Arctic Rescue: A Memoir of the Tragic Sinking of HMS Glorious by Ronald Healiss

Author:Ronald Healiss [Healiss, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2020-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

5

THE water was black, and as hard and cold as ice as I hit it.

A scouser, the sea in my blood, there was no moment of fear as I jumped, but I wasn’t prepared for the grim violence of the next few minutes. Never in my life had I taken a header for anything deeper than just a plunge off the deep end of the baths; now I was falling in space, spread-eagled.

I hit the surface a belly-flop, then went down like a stone, half unconscious with the Arctic grip of the water after the scorching heat round the gun.

And, like a stone, I sank… Just how far and at what point I began to float upwards I’ll never know, for the brutal slam of hitting the water had winded me almost into insensibility. There was a whirling impression of green and black. Then I broke surface and breathed again.

It must have been a couple of minutes at least, after surfacing and trying to tread water, that I realised the intensity of the cold, and the terrific impact with which I must have hit the water.

For one thing, all my shoulders and side were bruised, as though I had fallen on concrete. For another, my long sea-boot stockings had peeled off, in the mighty suction drag as I surfaced after the dive. So I was just in my pants, vest, shirt and trousers, with nothing else to keep out the cold. Undoing the quick-thread stopper, I blew air into my lifebelt, and watched it swell round waist and shoulders.

That was the moment I knew I was facing death for the first time. There had been no such thought in my mind in the action of the preceding two hours of hell.

I had seen my pal with his leg shot off; I had watched the men who had been my shipmates for years vomit to an awful death; I had heard the awful clang of metal as shell-splinters rebounded from the ship’s plates a yard or two behind. Even then I had not realised I was looking straight into the face of death.

But now…

It was that M.O.’s lecture we had when we first started the Norway run; that’s what was rattling my brain.

“P.T., chaps. Dull stuff and a bit of a bind. But you’ll need it now to keep the blood running. These past two and a half years in Mediterranean sunshine have thinned the blood, and for a time your resistance is lowered.”

That’s why I was always scrambling around the flight-deck to keep my fat down. That’s why we ate so many spuds, and scrounged extra sweaters to put on at night when we got into our hammocks, instead of undressing. Thin blood. And now this… a cold so intense it gripped your whole body with a steel hand.

Not that I was afraid to die. I knew I was for it. The only question was: How long …?

And how would it happen? How long before I became just a bit

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