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.’
She paused then as she handed a small, black notebook to Grace. ‘I used to fancy myself as a bit of a writer too you know.’
‘What is it?’ Grace asked, turning the book over in her hands and flicking through the pages.
‘It’s my journal. I started to write it the night we got to Queenstown. I thought I might like to show it to my aunt Mary when we arrived in Chicago; thought I might sit with my children one day and tell them all about the fantastic ship I had sailed to America on. I was writing my last entry when we hit the iceberg. You can even see the shudder in my handwriting. Look.’
Maggie pointed to the last written page, about half-way through the book. There was, indeed, a definite jerk in the handwriting, followed by the words the ship is shaking, maybe we are slowing down.
‘Maggie, this is incredible. I just can’t take it all in. How do you feel seeing all these things again now?’