Page 94 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

it was not known which of the people were Catholics and which news of the accident
were
Protestants. Three times the hour for the burial was announced, and a
number of people went to the cemetery, but each time it was cancelled
because the question of taking the bodies to France was still under con­
sideration. Finally the matter was postponed until the following day. The
burials did take place in Manama, and after some months the coffins
were
taken to France.
That night the weather changed. The sky was clear and there was no
sand in the air and the wind dropped. After a long and very trying day
I went to sleep on my bed on the roof, where I used to sleep in the hot
weather. I am a sound sleeper and it takes a good deal to wake me up,
especially after a long hard day.
In what seemed to be the middle of the night, though in fact it was
about three o’clock in the morning, something disturbed me. I seemed to
hear a voice speaking about the Air France crash. When I went to sleep
my mind had been full of the disaster and the sights which I had seen, and
I thought that I was dreaming. I roused myself and then I saw a young
British police officer standing by my bed. I was very drowsy. ‘An Air
France aircraft has come down in the sea,’ I heard him say. ‘Yes,’ I mut­
tered, ‘of course, I know all about it. Why have you come to talk about it
now?’ I then realized that he was very excited and upset. ‘Another Air
France aircraft has come down in the same place/ he said urgently. ‘It’s
impossible/ I replied. ‘It couldn’t happen again/ By this time I was wide
awake. ‘Sir/ said the young officer, ‘it’s true, there has been another
crash, at exactly the same time and in the same place as the one the day
before yesterday/ I realized then that what he
was telling me must be
true. In a minute I was out of bed. I ran downstairs and hurled on some
clothes and told Marjorie, who was sleeping inside the house, what had
happened. She was awake and knew that something was amiss as the
police officer had burst into her room looking for me before he came on
to the roof. As fast as I could I drove through the empty streets to the
fort. Again I told the police that a second crash had occurred, but it was
hard to. make them believe this, especially as they were tired and drowsy,
most of them having been up all through the night and the day before.
Again I issued orders for the launches to go out, and for patrols up and
down the coast and then, with Jim Hyde and another police officer, I
drove, hell for leather, to Sitra pier. I still could hardly believe that there
had been a second crash. I said to myself, ‘There must be some mistake,
perhaps some other aircraft sighted the first one submerged in the sea and
reported a fresh accident/
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There were only a few people on the wharf, the
had not yet become generally known. It was still dark and there was a
swell on the sea, other launches from the port were already searching the
sea around Sitra. We got hold of a small launch which, as we soon dis­
covered, had a very inadequate engine, and went out to sea. After some
time we saw a man swimming. We got alongside of him and tried to
lift him on to the boat. It was extremely difficult to get him on board
because he was almost at the end of his tether, but after a struggle we
managed to pull him into the launch. We went on for a while, roughly in
the direction where we knew the first aircraft had crashed. Soon we saw
a second man swimming; he was young and evidently a strong swimmer.
We picked him up without much difficulty. What surprised me so much,
when we got the second man into the boat, was that the first thing he
said was, ‘My watch, my watch, it is spoilt from the immersion in the sea.’
The first man who we had rescued was in a poor state, so we decided to
take him back to the shore, and on the way wc found several bodies
floating in the water.
By the time we reached the pier a number of boats had come into
action and aircraft were searching overhead. We took our two men into
a little room on the pier, where other people who had been rescued were
waiting for ambulances to take them to hospital. One of the men—he
was lying on a seat—was either a pilot or one of the ship’s crew; he said
several times that a moment before the aircraft touched the water the
instruments had shown considerable height.
Soon after we reached the pier a girl was brought ashore in a boat,
she had been picked up out at sea. She was very small and slight and did
not look as if she had the stamina to have swum far. As soon as she got
into the room she asked for a cigarette, then someone gave her an old pair
of shorts, and in a very few minutes she was carrying cups of tea to the
other passengers and doing all that she could to comfort them. She was
the air hostess. I have rarely seen a more plucky performance. Later, when
we got her to the Government Hospital, in spite of shock and exhaustion
she refused to be attended to until she had seen that the other survivors
were being looked after. I heard later that she married an Englishman in
the Colonial Service in West Africa. In the second'aircraft thirteen people
were saved, and thirty-eight people lost their lives. Altogether in the two
crashes eighty-three men, women and children perished; out of eleven
children only one survived.
Most of the people from the two aircraft, except one or two who
too ill to move, who remained at Awali, were taken into the
were
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