by Sarah Ellis
That Fatal
Night
The Titanic Diary
of Dorothy Wilton
BY SARAH ELLIS
Scholastic Canada Ltd.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1912
May 1912
June 1912
July 1912
Epilogue
Historical Note
Images and Documents
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Author’s Note
Copyright
Books in the Dear Canada Series
Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1912
May 1912
May 1, 1912
Father and Mother met with the principal this morning. I am not allowed to go to school for the rest of the year due to my shocking behaviour yesterday in the schoolyard. I am to do my lessons at home. This afternoon Miss Caughey brought my books to me. She also brought this notebook. She said, “When you are ready, write an account of what happened to you this spring. I think it will help.”
All right. I am ready.
My name is Dorothy Pauline Wilton. I am twelve years old. I live in Halifax. I have one brother, Charles, who is grown up and lives in New York City. I was in England visiting Grandfather and Grandmother at their house, Mill House, and I was coming home on a big new ship called the Titanic with Miss Pugh, who works in Father’s bank but was travelling to England to see her very old father so was taking care of me, and the Titanic hit an iceberg and it sank.
Many people drowned. I survived. Miss Pugh did not. Now I’m home.
That is what happened.
Done.
Over.
May 2
When I read over what I wrote yesterday it sounds as though I was cross with Miss Caughey. I was not. She is the kindest teacher in the school. But I am not going to write about the Titanic disaster. I am not going to write anything more about it, or talk about it, or think about it. The newspaper man at the train station said, “You’re part of history now, kid.” I am not. I refuse. I am a schoolgirl, not some old peson in history.
But even though I do not want to write about the disaster I am going to write about Wednesday, because it was not fair.
The first thing that I want to say is that I am not one particle sorry. Irene’s mother, Mrs. Rudge, says that Irene may never be the same. The principal, Mrs. Trueman, says she would like to be lenient, given my “unusual and troubling recent experience,” but that Halifax Ladies’ College “simply cannot condone violence of this nature.” Mother says that it is “never acceptable for a young lady to behave in such a manner.” Aunt Hazel says that this is what comes of giving a child too much attention. Father says I should never have been sent to England and it is all the fault of Grandmother and Grandfather, who are irresponsible bohemians.
Adults know nothing. Bloody nothing. Mother says that “bloody” is vulgar. I don’t care. Bloody. Bloody. BLOODY.
May 3
I hear Father and Mother coming home. They were at the Fairview cemetery. Today the victims of the disaster were buried in a special section there.
But not Miss Pugh. Her body was not recovered. Or it could not be identified. Thanks to bloody Irene Rudge I think I know why.
I am to spend my time at home doing lessons, reading “improving” books, learning domestic skills and thinking over my bad behaviour.
Today the lessons were French and Sums.
The domestic work was ironing table napkins. I could not get them to come out perfectly square.
Now I will think over my bad behaviour.
No, I will NOT.
I will think over the bad behaviour of Irene Rudge.
I do not like Irene. She was my friend when we were eight years old. When I was eight I liked her for her curly hair. Eight year olds do not always know what is important in a friend. Later I discovered that she always wants to be the centre of attention and to spread gossip. Sometimes girls want to be her friend, but after a time she is always mean to them.
Phoebe told me that after the disaster — but when I was still not at school — Irene got a lot of attention by telling everyone all about her uncle, who was one of the funeral directors who went out on the Mackay-Bennett to recover the bodies from the Titanic. But when I came back to school and when I was written up in the newspaper, everyone lost interest in Irene’s undertaker uncle.
Irene says that I showed off, but she is bloody wrong. I did not show off. I did not even mention the disaster to anybody except Mary. And Louise and Winnifred and a little bit to Flo, but only when they asked. I did not want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it, or think about it.
I expected that when I was home and back at school, things could be just as they were when I left in February. But they weren’t.
On Tuesday morning Irene came over to me when everyone was skipping, out in the schoolyard before the bell. She said she wanted to show me something around the corner of the building. She was acting friendly. I should have known.
When we got out of sight of the others she started to say the most awful things. She said that some of the bodies of the drowned people could not be identified. If they could not tell who the bodies were, they threw them back into the sea, weighted down with iron bars. She pretended that she was sad about this but she was really filled with glee. Nobody would believe me if I tried to tell them the truth about this. Grown-ups never believe these things.
I did not want to hear this and I should have run away, but it was like I was glued to the spot. Then she said that the reason the people could not be identified was that they had been chewed by sea creatures. This is when I was taken over by anger. I did not decide to slap her across the face. My eyes went blurry and my hand just did it. She stepped backward and tripped and fell against the brick wall and cut her head, and I did not plan that either, but I was glad. I was glad to see her stop looking gleeful. I was glad I hurt her. I am still glad. That is it. That is the truth that I can tell only to these pages.
May 4
Today Father went to St. George’s Church for one more funeral. It was for a little boy from the Titanic. Nobody claimed or identified this boy. I can’t understand this. Does nobody miss him? Even if his whole family drowned, don’t they have people at home wondering about them? At dinner Father described the funeral. Six sailors from the Mackay-Bennett carried a white casket all covered in flowers.
After dinner Father and I took Borden for a walk. Borden is as daft as he was when I left for England. Father says perhaps he is going to act like a puppy his whole life. Father walks just like Grandfather, with long strides, whacking at weeds with his walking stick.
I miss Grandfather and Grandmother so much. I long to be back at Mill House. Something odd has happened to time. It does not feel like two weeks since I have returned home but just an instant, yet my time at Mill House seems long long ago. And the five days on the Titanic? Stretched out like a rubber band.
May 5
Church this morning. I am all ready. Bed made. The stripes on my blankets make it so that I can line them up exactly right. The bedspread is harder because it has tufts that don’t make a regular pattern. It takes a lot of tugging. Mother says she is pleasantly surprised by how neat I have become and that Grandmother must have been a good influence. That isn’t it at all. At Mill House I had a feather quilt and all I did in the morning was pull it up. Sometimes I didn’t even do that if I didn’t want to move a sleeping cat. Nobody cared. Grandmother is not the reason that I need to make my bed perfectly. I just need to.
I don’t want to go to church. People will look at me. Mother says I have already been excused for two weeks and it is time to “resume t
he routine.” Father says he will bring me straight home after.
He did. Home now.
Mother stayed for the social hour but Father and I didn’t. Mother likes to chat but Father doesn’t because he says he talks to people all week at work. In the service there were special prayers for the victims of the Titanic and for their families. Then there was a prayer of thanks for all those “safely delivered home.” When the minister said those words I felt a kind of hum, as though everybody would be staring at me if staring were allowed during prayers.
Then we sang For Those in Peril on the Sea because there are still two ships out at the disaster recovering bodies. It talks about tumult and restless waves and foaming deep, but it doesn’t say anything about icebergs. Are there icebergs in the Bible? Probably not because they didn’t have icebergs in the Sea of Galilee and those other Bible places.
The Old Testament lesson was all about revenge and smiting. Smiting with a stone and smiting with an instrument of iron and smiting with a piece of wood. Smite is a word that sounds just like what it is, like a slap across the face.
The improving book that I’m reading is Madame How and Lady Why, a book about science and the Earth. The chapter was about earthquakes. The Madame How part was about steam beneath the Earth. I already knew a bit about what is under the ground because of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Just before I arrived in England Grandfather had bought the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (I like spelling Encyclopaedia. Perhaps some day it will be on a spelling bee and it will be my winning word.) It was very grand. Twenty-seven books. Black leather covers with gold decorations. Paper so thin you could almost see through it. It even had its own book-case with twenty-seven slots so that books could all slide in sideways. Each book was from something to something, like FRA to GIB. Millie and I made up creatures for all the three-letter names. BIS and CAL, MUN and ODD, EVA and FRA. VET and ZYM.
I loved the thought that EVERYTHING you could know was sitting on those two shelves. Sometimes Grandfather and I would just pick a volume at random and flip through until we found something we wanted to know about. One day we were flipping through one of the G books and, buried in the middle of Geology we found out that there are three ideas about what’s in the centre of the Earth. It could be rocks that are so hot they are liquid. It could be solid with just little pockets of red-hot rock. It could be gas with melted rock around that and the solid Earth around that. I asked Grandfather if we would ever find out for sure and he said he thought some clever chap would sort it out one day. Then Grandmother called out from the other room that it might well be a clever lass.
(I wrote that in fat letters because Grandmother speaks like that. She has many opinions about government, food, clothes, home decorating, education, the poor and, most especially, women. I won’t write them out now.)
On the subject of the encyclopaedia, Grandmother said that they could have better used the money to fix the roof, but then Grandfather said that if the roof leaked he would just read them a nice dry article such as the four pages on land registration.
Back to now, and my improving book. The Madame How part was followed by Lady Why and she just makes me angry. Mr. Kingsley, who wrote the book, asked why did God allow a lot of people to be killed in an earthquake in South America. Then he pretended to have an answer. It was something about tempting God’s will. But if it was a punishment for doing something wrong, and he doesn’t say what was the wrong thing, how can it include everybody, like mothers and children and that little boy that nobody claimed? I think Mr. Kingsley should stick to steam and not ask questions that he cannot answer.
May 6
Nobody understands. Last night I woke up in the darkness. I wake up at night now. I didn’t use to. I reached over the edge of the bed to touch my shoes and they were not there. I got out of bed and felt all around the floor and I could not find them anywhere. This blackness came over me and I heard myself screaming out. Mother came and all I could say was, “Shoes.” Finally she went to the wardrobe and got out my shoes. She had put them away when I was asleep. I need to be able to touch my shoes in the night. I cannot tell her why. I can’t tell anybody why. Not even in these pages.
Mother was not cross. She stayed with me until I fell asleep.
Phoebe came to visit after school. She reported that Irene is making the most of her injury, wearing a bright white bandage, sitting on the sidelines during Calisthenics (“Wish you’d slugged me,” Phoebe said. She loathes Calisthenics and sports of all kinds.) and pretending to feel dizzy several times a day. Phoebe says everybody is more than tired of Irene and misses me. I know this can’t be true (Irene has her loyal followers) but I’m glad Phoebe said it.
Phoebe admired my new clothes. I have a new coat and boots, hat, three new dresses, underwaists and drawers, nightgowns and combinations. If somebody had told me, before the Titanic, that one day I would go with Mother and buy all new clothes, from drawers right out to my coat, I would have thought that would be the best fun. Mother is always very sparkly when she is shopping, like someone at a party. But that is what happened the first week I was home and it wasn’t fun. Every new thing made me think of something lost, something drowned. I tried to be grateful and good but I could not be cheerful. Nobody understands.
May 7
Today there was a package of letters for me from England. When I opened the package and all the letters spilled out I could see a picture in my mind of everyone at Mill House.
Grandfather in his chair, reading and trying to keep his pipe lit. Grandmother on a ladder painting a scene on the wall above the fireplace. Mrs. Hawkins in the kitchen kneading bread dough. Owen Hawkins under the kitchen table teaching Brownie to balance a biscuit on her nose. Millie Hawkins doing the splits.
The longest letter was from Grandfather. He told me the whole story of how they first heard of the disaster in the newspaper and how all the news was muddled and how desperate they had been until they received Father’s telegram. He wrote that he kept saying to himself, “But it’s unsinkable.”
When I opened the note from Mrs. Hawkins, dried flowers sprinkled out. She wrote that she missed me and that the chickens missed me too and were not laying well. She wondered if I remembered the names of the flowers. I do. Bluebell, coltsfoot, butterbur, primrose.
Owen, whose penmanship is execrable (good word for bad), told me that he had the stitches taken out of his arm and it looks as though there is going to be a very good scar and did I see the iceberg and was it as big as the crurcr or not so big. I puzzled over that for a while, wondering if a “crurcr” was some English thing I didn’t know about. Then I sorted it out. Church.
Millie sent a drawing of the encyclopaedia creatures, CHA and SHU and LOR and all the rest. Millie’s drawings are like the ones in a book that Grandfather had, called Book of Nonsense. I wish I had that book. In her envelope there was also a scrap of paper with a muddy footprint on it, a shake-a-paw from Brownie to Borden.
I saved Grandmother’s letter for last. She wrote that she has started to knit me a new cardigan. She has made a dye of ragweed buds and she says it has turned out to be a beautiful green.
When I read this I cried. For my dark red cardigan that Grandmother made. For my locket that I got on my twelfth birthday. For my book of The Railway Children that Mrs. Bland gave me. For the plum pudding from Mrs. Hawkins that was going to be just perfect by Christmas. I know that people lost people in their families in the disaster. I know that old Mr. Pugh in England lost his daughter and that Marjorie, my best Titanic friend, lost her father, and that some family — and we don’t even know who they are — lost their little boy. I know that I should not cry over just things. But I did.
May 8
As of today I am a prisoner.
I completed my lessons before lunch. The truth is that it is much quicker to do lessons at home than at school. But I do miss school. I am missing the choir concert. Before I left I was getting much better at basketball and now that I’m a whole inch
taller I’m probably even better. Most of all I miss my friends. I had so much to tell them and I did not get a chance. And now, because of what happened this afternoon, I probably won’t.
After lunch Mother said we should leave lessons and domestic tasks and go for a walk because spring was in the air. We walked to Point Pleasant Park. Usually my favourite thing to do in the park is scramble out on the rocks, but I did not want to. I did not even want to look out at the waves. So we walked in the forest instead.
Mother did not mention my bad behaviour but instead talked about things like the church fete and Aunt Hazel’s sciatica and Charles shaving off his moustache, and what a shame it was that Mr. Amundsen beat Mr. Scott to the South Pole. The only correcting thing she said was that I had grown taller since I was in England and that she hoped I would not grow too tall but that in any case I must be careful not to slouch because she had noticed that the Potters’ oldest girl had shot up like a beanpole and was slouching and how that was very unattractive and a bad habit and easily cured by pretending that you have a string coming out the top of your head.
When Mother talks you don’t really need to reply. You can just say “hmm” every so often. Father and Charles tease her and call her “the gramophone,” but today I liked it. It was ordinary.
On the way home we walked up Young Ave. and when we got almost to Inglis there was a small crowd gathered. Two men with cameras were taking pictures of the house at 989 Young, which is a fancy, fairy-tale kind of house with a round tower. Mother told me that it was the house of George Wright. I knew who he was. They wrote about him in the newspaper. He was a wealthy businessman and he was on the Titanic. In the newspaper he was a four-words: “Titanic Tragedy: Halifax Businessman.” I was a four-words too. “Local Schoolgirl: Titanic Survivor.”