How To Be Brave by Louise Beech Page A

torpedoed the ship carrying Colin – he was a merchant seaman and had been for a while. There have been arguments about whether the submarine even was Italian; one seaman said that Germans surfaced after the sinking and they machine-gunned some of the men in the water. Of course, there must have been a great deal of panic so I imagine…’
    ‘This isn’t a build-up,’ said Rose, spitting milk. ‘This is an info dump.’
    ‘A what?’
    ‘Info dump. At school Miss said you should scatter your information through the story like bits of bread. You know like in “Hansel and Gretel”. Otherwise readers get really bored. You’re supposed to hook your reader with action first, not lots of crappy tell-y bits.’
    ‘Oh.’ I wasn’t sure how to go on. ‘Do you want to know about Colin’s ship?’
    ‘Suppose.’
    ‘Okay, she was called the SS Lulworth Hill , a cargo ship travelling from Cape Town back to England. She was carrying rum and sugar from the West Indies, and probably explosive material too, which might be why they sailed separately from a convoy. She was attacked in the middle of the night and sank in just one and a half minutes while most of the crew were asleep. She split right in two when she sank. Each part landed in the seabed miles from the other.’
    ‘You sound like one of those newsreaders,’ said Rose.
    I knew I was saying all the things I’d memorised from the newspaper articles, afraid to let go and wander off the factual path in case I lost my way. How did actors in the theatre find the character? I’d watched rehearsals at work; I should be able to do this.
    I took the insulin pen from the box and measured the correct dose. Rose got up and my heart sank. But she put her empty bowl on the table and came back; her face was still unreadable, a blank page waiting for paragraphs.
    ‘What did Colin do when the ship sank?’ she asked.
    What had he done? How must he have felt? What must it have been like?
    I closed my eyes. Let it in , I thought. Let him in. You know this story . Rose tugged my arm roughly. She pulled up her nightie, revealed a small area of skinny thigh so I could inject her. Now she closed her eyes.
    ‘I’ll tell you,’ I said.
    As I began to tell her the story of Colin, we no longer sat in the book nook. The early sun no longer landed gently like an appeasing mother’s hand on our heads; orange cushions no longer supported our bodies; Rose no longer argued and scowled and frowned.
    And I no longer struggled to find the right words, to find the character. When I spoke I was Colin and the verses came easily, like the lyrics to a song I’d never forgotten. I spoke for him, and I could smell salt and oil and fire, and the ship rocked and tipped and rolled, and we were there.

7
ABANDON SHIP
    Proceed independently for homeport at all speed .
    K.C.
    Once upon a time there was a ship called the SS Lulworth Hill . She was a very smart ship and she was on her way back to England, across the South Atlantic Sea. World War II had started four years earlier, on Colin’s seventeenth birthday, and many men had been lost fighting all over the world. Now though, as the Lulworth Hill made her way steadily across the sea, the allies were beginning to defeat the Germans.
    One sunny afternoon in March all the men were hard at work, painting and cleaning the decks. This is the tradition on a ship that’s on its way home. Colin polished the rails until they looked like silver, and he whistled happily. The men had always called him the Merry Whistler. ‘Give us a tune,’ they would say on quiet days. And if he was in a jolly mood Colin would reward them with a bright melody. But if they caught him on a grumpy day, they would regret asking, and the air would be filled with an angry tune.
    Today’s song was Whistle While You Work .
    Whistle, whistle, whistle .
    When the crew finished cleaning the ship that afternoon they were worn out. They sat on the deck with cigarettes and mugs of tea. Colin