Standing Rooom Only
Kate Sissons

On the evening of 29 October 1942 a German submarine torpedoed the American freighter West Kebar in the mid-Atlantic. Elizabeth Fowler, the only woman on board, went down a wet rope into a lifeboat with thirty-two men and a boy. She was sailing from the Gold Coast to New York to reach Nicky, the daughter she had sent to safety in America at the age of two.

For ten days they drifted on the Atlantic swell. Their ration was two ounces of filthy water, twice a day. A U-boat surfaced and took the Captain away for questioning, then handed him back with a cordial goodnight. Sharks circled the boat. The sun scorched the skin off the men, and two of them tried to kill themselves. The Harrods gingham dress she had packed for meeting her daughter ended up on the ship's giant cook. Rescued off Barbados, Elizabeth reached New York seven weeks after the sinking, to meet a four-year-old who did not know her.

Her book was published in New York in 1944 and reviewed by the New York Times. It has been out of print ever since. Her granddaughter, Kate Sissons, has retold it for today, with every seaman named from the ship's own articles and the attack traced in the U-boat's war diary. October 2027 marks the eighty-fifth anniversary of the sinking.

The four-year-old waiting at Grand Central was Kate's mother. Her story goes on in Knee Deep in Knightsbridge and Losing the Plot: D is for Dementia.