The Girl Who Came Home(5)

For the past five years, his father had been employed as one of the construction workers, building the new White Star Line dock which would accommodate the huge transatlantic liners. Jack Walsh was proud of his work and liked nothing better than to sit with his son on an evening and tell him all about the impressive new dock they were building. ‘It spans sixteen acres,’ he would tell him, ‘sixteen! And it’s been dredged to forty feet!’ It was a scale on which nobody in the community had worked before and they could barely even begin to imagine the sight of the ships which would sail from there.

Although she had been berthed in the White Star Dock for almost a week now, Harry hadn’t seen Titanic yet. His father’s health had been suffering recently so his mother had decided that the family would go and stay with her sister in the Devonshire countryside for a few weeks, until his father felt better and the coal strike was over, when there would be the chance of employment for the men again. Harry and his mother had arrived back into Southampton the previous evening; his father had stayed on in Devon for a while longer, feeling too unwell to make the return journey. It bothered Harry that after all these years of work his father wouldn’t get to see the biggest liner in the world set sail from his hometown and he had tried to persuade him to come back to Southampton the previous evening.

‘Stop fretting lad,’ he’d said, ‘you’re as bad as your mother. I’ll come down to see her when she comes back. She’s not planning on anchoring in New York for the next forty years y’ know.’

As he reached the top of the steady incline of his road, Harry could see in the distance the distinctive black tops of Titanic’s four funnels towering into the sky, the red flags of the White Star Line fluttering in the bright sunshine at the tops of the impossibly high masts at bow and stern. He smiled and broke into a steady jog, his heart racing with excitement.

After weeks of unemployment and uncertainty in the town, there was a definite sense of jubilation in the air that morning. As he approached the new, purpose-built dock, he caught the sounds of drums and trumpets from one of the many local bands who had been hired to entertain the First Class passengers as they waited to board. The chatter and cries of hundreds of passengers who thronged the dockside grew steadily louder as he walked nearer, the hooves of the horses bringing more passengers clattered on the road beside him, the wheels of the carts generating a steady rumble which reverberated through his body, the incessant cries of the seagulls a familiar sound to him among all that was new; all the noises amalgamated into one exhilarating melody of thrill and anticipation as he turned the final corner.

And then he stopped.

Nothing could have prepared Harry Walsh for the sight of that ship in Southampton docks. No amount of description or expression could have conveyed what his eyes saw now. The sheer enormity of her caused him to stop dead in his tracks as he gazed in silent awe; the black steel bow soaring into the sky, the letters TITANIC emblazoned across the front in white. Her funnels reached so high above the waterline that he almost fell over backwards, he had to lean his head so far back to take them in, the gleaming steel hull, the endless lines of portholes, every single iron rivet completely fascinated him. She was, quite simply, the most unimaginable thing he had ever encountered, towering above every other vessel in the dock. Even the other mighty liners Oceanic and New York which were berthed, out of action due to the coal-strike, seemed to resemble mere children’s toys in Titanic’s mighty presence. Harry and all the passengers already massing around the dockside were dwarfed by her and he felt suddenly insignificant, totally overwhelmed.

‘She’s a beauty, ain’t she?’

Harry turned to the voice behind him.

‘Billy Wallace!’ he exclaimed, relieved to see his good friend who would also be working as crew on the Titanic, slapping him on the back as they shared a comfortable embrace ‘She’s bloody unbelievable alright. Bloody unbelievable!’

‘She certainly is that,’ Billy agreed, craning his neck to try and take in the height of the ship. ‘D’you know, some fella told me that you can drive a whole locomotive through one of those funnels and a double-decker tramcar through each of the boilers – and there’s twenty nine of ‘em. Imagine that!’

The two friends stood side-by-side for a moment, completely mesmerised. Harry caught a whiff of beer and cigarette smoke off his friend.

‘You been in The Grapes then?’

‘Ah, just for one y’know. For good luck an’ all that. There’s half of Southampton in there, and every last man seems to be heading off to work on Titanic. As usual, some great fools have been drinkin’ since last night – I doubt they even know what day it is, never mind what ship they’re supposed to be working on. Eddie Collins for one certainly ain’t gonna make this sailing I can tell you, he’s slumped on a table at the back of the snug. Arthur Smith says he ain’t moved in two hours.’