“I saw her come around the back of the lighthouse, which they use as a short cut on the high tide.”Last night the St Malo, built two years ago, was beached in St Aubin’s Bay, south Jersey, where divers will examine her.Why St Malo survived, page 2. Some of the passengers – 185 Germans, 40 French and the rest presumed British – stepped on to a flotilla of rescue boats, others were winched into helicopters and more than 100 leapt into life-rafts amid waves up to 4ft high.Frederic Avierinos, chairman of Channiland, the St Malo’s owners, last night confirmed that the craft had struck a rock but said the cause was unknown.However, Dave Turner, watching from the shore, said the ferry was too close to rocks. The ferry was holed as it passed Corbiere point off south- west Jersey.As water poured into one of the aluminium hulls, the ferry began to list and the captain sent a mayday signal. Last night 30 were in Jersey General Hospital, many suffering from broken legs and ankles.The drama began at 10am, about 15 minutes after the French-owned St Malo, which operates between the port of that name and the Channel Islands, left St Helier. A catamaran ferry that almost sank a mile off Jersey in the Channel Islands yesterday, prompting a dramatic rescue operation to save more than 300 passengers, hit a rock It is believed to have taken a short cut. Inspectors from the Department of Transport’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch will carry out an inquiry.
Fifty people were hurt as the 307 passengers abandoned her in a heavy swell. When Anne encounters Wentworth in the street and their feelings finally become clear, Austen writes of “smiles reined in and spirits dancing in private rapture”.Perhaps the long stretch of self-denial had exhausted them but the film- makers couldn’t resist a cheesier form of consummation.

You were given one of those slow motion lip-collisions so beloved of Hollywood romances. This was simply improper, an unnecessary addition to the infinitely more moving closure of Wentworth’s glove around Anne’s hand, and it showed a wilful indifference to the novel, which is absolutely not about the abandonment of social restraint.Still, the mischief came too late to really matter, and the heart cheered even if the head didn’t.. This is a degraded idiom, a stock shot from horror movies, and it was as jarring here as if Captain Wentworth had stuck his head round the door and said: “Yo, babe.”The film ended with its only other serious breach of good manners. When Anne first sees Wentworth, a moment in which she has to reconcile huge internal shock with external equanimity, he employed one of those Hitchcock zooms, in which the perspective skews queasily as you close in on a face.

It was beautifully paced and capped with a pert invention of Dear’s – Simon Russell Beale slumping down morosely and condensing all these complaints into just two words: “Oh Anne!”Roger Michell’s direction, too, was prepared to trust the acuity of the audience’s emotional eyesight, a virtue paradoxically emphasised by one of his rare lapses into cinematic magnification. But the early scenes managed to turn Anne’s subjection into a dark social comedy, in particular a montage in which she receives the whining confidences of everyone in the Musgrove household. Her transformation warmed the final scenes even before Wentworth’s declaration brings the sun full out.Nick Dear’s script coped with this vacancy marvellously. Persuasion is a story of unspoken words and awkward silences, not the easiest thing for a writer to get to grips with, particularly if the possibility of a narrative voice has been ruled out. As Anne’s hopes mount, by those achingly tiny increments, her beauty grows, so that the scene in which Sir Walter suddenly notices her changed appearence required no suspension of disbelief on our part.