POV: Your Last Day on the Lusitania

It is the morning of 7 May 1915, and you are a thirty-year-old second-class steward on RMS Lusitania, four years with Cunard, Liverpool born. Your sister Nell is travelling home in second class because your mother is ill. You wake to four bells, tea with condensed milk, and your father's brass watch under the pillow. The day is told through what you can see, hear and touch: the fog and the ship's whistle, the Admiralty message about submarines, the German warning printed in the New York papers, the lifeboats swung out on their davits, the sun coming back, and the green line of Ireland through the portholes. Then comes the torpedo at 2:10 in the afternoon and the eighteen minutes that follow, from the dining saloon to the lifeboats. The story keeps to the record and shows only what a steward could have seen from where he stood. The film ends with an epilogue in the future tense: the inquiry, the count of the dead, the war that follows, and what is left of a family afterwards.