This is the Captain of your Ship.....

On February 16 1987, myself, my wife and our two children came home on leave home to England from Germany on the Herald of Free Enterprise. We returned to Europe, via Zeebrugge some 10 days later, nine days before hell broke loose.

On March 6th 1987 the same ship sank just off the coast of Belgium at 6am in the morning.
Andrew Parker lay down and used his body as a human bridge - a feat which earned him the George Medal for gallantry in that year's Queen's Honours List.

In spite of his bravery, Parker has reported feeling terrible guilt for being the one who survived.

The tragedy produced poignant heroes like Michael Skippen, the head waiter, who died while getting passengers to safety.

Equally, there were stories of people climbing over each other to get to life jackets, of children being shoved out of the way. Humans in extremis behave as they do in everyday life: sometimes terribly well, and sometimes only terribly. In general, though, we choose to focus on the heroes, tell their stories.

In some way, perhaps, we hope that we would be like them.
Risto Ojassaar was one of the few survivors of the Estonia, the ferry which sank in the Baltic in 1994. Interviewed in 1997, he described scaling the floor of his cabin in a ship which had listed so far that the decks were vertical walls. Finally making it out, he turned to follow a swarm of desperate passengers heading to the left. Heeding his instinct, he changed his mind and turned to the right. Unlike the crowd who had gone left, he survived.

As with the tales from the last minutes of the Titanic, the Estonia's sinking is full of tender, terrifying moments: a mother tries to climb the vertical floor of the bar with her adult son until, exhausted, she tells him she cannot go on, that he must go on without her.

Refusing his pleadings, she calls to him that he must survive, and live well, live well enough for two. Sobbing, he goes on, and survives. More than 850 people drowned on the Estonia, the majority trapped on the ship as it went down. Most of the survivors were young men, fit and strong. Older people, women and children simply lacked the strength to get out.

When only a small child,, I saw the film A Night to Remember for the first time.. I remained mostly silent throughout, busily planning an escape route and survival strategy for the imminent likelihood of my being stuck on a large cruise liner, about to go under.
By the time I saw the first of many reruns of the Poseidon Adventure, I was taking detailed notes: stay near the stairwells - you can use them to climb to the upper decks; get a cabin near the lifeboats and hang around them at all times; don't sleep - as soon as you do, the ship is bound to crash into something and you'll lose valuable seconds in getting to the lifeboats first; and if you can't get to the lifeboats, jump. But take a chair and a life jacket with you. Actually, the chances of my being on anything more impressive than a dinghy at the local reservoir were tiny. But that was irrelevant. I couldn't help but imagine myself as those on board - survivors and victims.

The sinking of ships such as the Titanic holds many of us captive in films (even the overblown James Cameron affair had millions sobbing into their popcorn), photographic images and incidental anecdotes which have become part of our memory. Tragedy often has a mythical power - and any shipwreck is tragic - but we choose which tragedies affect us. The stories are as familiar as breath: the musicians playing in the last moments; the steerage passengers locked behind bars; the steward firing into the crowd; the Astors insisting on dying together.

We hear the details and, as with Gestalt therapy, we imagine ourselves into the role: I am the steward who will survive at all costs; I am the woman who cannot find her child; I am the man stepping aside for an older man. In doing so, we test out our versions of ourselves, good and bad.

JVIP With Acknowledgment to KH