The Girl Who Came Home - a Titanic Novel (14 page)

CHAPTER
14

Grace continued reading the newspaper clippings and the scrawled pages of Maggie’s journal, late into the night. She was so completely immersed in Maggie’s Titanic world she barely noticed day turn to dusk and eventually to the darkness of evening, absorbing every last detail as Maggie described life on board the ship; every thread on the linen tablecloths in the room where they ate their meals, the friendly manner of the crew, the steward she referred to as
Lucky Harry
who seemed to have befriended Maggie and some of the other younger girls in their group, the sounds of the Uilleann pipes and fiddles played in the general room after dinner, the sparkle of the diamonds Maggie saw on the fingers of some of the First Class ladies during mass. She read each page of the journal, lost in the thoughts of a seventeen-year-old girl, through whose eyes she saw this most famous of ships in an entirely new light.

April 11
^th
1912

Day 1 at sea

…
the third-class quarters are very nice. We have real mattresses on the beds and there is a reasonable amount of space – at least there is for the four of us sharing our cabin, number 115. The steward told us that there is a family of nine sleeping in the cabin next to ours and that it is exactly the same size. I asked him how they could fit everyone in. He told me there are two in each bed and the baby sleeps in a suitcase on the floor. I can hardly believe how cramped that must be and feel a bit guilty that we have this space just for the four of us. Peggy says she reckons you’d be able to fit one of our cabins into the First Class rooms four times over and still have space for a set-dance. It is an unbelievably big boat - we’ve been wandering around the ship for hours now and I don’t think we’ve even seen one whole side of it.

…
. Peggy is dying to see the First Class quarters and Katie heard someone saying there are eight giant crystal chandeliers in the First Class dining room. I think my eyes would pop right out of their sockets if I saw such a sight!

…
I think about Séamus a lot and hope his Da is getting better. I took the packet of letters from my coat pocket today and read the first one. It was so nicely written and the words were so kind it made me cries. He says he has written one letter for each of the fourteen months of our courtship together in Ballysheen – the first letter is called ‘January’ and he has written about his memories of the first night we danced at the Brennan’s wedding. He says he thought me lovelier than all of the stars that shone in the sky that night. I wish he was here with me now. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain to him what this ship is like – maybe he will sail on it himself one day if he can ever come to America to join me.

April 12
^th
1912

Day 2 at sea

……
Peggy is complaining that the vibrations from the engines kept her awake last night. I think it’s quite a nice noise - a sort of humming sound like a big swarm of bees have set up a hive in the boiler room. Katie says Peggy should stop thinking about that English steward we met yesterday – she thinks it’s more likely him which is keeping Peggy awake at night and not the engines at all!

…
.I was lost earlier today! I’d been for some fresh air on the promenade deck and couldn’t find my way back to our cabin. I think I went down the wrong stairwell and ended up on D deck instead of E deck. Luckily there are always plenty of crew members around and I asked someone where I was. He walked me personally back to E deck and all the way down the crew passageway which he told me is called ‘Scotland Road’ to the place where our cabin is. I was glad to be back there. I gave myself quite a fright being separated from everyone like that. I think I’ll ask someone to come with me for fresh air next time.

…
..the meals on board are very nice. We are already used to the call from the bugler who signals that we can make our way to the dining saloon where we sit at tables covered with white linen tablecloths! Today we had smoked herrings for breakfast, brawn for lunch and corned beef and cabbage for dinner. I think I’ll be needing some new clothes in America if I keep eating at this rate. To think that there’s a whole army of crewmen peeling our forty ton of spuds and carrots and boiling our forty thousand eggs while we sit on our backsides! Tea and biscuits are served in the afternoon. Katie says they have the biscuits laid out in such neat rows on the plates it would nearly stop you taking one so as not to break up the pattern.

…
we are all in good spirits, even though it feels like we are a very long way from home now. We’re always talking of the people we’ve left behind though – one of us will remember something somebody said or a time they made us laugh and we try to get the time of day right in our heads so as to imagine what they are doing while we steam further away from them across the ocean.

April 13
^th
1912

Day 3 at sea

…
.the general recreation room is for steerage passengers to use for reading or playing cards or a bit of dancing. It’s a big room with a piano for us to play whenever we like. Some French fella plays most of the time, he’s very good. He likes to play some of the ragtime music I’ve heard a little. I think John O’Dea back home would have mighty craic with that piano, it would put the small yoke he plays in D’Arcy’s pub to shame! The man with the Uilleann pipes plays a fair bit too. He’s very good and gets a good old sing song going among us Irish – there’s plenty of us, I’d say we take up at least half of the steerage if not more.

…
today Peggy and me played with some of the young ones. One woman has seven children with her and is travelling all alone, God love her. I think she might be Italian or something, none of us can understand a word she says, but she’s nice and her kids are nice. I played with the baby a lot. He likes to drop things and watch you pick them up again. Maura Brennan was talking with a family from a place called Wiltshire in England. The mam and da are taking their five little ones to join relatives in Philadelphia. The youngest is just two year old and the eldest is turned sixteen. She’s a nice girl, Elsie is her name. She told me about her home and it sounds a bit like ours with the fields and the lake.

…
.Ellen Joyce has found another woman who is to be married when they arrive in America so they are all talk about wedding gowns and veils and admire each other’s rings all the time. There are four other newly-wed couples in our section of the ship who are headed out on honeymoon and Maura has been talking with another woman who’ll be having a baby soon. It’s quite a social gathering altogether! Peggy and Katie have taken to fanciful talk again about what they’ll do when they are in America and what the fancy homes they will live in will look like.

…
There are some sad stories of people who are unhappy to be leaving loved ones behind, or who are travelling to visit a sick or dying family member. I heard someone say there are over two thousand people on board this ship, so I would imagine in all of that there are plenty of sad hearts as well as many happy ones.

…
the English steward Harry (Lucky Harry is his nickname) is very sweet on Peggy. He talks to her at any opportunity and makes up all sorts of excuses to knock on the cabin door, or to fuss over her at dinner. He admired her hat yesterday and she was practically married to him then! He’s a nice fella and is great craic altogether with the stories he tells us. Like the sailing from Southampton with the bands playing and people standing on the quay to cheer and wave as the boat set out. He swears he saw five grand pianos and a motor car being loaded onto the ship before they left Southampton – but I think he’s pulling our legs. He says that the stewards on the upper decks wish they were assigned to Third Class – they have a pain in their arses with all the fussing and complaining of the First Class passengers. Some of them can be awful rude apparently and demand that their rooms are cleaned several times a day and grumble about the wrong sort of linen on their bed covers! He told us that one of the stewards says he wouldn’t be surprised if they asked him to wipe their arses for them next! Peggy told him all about the tealeaves and the strange man at Queenstown. He told her not to be worrying because he had personally seen a priest blessing the lifejackets!

…
it’s nice to walk on the deck in the sunshine and breathe in the fresh, sea air, although it is chilly up so high and with the ship going along at such a rate of knots there’s a fierce breeze all the time. Pat fancies himself as a bit of a crew member giving us daily reports of speed and iceberg warnings. These are posted every day outside the dining room and we let him tell us the latest news. He enjoys it!

…
Lucky Harry is friendly with the radio operators who work for the Marconi Telegraph Company in the radio room on the ship. He told us that the First Class passengers can pay to send messages from the ship to loved ones back in England or France or in America! Apparently some actress has been sending messages to her mother in New York telling her how much she and her fiancée are looking forward to setting a date for their wedding when they are back home and then she sends other messages to her sister telling her about a handsome millionaire she’s got friendly with and that she has ‘confused feelings’! I said that only an actress would be able to lead such a strange life! I’d love to be able to send a message to Séamus. I don’t even know how the messages work though because he certainly doesn’t have a wireless in his house. I think I’ll ask Harry about it all.

Grace scribbled frantically in her notebook as she read Maggie’s words, the detail and ideas rushing at her faster than she could capture them on the page, anxious to get them written down before they slipped away again. She reworked the notes then into legible, ordered paragraphs, mindful of the journalistic mantra of story first, detail later as she mapped Maggie’s revelations into words which flowed as easily as the water she had sailed over.

The rain was still falling and the early light of dawn was spreading from the East when she eventually turned out her light.

PART
III

'Leila safe and well cared for. Edgar missing'.17 April 1912

Marconigram message sent from Leila Meyer, Carpathia to Saks & Co., New York. Edgar Meyer was married to Leila Saks of Saks & Co., New York. He was lost when the Titanic went down.

CHAPTER
15 - R.M.S Titanic, 13
^th
April, 1912

Harry laughed as he closed the gates behind her. She was a stunning girl with a sense of humour to warm a man’s heart and a smile to melt it.

‘
You make sure that gate is good and locked now Lucky Harry,’ she shouted back to him, descending the stairs to the Third Class cabins with her friends Maggie and Katie. ‘We don’t want any o’ those First Class folk comin’ down here botherin’ us with their shiny jewels and fine shoes, givin’ us some posh disease with a fancy name now, d’ye hear?’

The girls giggled at Peggy’s joke. They were in fine mood after another hearty meal served in Titanic’s dining room and were looking forward to the post-dinner singing and dancing deep in the bowels of the ship.

He drew the gate across the top of the stairwell, as was the regulation, and called after the girls. ‘But what if some of those rich American bachelors want to come down Miss Madden?’ he called back down to them. ‘What should I do then?’

Peggy turned at the bottom of the stairwell, placing her hand on her hip, an expression of mock consideration on her face. ‘Well, then tell ‘em that they should ask for a Miss Peggy Madden on arrival in New York where she would be delighted to accept their offers of marriage. Now, please excuse us, we have to show these borin’ folk from England how to sing a decent song.’

Returning to his own dormitory, Harry lay on his narrow bunk bed, his hands behind his head. He had been on his feet since 6am that morning. It was now nearly 11pm and he was exhausted.

His thoughts turned to home, wondering whether his father was feeling well enough yet to return from Devon and how his mother was coping without them both. He imagined her sitting quietly in the living room, reading a newspaper or listening to the wireless, getting up every few minutes to adjust the tablecloth or straighten a cushion or poke the fire. His mother was a restless woman and without her two men to fuss over she would be finding small, insignificant ways to occupy her time. Harry knew that she was always anxious when he was at sea. No matter how many times he sailed, she was always fretful until he walked in through the front door again, safely back in the family home. He imagined she would have been to church to pray for his safe voyage; lighting a candle as she knelt at the altar.

For all her annoying mannerisms, he was very fond of his mother. She’d had a huge impact on his life, always there for him, always supporting him, always waiting for him to come home. She often teased him about getting married and getting out from under her feet to set up a nice place with his wife. ‘I’m sick and tired of picking up after you and washing your filthy socks, Harry Walsh,’ she would chide, but he knew she didn’t mean it. He just laughed at her and said that she would most likely be washing his socks for the rest of her life because no woman would ever be good enough to marry her precious son.