Through my blurred, underwater vision, I could see the clinkered bottom of the white lifeboat, the red-brown antifoul below the Britannic, sunlight reflecting through flotsam and dismembered bodies on the surface. Father’s voice resonated in my head: Promise you’ll never give up, Gertie!

The tapes of my lifesaver floated before my face and I realised I hadn’t tied them properly. I grasped for them, feeling a sharp stab of pain in my wrist, then a wisp of blood before my eyes. I looked towards the seabed. In a shaft of refracted sunlight Sissy’s watch glinted and flashed, beckoning me to follow as it spiralled down, out of reach. Down, into the unknown.

Dragged under by my blue serge dress, long apron, and petticoat, I struck out in an effort to swim to the surface. Up, up, up towards air, a breath, a chance, but despite kicking hard, the skirt hindered my legs and the weight of my uniform was too much for my feeble arms to battle against. I won’t give up, Papa! The lifesaver was under my chin. I struggled to pull it down, but it seemed determined to leave me. I remembered my father’s hand over my face pushing me under the water and I kicked with all my might for he who had tried to teach me this lesson.

*

I believe I was still plunging downward, my eyes fixed on the blurred, glinting shape of Sissy’s watch as it danced a zig-zag path into the depths. I recall thinking I must keep trying, or I would go past the point of no return. At that moment, I glimpsed a slick grey torpedo shape loom out of the darkness and race towards me. Now I was done for.

My thoughts went to my dead siblings, sure I was about to join them. The lifesaver passed over my face and headed for the surface. Hit hard in the belly, then pushed helplessly through the water at inescapable speed, I saw air bubbles, lifeboat wreckage and body parts fly by. Everything was so confused, I didn’t know which direction I was going, up or down? How could I be travelling at this terrifying speed?

Shock hit me when I broke the water’s surface in an explosion of foam, my arms and legs flailing and my scream finding voice in a most unladylike way. Shocked, I realised whatever thrust me through the sea with such alarming urgency was a living thing. How was that possible? The strength and speed by which I’d been forced upward, racing towards a life-saving breath, was impossible to comprehend; and by an animal . . . a creature that I sensed had exceptional power and intelligence.

They hauled me back into the lifeboat. Hands tugged at my clothes, people groaning under the weight of me, my ungainly clumsiness as nurses and crew manhandled me back to my seat.