The Girl Who Came Home - a Titanic Novel

by Hazel Gaynor

  Some of our group, who have travelled on steam liners before, seemed less impressed than the rest of us who have rarely seen a row boat on Loch Conn, but I even heard aunt Kathleen comment on how large and magnificent the ship appeared.

  As our now tiny tender ‘America’ pulled alongside the wall of steel, a door opened in the side of the ship and a gangway was lowered. At the top of the gangway were the ticket inspectors and the doctors who carried out the health inspections. Slowly, we started to make our way up the gangplank, not one of us able to stop ourselves from craning our necks to take in the height of the decks and masts soaring high, high into the clouds above. I didn’t want to look down, didn’t want to see the swell of the ocean under my feet.

  There was a delay in the inspection line ahead and I heard another passenger tell their friend that a girl up ahead had a rash and was being refused entry. Then I saw who the person was, it was the Mayo girl I had spoken to on the wharf, the girl who was going to join her brothers. As she walked back down the gangway, sobbing, I heard a crew member explain to her that she would have to travel on another ship when her rash was healed. ‘The Celtic sails tomorrow miss and the Oceanic next week. A few days won’t make much of a difference.’ I wanted to call to her but didn’t even know her name. My heart was so sorry for her and I hope she can board the Celtic tomorrow.

  We waited more anxiously then for our own inspections, wondering what would happen if one of us was to be turned away. The doctors examined our eyes and our hair and checked our faces and hands. All fourteen of us passed with a clean bill of health and finally, one by one, we stepped onto the deck of the ship which would take us to America.

  As we boarded, I noticed a priest leaving the boat. He had a camera in his hands. I thought it strange that he was getting off here – surely there were less expensive ways to travel from Southampton to Cork? He continued to take pictures as he walked down the gangplank and as he stepped aboard the tender we had just left. He seemed interested in the long line of us waiting for our health inspections and in the mailbags being loaded onto Titanic and unloaded from her onto the tender. He must have sensed me staring at him anyway, because he turned at the bottom of the gangway and caught my eye. ‘She is a magnificent ship miss,’ he said to me. ‘God bless you and keep you safe.’

  Ellen Joyce told me later that she’d actually seen a man hiding among the mailbags to be taken back to Queenstown – a stoker or a boiler man she said, judging by his dress and the muck on his face. She claims she saw him walking off Titanic and covering himself with the grey mailbags. ‘I saw him and he saw me,’ she said as we waited in line. ‘He had the fear of God in his eyes – he looked like a man who was running away from something. Maybe he was in trouble.’ When I watched the tender chug back to the quayside, I wondered what the man was running from and hoped that it was for good reason he didn’t want to sail to New York.

  The passengers who had already boarded in England and France watched us from the decks above and from benches and seating areas scattered around the deck we stood on. We were the new arrivals. I felt as though we had arrived late to a grand party. These people had already been aboard for a day and looked comfortable in their surroundings. An old lady smiled at me as we followed a steward who was to show us to our cabins. I smiled back and swapped my case into my right hand, the left growing tired of the weight. The steward noticed.

  ‘Let me take that for you miss,’ he said, taking the case from me. ‘You’ve probably carried that case far enough already.’

  I smiled, relieved to have the bulky case out of my hands and no longer banging against my shins which were black and blue by now from heaving it across half of Ireland. He had a kind face and I noticed the shiny new crew member badge on his arm. Number 23, whatever that meant.

  Our cabins are quite fine. Ours is number 115. There are four beds; two bunk beds. Me and Peggy have the two top bunks and Aunt Kathleen and Katie have the two bottom ones. They all have proper mattresses and are as comfortable as any bed I have ever slept in. There is a hand wash basin in the cabin itself with two White Star Line hand towels hanging from a silver hook on either side. There is even a bar of White Star Line soap for us to use! We have placed our cases under the bottom bunks but I have kept the packet of letters from Séamus in my coat pocket and my coat is folded up at the foot of my own bed.

  When we were settled, the steward, Harry is his name, showed us where the life jackets were kept and took us up to see one of the sixteen lifeboats. Pat said the lifeboat was almost as big as the tender we had just left and how could anyone imagine that a ship could be built which was big enough to hold sixteen of them? Pat is like a child walking around this ship, he has the poor steward’s ear half bent off by asking so many questions about it!

  We set sail at 1.30pm according to Ellen’s gleaming, gold watch which she takes out to tell the time at every possible opportunity. The thrust of the engines sent a shudder through my bones and a steady vibration through the wooden benches we were sitting on in the General Room. Realising we were setting sail, we all rushed back out to the deck, eager to catch a last glimpse of Ireland.

  Our excitement faded then and we stood for a long while at the white railings at the stern of the ship, silently watching our homeland fade from view, each crashing wave taking us further away from everyone we loved and everything we knew.

  The man with the Uilleann pipes stood next to me for a good while, neither of us spoke. ‘She’s a mighty fine land,’ he said eventually, ‘you should be very proud to have known her, wherever life might take you.’

  I turned to him. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Yes, I am. Very proud indeed.’ I remember feeling for the precious packet of letters in my coat pocket, still bound by their packaging and string. Grasping them and my rosary beads, I said a silent prayer.

  Titanic followed the coastline of Ireland for the rest of the afternoon, past Old Kinsale Head and on, following the cliffs and the mountains. We returned to our cabins now and again, coming back up to the deck occasionally to catch a last glimpse of our country. The sun was setting as the boat turned to head out across the ocean and we were silent once again as Ireland’s coastline faded into the sea mist and was obscured from view.

  PART II

  Jules E. Brutalom 31 East 27th St Nyk: 'Safe picked up by Carpathia don't worry.’ Dorothy.Gibson

  Marconigram sent from Miss Dorothy Gibson, Carpathia to Julie [Brutalom, Jules E] on 18th April 1912

  CHAPTER 9 - Chicago, 1982

  In a dimly lit, dusty attic in her great-grandmother’s house, Grace rummaged among cardboard boxes and plastic bags, moving things to one side only to discover yet more boxes hidden behind the first layer. Nothing was labelled; there was no sense of organisation. In fact, there was a distinct sense of disorganisation. She leant back on her heels, sighed and placed her hands on her hips, glancing from one end of the attic to the other. It stretched across the length of the house and was littered with unwanted junk accumulated over the course of a lifetime.

  She’d already been looking for over an hour and still the small, black case she was looking for would not reveal itself. This is impossible she thought to herself, jumping at the sensation of a cobweb brushing against her arm. Maybe, after all these years, this case doesn’t want to be found.

  Since the night of her birthday party a week ago, Grace had been unable to think about anything other than her great-grandmother’s revelation about Titanic. It was almost unbelievable to think that, for seventy years, she had told nobody other than her husband. Not a soul. Not her children or her grandchildren, nobody. It was astonishing to Grace to think that somebody could keep something like that a secret for so long; everyone knew about the ironic tragedy of the unsinkable Titanic, everyone wondered what it must have been like to have sailed on that ostentatious ship and to have experienced the terror that occurred four days into the voyage across the Atlantic. She remembered doing a school about the disaster when she was nine years old, remembered the
faces of the strange, ghostly-looking people in the black and white photographs of old newspaper articles. She remembered the childish pictures she had drawn of the disaster herself; a big, black ship with one of the funnels broken and a small hole in one side. She wasn’t good at drawing people, so there weren’t any in her picture. It had never occurred to her to ask whether anyone in her own family had actually been involved.

  When Maggie had told her the entire, incredible story, had explained her unbearable sadness and her inability to accept what had happened, Grace began to understand why a person would want to completely eradicate something so traumatic from their life. ‘Why would God have spared me,’ she’d said, ‘an insignificant young girl from Ireland, when so many others drowned?’

  If it was never spoken about again during her lifetime, perhaps she would be able to distance herself from the legacy of Titanic and observe it, as thousands of people all over the world did, as a mildly interested passer-by in an event which was fascinating in its telling and tragic in its reality. Maybe then she would be able to forget that she was actually one of the thousands of victims.

  ‘Are you sure it’s a black case I’m looking for?’ Grace shouted down the small hole in the attic floor which she had clambered up earlier that morning. ‘I can’t seem to find it anywhere.’ As much as she wanted to find the case, it was getting hot and claustrophobic in the attic and Grace was thirsty.

  She could hear her great-grandmother pottering about in the kitchen underneath, teaspoons clattering on teacups, the biscuit tin being opened. She imagined her placing one of her paper doilies carefully onto a china plate, arranging the biscuits in a perfect, over-lapping circle. It was a ‘thing’ of Maggie’s, her biscuit display, an almost unreasonable amount of detail being paid to a seemingly trivial activity. But Maggie took pride in many things in life and providing her guests with a nice pot of tea and a plate of uniformly arranged biscuits on a china plate was one of them.

  ‘Yes dear,’ she shouted back up, the projection of her voice causing her to cough slightly. ‘A small black case. About the size of a pillow. It’s probably near the back. Underneath a load of your great-grandfather’s old junk.’

  You don’t say.

  Just as she was about to give up and go down the stepladder for a tea break, Grace saw the slightest glimpse of a solid, black corner jutting out between two fallen boxes. She clambered over to it, the ache in her stooped back and the pain in her knees suddenly forgotten. Her heart raced as she pushed and heaved the heavy boxes to one side and grabbing the edge, pulled the small, black case, out onto the bare floorboards. It was about the size of a pillow.

  The hairs stood up on the back of her neck, she could hear the blood rushing through her ears, and her heart hammered in her chest. Yes she thought Yes. This is it! She swept her fingers across the top of the case, sending a shower of dust particles whirling and spinning into the air around her, blurring her vision temporarily and causing her to cough.

  As the dust settled, she saw what she had been searching for. A luggage label bearing the name Maggie Murphy and an address of North Ashland Avenue, Chicago

  ‘I have it Maggie,’ she called, coughing again in the dust, ‘I’ve found it!’ Her voice was shrill with excitement. Her great-grandmother didn’t respond. ‘I’m coming down, you can pour the tea.’

  Maggie placed the case carefully on her lap. She sat for a moment, closing her eyes, lost in the distant memories of her life. The small clock on the mantelpiece struck eleven o’clock, a bird sang from the old blackberry bush in the garden, a fly buzzed annoyingly in the hallway and particles of dust danced in the shaft of sunlight streaming in through the window. Nothing else moved for those few, quiet moments. Grace hardly dare breathe.

  ‘I shouldn’t have gone back for it really,’ Maggie said softly, rubbing her hand across the top of the case. ‘It’s a bit silly now when I think about it, a ship sinking and me going back for a coat and a suitcase. We didn’t realise how bad it was though you see Grace; we didn’t think she would go down.’ She sat silently again then as she prepared herself to face her past.

  ‘Do you remember what’s in it Maggie?’

  Her great-grandmother looked at her; a softness, a sadness in her eyes. ‘I do Grace. I do. Even after all these years.’

  Grace watched quietly as Maggie fiddled with the rusted fastenings, her frail hands shaking more than usual. Those few moments, with the latches grating and groaning but refusing to open, felt like hours. That small, black case seemed, at that moment, like a barrier; a dam against which a deluge of memories had strained for decades and which now threatened to engulf her great-grandmother as soon as it released its secrets and revealed its history.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?’ Grace asked tentatively, afraid that opening this case may have a bigger impact on their lives than either of them had at first thought.

  Maggie looked at her. ‘No, I’m not sure at all. But we’re here now aren’t we and I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly not going to put that case back up in that stuffy old attic without seeing what’s inside.’

  Finally, the fastenings clicked open. Gently, Maggie lifted the lid, emitting a tiny, barely audible gasp as her eyes settled on the contents inside.

  It was a moment Grace would never forget, watching this dignified old lady who she loved so much, as she stared into a small case which she’d last seen when only a child. A lifetime of memories flooded her lined face; a lifetime of forgetting washed away in that silent moment in an ordinary sitting room in an average house in a quiet, Chicago suburb.

  Maggie lifted her head, resting it against the back of the chair, a sense of release washing over her, the dreadful burden of carrying this secret for all these years seeming to lift from her small shoulders.

  Grace sat quietly in the seat opposite, rubbing her fingers over the rough, plum-coloured fabric of the chair, digging her nails into the edges of the intricate pattern, just as she had done since she could first remember coming to this house as a small child. She almost felt uncomfortable now, as if she were intruding in a very private moment. Watching Maggie now, the magnitude of her story hit her fully for the first time. She had been on Titanic. She had watched the people she loved drown in an icy sea. She had heard the screams and terror of a thousand voices and had lost everything except for the contents of that small, insignificant case and the clothes on her back. It struck Grace that this was no longer about a story to reignite her journalism career; this was real life, and she was watching it happen in front of her very eyes.

  From the case, Maggie began to lift out the items, caressing and studying each one as if it were the most precious of treasures. A simple steel hair comb, a handled-mirror, an emerald coloured brooch, a pair of black, cotton gloves, a bible, a set of rosary beads and a bottle of holy water, a green Third Class Health Inspection Certificate, a menu card, a small book and a bundle of what looked like newspaper clippings. Memories flashed across Maggie’s mind, each item promoting a remembered conversation, a place or a person.

  She held her Titanic boarding ticket for a good while, rubbing gently at the fragile paper with her fingers. She closed her eyes and was immediately transported back to the clattering hooves of the horses as they rode into the streets of Castlebar. She remembered walking into Mr Durcan’s office on Main Street to collect their tickets. She recalled Tom Durcan as a stout, middle-aged man with a whiskery moustache and small, shifty eyes. He’d smiled at her and winked as he handed the tickets to her aunt. ‘She’s a beauty,’ he’d whispered to her. ‘Forty tonne of potatoes on board, they say, and no less than forty thousand eggs. Ye certainly won’t be starvin’ that’s for sure.’ Her eyes had widened at the sheer thought of that many eggs and she’d said something about looking forward to being among the first to sail on the ship before her aunt had bustled her out of the office saying if they stood around chattering all morning, Titanic would sail without them and then they wouldn’t be eating a one of
those eggs, let alone forty thousand. She remembered herself and Peggy admiring their tickets with the impressive picture of Titanic on the front. They’d been excited to note that their tickets were sequential in number, hers being 330923 and Peggy’s being 330924. How inconsequential that ticket number had turned out to be.

  ‘Not much really is it, to start a new life,’ Maggie said now, turning the items over in her hands. ‘Not much at all. Of course, the rest of my things were in my aunt’s larger case, and we know where that is now. We kept the suitcases under the bunk beds but I kept my personal possessions in here you know, for safe-keeping. I kept this case at the bottom of my bed with my coat. The letters were in my coat pocket. It’s a shame I didn’t keep them in here I suppose.’

  Grace moved over to her and knelt down at her side, placing a hand on hers. ‘Do you mind if I look?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s all of no use to me now is it?’

  Grace studied everything carefully, asking Maggie about the story behind each item, and unwrapping the bundle of newspaper clippings. It was an archivists dream. ‘Oh my goodness Maggie, this is amazing. These are actual newspapers from the time. Look, The Chicago Tribune, 18th April 1912.’ They sat for a while then, poring over the fragile, yellowed newspapers.

  ‘It was the nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York,’ Maggie explained. ‘They’d kept all the newspapers to follow the story. Of course, the papers got it all wrong at first you know, reporting that Titanic was sailing back to Belfast for repairs. Look.’ She pointed to a headline on one of the papers, reading it out loud. ‘Repair Problem. As far as the company know, Belfast is the only place which possesses a dock of sufficient dimensions’. And look at this one ‘Titanic Sunk. No lives lost. Collision with an iceberg. Largest ship in the world. All passengers taken off.’ They didn’t know we were all drowning you see.’ She paused for a moment as they studied some more of the incredible newspaper headlines. ‘One of the nurses gave all these to me when I left the hospital,’ Maggie continued. ‘She said I might want to keep them. She said that Titanic would still be talked about in a hundred years’ time. I thought she was joking.’