The Girl Who Came Home - a Titanic Novel (30 page)
‘
Vivienne, darling, my darling Vivienne,’ Emily Walker-Brown cried hysterically as she pushed her way towards the gangway which had been erected for the disembarking passengers.
Catherine watched, unnoticed, as the mother and daughter shared an emotional embrace, Emily weeping for the loss of her future son-in-law. But Vivienne Walker-Brown did not cry. Catherine overheard her reassuring her mother that Robert did the honourable thing and made space for the women and children as instructed, ‘unlike that dreadful Ismay fellow,’ she added at the top of her voice. ‘Shameful behaviour saving himself without a care for the poor souls left to perish in the icy sea. Robert’s seat was taken by a young woman with two children, mother. We must not be sad that his life is lost when those young lives were saved.’
It was a chilling reality, relayed in a strangely detached manner. Catherine watched then as the family walked towards a waiting taxicab. Vivienne and her dog would be back within the comfort of their Park Avenue home within thirty minutes. The steerage passengers hadn’t even started to emerge from the Carpathia.
For hours, Catherine watched and waited as the remainder of the first and second class survivors disembarked the ship and made their way unsteadily along the gangplank and into the waiting crowds, the gathered press pack, corralled behind the fencing on West Street, shouting questions to the bewildered passengers, trying desperately to get a scoop for the first editions of the morning papers. It was nearly midnight when the steerage passengers began to emerge. It struck Catherine how like the pictures they looked which she had seen depicting the waifs and strays emerging from the famine ships a generation ago; most wearing only their nightclothes, some with just a blanket around their shoulders for warmth and many without shoes. Numbly she watched the faces, staring as some survivors were taken straight to the waiting ambulances.
Still, she stood quietly, patiently, hopefully, barely noticing the crowds dispersing around her.
‘
Please come, Katie my love,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Please be there.’
It was only when the crew of the Carpathia started to emerge that her hopes began to fade.
‘
Excuse me miss.’ She turned. A White Star Line official stood by her side. ‘They are all off. It’s just Carpathia crew now miss.’
She looked desperately into the man’s eyes. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘No. They can’t all be off. I’m waiting for my sister. Katie Kenny is her name.’
‘
I’m very sorry miss. All the survivors are ashore now.’ He tipped his hat then and disappeared into the rain.
Catherine stood alone, drenched to the skin, staring at the looming, empty bulk of the Carpathia. The remaining people around her on the wharf dissolved into the darkness which engulfed her. ‘No. No. Not Katie,’ she gasped. ‘Not my darling Katie. Please, no.’
She sank to her knees and wept with every part of her soul. Not even the relentless rain could compete with the flood of tears which fell in New York that night.
CHAPTER
31 -
Private Journal of Maggie Murphy
St. Vincent’s Hospital, New York
Saturday, 20th April, 1912
I feel numb. Cold. Frightened. I cannot stop the tears falling. They tell me I am in a hospital somewhere in New York. I barely know how I got here. I barely know my own name. My hands are misshapen - swollen and purple from the cold and frostbite. My God it was so cold on that lifeboat.
I can barely hold the pen. The nurse says it is good for me to write; that it will help to get my circulation going again. I don’t know what to write, don’t know what to say. Part of me wishes I had died too.
I want to go home.
Sunday, 21
st
April, 1912
We must have been at sea for some days on the Carpathia because the girl lying in the bed next to me says it is Sunday and it was a Sunday when I last wrote in this journal. How can a whole week have passed?
Sometimes when I wake from my sleep I forget where I am and what has happened. For a few minutes I feel quite peaceful. Then I see the bare hospital walls and the rows and rows of beds and I remember.
I recognise some of the people in the beds near to me. It seems like a dream that we shared a song or danced a jig together on that mighty ship which is now at the bottom of the ocean. I have searched the faces again and again, desperately hoping that I’ll see Peggy or Kathleen or Katie or anyone from our group – but I know it’s hopeless to think that they somehow survived.
I’m frightened. I don’t like being alone here.
I do not know what will happen to me at all. I don’t know if my Aunt Mary in Chicago will know about the disaster – or anyone in Ireland. It is so terrible. So many people here have lost everyone and everything. I can barely imagine how I can live again. I sometimes wish I had gone down with the others. Why would God save me when thousands died – some of them rich millionaires? I saw babies in that water frozen blue with the cold and I think their faces will haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.
I am too tired to write any more.
I want to go home.
Sunday 21st April, 1912 – evening time
I do not have my coat. I remember taking it off on the lifeboat because it was damp and making me shiver. A well-dressed lady with a dog on her lap gave me her coat. I seem to remember that she was wearing two coats – an everyday one and a fur one, she said. She handed me the everyday coat to keep me warm and that was what I arrived here in. I still have it but I don’t know what became of my own coat and there were some letters in the pocket, I’m sure of it. Letters from Séamus. Poor Séamus. What must he be thinking hearing about the ship being sunk and all and me in no fit state to contact him to tell him I’m alive. I wish I had his letters – they would comfort me. Now I’ll never know what those letters said. I know I shouldn’t feel sad about a few letters what with all those poor people dead, but I do. They were all I had to remind me of him.
I want to go home.
Monday 22
nd
April, 1912
The Salvation Army women came today. They gave us all a parcel of clean clothes and some money to go onwards on our journey. There’s all sorts of relief efforts and money being raised for the survivors – thousands of dollars. A kind lady called Elizabeth told me that my aunt Mary had been in contact and it has been arranged that she will meet me off the Pennsylvania train at Union Depot station in Chicago in two days’ time. I am writing those names down so as not to forget.
When I was changing my nightdress to put on a clean one from the donated clothes, I found $25 in bills pinned to my old one. I hadn’t noticed it before but then I vaguely remembered a man talking to me when I was first brought to the hospital from the Carpathia. He had a whiskery beard and plump fingers and his breath smelt of tobacco. He spoke a lot of words to me but I was too shocked to take it all in. I remember he asked me to sign a paper which he handed to me. I thought it was a train ticket to Chicago I was signing for but the nurses now tell me that it was a waiver for damages. I’m not really sure what that means, but it seems that the White Star Line people wanted to make sure I didn’t come back and try to get money from them for the suffering I’ve experienced and for all my losses. They seem to think $25 is compensation enough for my troubles. I remember the man had to hold my arm to help me write my own name because my hands were too numb to hold the pen properly. I am too sad and alone right now to be angry with them.
The newspaper men are crawling all over the hospital. They want to talk to us about what really happened the night Titanic sank. I have said a few words to them about how I got to the lifeboats, but I really do not want to go through all the terrible moments again. I cannot get the faces of those poor people out of my head, stood against the railings, praying for their lives and those terrifying sounds of the crunching, grating, screeching metal and the desperate screams of a thousand people will haunt my dreams forever I am sure of it.
I want to go home.
There are some desperate sights here in the hospital and some terrible tales are being told about what happened to people when Titanic sank. We sit about and say a few words to each other now and again – normally talking about someone else’s experience rather than our own. I think we all just want to lock away our own memories and try to forget.
One of the nurses who tends to me most of the time has told me about a young Finnish girl who doesn’t speak a word of English. She sits in the bed across the room from mine and looks to be in a constant daze. Her brother, her uncle, and the man she was to marry were all lost in the disaster. She is to sail back to Finland on Wednesday. I cannot imagine the fears she must have about sailing again. I wish I could help her in some way.
The nurse also told me about the small Swedish woman at the end of the ward who refuses to leave the side of her two little children. Her husband, their father, was lost. The children have the fairest hair I have ever seen and the mother dotes on them day and night, so she does, stroking the little dresses which came in for them from the Women’s Committee. Apparently, she told the nurse that when she started to climb down the rope to the lifeboat which was already being lowered, she realised she could only carry the youngest child and hold the rope at the same time. Her three-year-old daughter clung terrified to her skirt all the way down that rope, the black Atlantic sea heaving underneath them. Thank the Lord the little girl held on good and tight and they all three made it safely to the boat, although the father was lost.
There is another woman here who has just married her fiancée in the hospital. They were separated on the deck of Titanic and she thought him lost until they discovered each other in different wards of the hospital. She had been clinging to an upturned lifeboat for eight hours. The nurse tells me it’s important to try and be grateful for stories like this, despite our own terrible losses. I know she is right, but the faces of my friends and family still disturb my dreams at night.
Tuesday 23
rd
April, 1912
Some of my words have been printed in the morning newspaper. My nurse showed it to me. She has given me a whole bundle of newspapers which she says I should take with me when I leave. She says that I should keep them somewhere safe because the Titanic disaster will be talked about in a hundred years’ time and people will be interested in seeing them. I cannot see why anyone would want to remember this terrible event, but I have folded the papers and put them into my case anyway, along with the few other possessions I have somehow managed to keep with me through all of this: the silver haircomb and rosary beads which Séamus gave me on the morning we left Ballysheen, my Titanic ticket, my Health Inspection certificate, a bottle of Holy Water and a few other unimportant items. Some people might want to talk about Titanic for the next hundred years – after I leave this hospital and get to Chicago, I never want to talk about it again for as long as I live.
I will leave the hospital tomorrow. I have no idea what life has in store for me, but I know that I can never cross the ocean again. I will never step foot on a ship as long as I live which means that I will have to try and forget about Ireland and those who we left behind. How could I ever look into the eyes of those poor mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers – knowing that I got off the ship when their loved ones did not and perished in the freezing seas? I can never see their faces – I can never explain what happened that night.
Peggy is alive! I cannot believe it. She’s is ALIVE!
She walked right into the ward where my bed is and woke me from my sleep. ‘Is it really you Maggie Murphy?’ she said. We took to crying and hugging each other – I am beyond words. I thought it was a ghost at my bedside for a few moments I dared hardly believe it was really and truly her – alive and well and with her beautiful, golden hair falling about her shoulders as usual. We sat and stared at each other for an age – laughing and crying hysterically – neither of us knowing what to say or do with ourselves.
We caused such a commotion with all our shrieking and crying and gasping that the nurses came running – they thought someone was dying. We brought tears to their eyes when we told them we were sailing on Titanic together and thought each other dead along with everyone else we loved and cared for.
When we finally composed ourselves and the nurses had brought us both a cup of hot, sweet tea, Peggy told me that after we were separated on the ladder, she’d seen Katie and Maria and Pat heading up towards the back of the ship to escape from the water. She told me one of the great funnels broke loose from its fixings then and smashed into everything underneath – she doesn’t even want to imagine that it was that funnel which killed them all, but she didn’t see anyone from the Ballysheen group again and ran, with a group of crewmen, to the starboard side of the ship and somehow managed to jump from the deck to a lifeboat which was being lowered some fifteen feet down. She said she was never more terrified in her life when she made that leap, but she knew it was her last chance to survive. Then, when the lifeboat reached the water it was capsized by people who were already thrown overboard, trying desperately to clamber aboard. She wept when she described the fear of being in that icy water and the people all thrashing around her. Her face went under the water a dozen times, she told me, what with people trying to climb over her to reach the boat. But brave Peggy managed to somehow swim to an upturned collapsible raft which she clung to in her sodden clothes right through the night. She was rescued along with twelve others from that upturned boat – one of the Marconi radio boys was with her. Bride, she said his name was. Harold Bride. I remember Harry the steward telling me that was the name of the boy he knew and who he was asking to send my telegram to Séamus. I am glad to know that he survived. Imagine, Peggy being on the Carpathia with me and in the same hospital as me for all that time and we never found each other until now.