KEY POINTS:
Shirley Hick presents as determined and tough, but she was in tears after an embrace with a stranger at a Wahine commemoration service today.
Margaret Walker wasn't on board the Wahine or involved in the rescue effort, but her sister Anne nursed Mrs Hick's unconscious one-year-old son Gordon after he and hundreds of others made it to shore after the Wahine sinking 40 years ago today.
Mrs Walker was at today's anniversary service at Seatoun, Wellington, on orders from her sister.
Anne Smalley couldn't make it because of a family illness.
"But she asked me to come because she was with Gordy in the ambulance. She gave him cardiac massage all the way to the hospital."
Gordon survived but suffered brain damage. He died from it 23 years later and is listed as a Wahine fatality.
Mrs Hick, from Shannon near Palmerston North, lost her three-year-old daughter Alma in the disaster. She died after hitting her head when the lifeboat she was in overturned.
She thought Gordon had gone too.
"When he was in the water, I knew he had died because he had stopped crying. Then we found him later in the day," Mrs Hick told NZPA.
"He was the most beautiful child."
She said she had not known who had taken Gordon to the hospital and was delighted Mrs Smalley had made contact and would speak to her personally as she appreciated her efforts in nursing her son.
But she was upset at others over the long resuscitation effort later on, stretching over two to three hours.
She said she was hoping to meet today the stranger she had handed Alma in the hope her daughter would be saved as the ship listed in the huge seas. "But I doubt that will happen."
Mrs Hick, comforted today by her eldest son David, who also survived, has a tattoo of Gordon on one shoulder and Alma on the other.
Earlier today she unveiled a plaque on the Wahine mast at Frank Kitts Park on the Wellington waterfront, dedicated to the rescuers.
"We will never forget the people who rescued us," Mrs Hick told the crowd, many of them survivors and rescuers.
"From the survivors, thank you."
She was the driving force behind the plaque, though fund-raising with a diffident Wellington corporate scene was difficult.
But she said she was delighted to be able to tell her husband she had raised enough money for it just before he died eight months ago.
"He is up there saying, 'well you got your own way. You've done it'."
- NZPA
