The Girl Who Came Home(83)

I want to go home.

*

There are some desperate sights here in the hospital and some terrible tales are being told about what happened to people when Titanic sank. We sit about and say a few words to each other now and again – normally talking about someone else’s experience rather than our own. I think we all just want to lock away our own memories and try to forget.

One of the nurses who tends to me most of the time has told me about a young Finnish girl who doesn’t speak a word of English. She sits in the bed across the room from mine and looks to be in a constant daze. Her brother, her uncle, and the man she was to marry were all lost in the disaster. She is to sail back to Finland on Wednesday. I cannot imagine the fears she must have about sailing again. I wish I could help her in some way.

The nurse also told me about the small Swedish woman at the end of the ward who refuses to leave the side of her two little children. Her husband, their father, was lost. The children have the fairest hair I have ever seen and the mother dotes on them day and night, so she does, stroking the little dresses which came in for them from the Women’s Committee. Apparently, she told the nurse that when she started to climb down the rope to the lifeboat which was already being lowered, she realised she could only carry the youngest child and hold the rope at the same time. Her three-year-old daughter clung terrified to her skirt all the way down that rope, the black Atlantic sea heaving underneath them. Thank the Lord the little girl held on good and tight and they all three made it safely to the boat, although the father was lost.

There is another woman here who has just married her fiancée in the hospital. They were separated on the deck of Titanic and she thought him lost until they discovered each other in different wards of the hospital. She had been clinging to an upturned lifeboat for eight hours. The nurse tells me it’s important to try and be grateful for stories like this, despite our own terrible losses. I know she is right, but the faces of my friends and family still disturb my dreams at night.





Tuesday 23rd April, 1912

Some of my words have been printed in the morning newspaper. My nurse showed it to me. She has given me a whole bundle of newspapers which she says I should take with me when I leave. She says that I should keep them somewhere safe because the Titanic disaster will be talked about in a hundred years’ time and people will be interested in seeing them. I cannot see why anyone would want to remember this terrible event, but I have folded the papers and put them into my case anyway, along with the few other possessions I have somehow managed to keep with me through all of this: the silver haircomb and rosary beads which Séamus gave me on the morning we left Ballysheen, my Titanic ticket, my Health Inspection certificate, a bottle of Holy Water and a few other unimportant items. Some people might want to talk about Titanic for the next hundred years – after I leave this hospital and get to Chicago, I never want to talk about it again for as long as I live.

I will leave the hospital tomorrow. I have no idea what life has in store for me, but I know that I can never cross the ocean again. I will never step foot on a ship as long as I live which means that I will have to try and forget about Ireland and those who we left behind. How could I ever look into the eyes of those poor mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers – knowing that I got off the ship when their loved ones did not and perished in the freezing seas? I can never see their faces – I can never explain what happened that night.

*

Peggy is alive! I cannot believe it. She’s is ALIVE!

She walked right into the ward where my bed is and woke me from my sleep. ‘Is it really you Maggie Murphy?’ she said. We took to crying and hugging each other – I am beyond words. I thought it was a ghost at my bedside for a few moments, I dared hardly believe it was really and truly her – alive and well and with her beautiful, golden hair falling about her shoulders as usual. We sat and stared at each other for an age – laughing and crying hysterically – neither of us knowing what to say or do with ourselves.

We caused such a commotion with all our shrieking and crying and gasping that the nurses came running – they thought someone was dying. We brought tears to their eyes when we told them we were sailing on Titanic together and thought each other dead along with everyone else we loved and cared for.

When we finally composed ourselves and the nurses had brought us both a cup of hot, sweet tea, Peggy told me that after we were separated on the ladder, she’d seen Katie and Maria and Pat heading up towards the back of the ship to escape from the water. She told me one of the great funnels broke loose from its fixings then and smashed into everything underneath – she doesn’t even want to imagine that it was that funnel which killed them all, but she didn’t see anyone from the Ballysheen group again and ran, with a group of crewmen, to the starboard side of the ship and somehow managed to jump from the deck to a lifeboat which was being lowered some fifteen feet down. She said she was never more terrified in her life when she made that leap, but she knew it was her last chance to survive. Then, when the lifeboat reached the water it was capsized by people who were already thrown overboard, trying desperately to clamber aboard. She wept when she described the fear of being in that icy water and the people all thrashing around her. Her face went under the water a dozen times, she told me, what with people trying to climb over her to reach the boat. But brave Peggy managed to somehow swim to an upturned collapsible raft which she clung to in her sodden clothes right through the night. She was rescued along with twelve others from that upturned boat – one of the Marconi radio boys was with her. Bride, she said his name was. Harold Bride. I remember Harry the steward telling me that was the name of the boy he knew and who he was asking to send my telegram to Séamus. I am glad to know that he survived. Imagine, Peggy being on the Carpathia with me and in the same hospital as me for all that time and we never found each other until now.