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.