: for a few seconds they would hang there, being battered against the ship's side, alternately being plunged deep into the water or hauled high above it as the foundering vessel rolled deeply, sluggishly in the seas: and then their slender strength would fail them, their fingers would open and they were never seen again.
Other women took children in their arms and leapt into the darkness of the sea near a spot where they had seen a raft being dropped over the side. Occasionally — very occasionally — they would reach it, drag themselves aboard and lie there helpless, beaten flat by the wind, the hail and the waves, unable even to so much as raise their heads: more often than not, they would fail to see the raft in the deep gloom of a sea where the towering wave-crests reduced visibility to only a few feet, or, even if they did see one, would find it floating away into the outer darkness more quickly than they could swim after it.
The CITY OF BENARES sunk in just over ten minutes from the time she was torpedoed, and the wonder of it is that so many managed to get away at all. Miracles of effort and selfless courage were the order of the day. Crew-members leapt into the water to right upturned boats and rescue what passengers they could. Others stayed on the slippery canting decks until the CITY OF BENARES foundered, struggling to free rafts and jammed lifeboats. All too often they were still struggling when the ship foundered, taking them along with it.
In the minds of nearly every one of the crew and the passengers, the children were the first, last and only thought. The Captain died while still searching for them below decks. So did Colonel Baldwin-Webb, MP for the Wrekin Division of Shropshire, who had acted with imperturbable gallantry throughout and had led many children from the cabins to the lifeboats. So did Colin's guardian, Mr Raskay, who gave up his own place in a lifeboat to a woman and child, turned back, went below, extricated more women and children from blazing cabins, returned to the upper deck and dived into the sea, not to save himself, but to rescue drowning children in the water. It is not known how or where he died, but it was inevitable that he should die. Mr Raskay was a Hungarian, but race and creed meant nothing to him, only humanity.
The chief quartermaster also died in the search for children. He had loaded a lifeboat with women and children, left it in the command of another seaman, climbed back aboard and was never seen again. And the children's official escorts more than lived up to the trust that had been placed in them: only three of them survived.
One of them was Mrs Towns. She stayed to see as many children as possible into the boats, refused a place for herself, and jumped over the side — and she had never swum before in her life. Somehow she reached an upturned boat and clung on to it, one of fifteen, mainly children, who did so. But the cold struck deep, the biting hail and pounding seas numbed arms and bodies and legs, and one by one the children dropped off during that bitter and interminable night. When dawn came, only Mrs Towns and two little girls were left. They survived.
Colin Richardson and Kenneth Sparks were luckier — they managed to get away in lifeboats. Colin remembers vividly the actual moment of the sinking of the CITY OF BENARES, the spectacle of a man being blasted out through a door crashing back on its hinges, the swift plunge, the bursting open of doors and ventilators as the air pressure inside built up swiftly to an intolerable degree.
He remembers too, the strange sight of the sea dotted with the red lights attached to the life belts of the crew struggling in the water, of those who swam alongside and begged to be taken into the already overcrowded boat; the quiet, unquestioning acceptance of nearly all those who were told there was no room left. They swam away to find what floating debris they could, most of them knowing that it could be only a token postponement of the death by exhaustion and exposure that surely awaited all those without either boat or raft. And the fear-crazed selfishness of one or two who desperately hauled themselves aboard, almost sinking the boat.
'It was a dreadful night,' Colin Richardson remembers. 'Rough and bitterly cold: we were continuously swept by icy wind, rain and sleet. There was a half-hearted attempt at singing to keep up our spirits — but this did not last long for every time we opened our mouths we got them full of salt water. So we resigned ourselves to concentrating silently and grimly on keeping our place in the boat.'
And, indeed, that was an almost impossible task. Colin's lifeboat was swamped, waterlogged, down to its gunwales in the water and kept afloat only by means of its buoyancy tanks. All were sitting waist-deep — for youngsters like Colin, chest — deep — in the freezing water: every time a wave came along, and they came in endless succession all through that endless night, they had to cling on desperately to prevent themselves from being swept away into the sea: when, like Colin, it was impossible even to reach the floorboards with your feet, the chances of holding on and surviving were negligible. But Colin held on — and he survived.