The Girl Who Came Home(82)
CHAPTER 31 - Private Journal of Maggie Murphy
St. Vincent’s Hospital, New York
Saturday, 20th April, 1912
I feel numb. Cold. Frightened. I cannot stop the tears falling. They tell me I am in a hospital somewhere in New York. I barely know how I got here. I barely know my own name. My hands are misshapen - swollen and purple from the cold and frostbite. My God it was so cold on that lifeboat.
I can barely hold the pen. The nurse says it is good for me to write; that it will help to get my circulation going again. I don’t know what to write, don’t know what to say. Part of me wishes I had died too.
I want to go home.
Sunday, 21st April, 1912
We must have been at sea for some days on the Carpathia because the girl lying in the bed next to me says it is Sunday and it was a Sunday when I last wrote in this journal. How can a whole week have passed?
Sometimes when I wake from my sleep I forget where I am and what has happened. For a few minutes I feel quite peaceful. Then I see the bare hospital walls and the rows and rows of beds and I remember.
I recognise some of the people in the beds near to me. It seems like a dream that we shared a song or danced a jig together on that mighty ship which is now at the bottom of the ocean. I have searched the faces again and again, desperately hoping that I’ll see Peggy or Kathleen or Katie or anyone from our group – but I know it’s hopeless to think that they somehow survived.
I’m frightened. I don’t like being alone here.
I do not know what will happen to me at all. I don’t know if my Aunt Mary in Chicago will know about the disaster – or anyone in Ireland. It is so terrible. So many people here have lost everyone and everything. I can barely imagine how I can live again. I sometimes wish I had gone down with the others. Why would God save me when thousands died – some of them rich millionaires? I saw babies in that water frozen blue with the cold and I think their faces will haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.
I am too tired to write any more.
I want to go home.
Sunday 21st April, 1912 – evening time
I do not have my coat. I remember taking it off on the lifeboat because it was damp and making me shiver. A well-dressed lady with a dog on her lap gave me her coat. I seem to remember that she was wearing two coats – an everyday one and a fur one, she said. She handed me the everyday coat to keep me warm and that was what I arrived here in. I still have it but I don’t know what became of my own coat and there were some letters in the pocket, I’m sure of it. Letters from Séamus. Poor Séamus. What must he be thinking hearing about the ship being sunk and all and me in no fit state to contact him to tell him I’m alive. I wish I had his letters – they would comfort me. Now I’ll never know what those letters said. I know I shouldn’t feel sad about a few letters what with all those poor people dead, but I do. They were all I had to remind me of him.
I want to go home.
Monday 22nd April, 1912
The Salvation Army women came today. They gave us all a parcel of clean clothes and some money to go onwards on our journey. There’s all sorts of relief efforts and money being raised for the survivors – thousands of dollars. A kind lady called Elizabeth told me that my Aunt Mary had been in contact and it has been arranged that she will meet me off the Pennsylvania train at union Depot station in Chicago in two days. I am writing those names down so as not to forget.
When I was changing my nightdress to put on a clean one from the donated clothes, I found $25 in bills pinned to my old one. I hadn’t noticed it before but then I vaguely remembered a man talking to me when I was first brought to the hospital from the Carpathia. He had a whiskery beard and plump fingers and his breath smelt of tobacco. He spoke a lot of words to me but I was too shocked to take it all in. I remember he asked me to sign a paper which he handed to me. I thought it was a train ticket to Chicago I was signing for but the nurses now tell me that it was a waiver for damages. I’m not really sure what that means, but it seems that the White Star Line people wanted to make sure I didn’t come back and try to get money from them for the suffering I’ve experienced and for all my losses. They seem to think $25 is compensation enough for my troubles. I remember the man had to hold my arm to help me write my own name because my hands were too numb to hold the pen properly. I am too sad and alone right now to be angry with them.
The newspaper men are crawling all over the hospital. They want to talk to us about what really happened the night Titanic sank. I have said a few words to them about how I got to the lifeboats, but I really do not want to go through all the terrible moments again. I cannot get the faces of those poor people out of my head, stood against the railings, praying for their lives and those terrifying sounds of the crunching, grating, screeching metal and the desperate screams of a thousand people. It will haunt my dreams forever, I am sure of it.