Second extract from 'The Girl Who Came Home'. 12th April, 1912

Today's extract from 'The Girl Who Came Home' shares some of Maggie's thoughts and observations about life on board Titanic during the second day at sea, and also reflections of those left back at home in Ireland.

Private Journal of Maggie Murphy

April 12th, 1912. Day 2 at sea.

… I think about Séamus a lot and hope his Da is getting better. I took the packet of letters from my coat pocket today and read the first one. It was so nicely written and the words were so kind it made me cry. He says he has written one letter for each of the fourteen months of our courtship together in Ballysheen – the first letter is called ‘January’ and he has written about his memories of the first night we danced at the Brennans’ wedding. He says he thought me lovelier than all of the stars that shone in the sky that night. I wish he was here with me now. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain to him what this ship is like – maybe he will sail on it himself one day if he can ever come to America to join me.

……Peggy is complaining that the vibrations from the engines kept her awake last night. I think it’s quite a nice noise - a sort of humming sound like a big swarm of bees have set up a hive in the boiler room. Katie says Peggy should stop thinking about that English steward we met yesterday – she thinks it’s more likely him which is keeping Peggy awake at night and not the engines at all!

….I was lost earlier today! I’d been for some fresh air on the promenade deck and couldn’t find my way back to our cabin. I think I went down the wrong stairwell and ended up on D deck instead of E deck. Luckily there are always plenty of crew members around and I asked someone where I was. He walked me personally back to E deck and all the way down the crew passageway which he told me is called ‘Scotland Road’ to the place where our cabin is. I was glad to be back there. I gave myself quite a fright being separated from everyone like that. I think I’ll ask someone to come with me for fresh air next time.

…..the meals on board are very nice. We are already used to the call from the bugler who signals that we can make our way to the dining saloon where we sit at tables covered with white linen tablecloths! Today we had smoked herrings for breakfast, brawn for lunch and corned beef and cabbage for dinner. I think I’ll be needing some new clothes in America if I keep eating at this rate. To think that there’s a whole army of crewmen peeling our forty ton of spuds and carrots and boiling our forty thousand eggs while we sit on our backsides! Tea and biscuits are served in the afternoon. Katie says they have the biscuits laid out in such neat rows on the plates it would nearly stop you taking one so as not to break up the pattern.

…we are all in good spirits, even though it feels like we are a very long way from home now. We’re always talking of the people we’ve left behind though – one of us will remember something somebody said or a time they made us laugh and we try to get the time of day right in our heads, so as to imagine what they are doing while we steam further away from them across the ocean.

County Mayo, Ireland

Dusk was settling over the rugged landscape, casting long shadows and shrouding the mountains in a blanket of mute darkness as Mary d’Arcy and eight other women walked slowly to the Holy Well on the edge of the village. They were a sombre group, making their short pilgrimage to pray for the safe passage of the fourteen who had left their homes just a day ago. To these eight women; some of them mothers, some of them sisters and some of them grandmothers of the departed, it already seemed as though their loved ones had been gone for many, many months, rather than a few short hours.

There was something of a tentative silence hanging over the women who, on any other day, could be heard exchanging friendly banter as they went about their work and daily chores in the village, laughing at a shared joke or a snippet of juicy gossip as they enjoyed a drop of porter in the ale houses. Theirs was not normally a quiet existence, but at that moment it was very much so. Only the haunting sound of a barn owl’s screech broke the silence around them. Approaching the well, they attended to their familiar rituals and said their own private prayers before kneeling on the hard ground, and taking their rosary beads in their hands, began, as one, to recite their Hail Marys.

To a distant observer such as Séamus Doyle, who watched now from the window of his father’s small farmhouse, this was a particularly moving sight, serene in its setting and mesmerising in its solemnity. How touched Maggie and the others in the group would be, he thought, to know how deeply their departure was felt in this small community; how heartened they would be to see this declaration of absolute faith being made in their honour. But they could not know, would not see.

*

The Girl Who Came Home - A Titanic Novel is available to download on the Amazon Kindle Store, priced 99p. If you don't have a Kindle, you can download free Kindle reading apps for PC, iPad, iPhone, Android and other devices from the Kindle Store.

Second extract from 'The Girl Who Came Home'. 12th April, 1912

First extract from 'The Girl Who Came Home'

On this day, 11th April, in 1912, Titanic departed from it's final embarkation point; Queenstown, in County Cork, Ireland. She set sail across the Atlantic Ocean, heading for New York. It was in Queenstown where the characters in my novel The Girl Who Came Home boarded Titanic. For the next five days, I will share an extract from the novel to provide a sense of life on board Titanic and both during and after the tragic sinking.

Today's extract is from the private journal of Maggie Murphy, my female protagonist. Maggie is a seventeen-year-old girl who is travelling on Titanic with 13 others from her small parish in County Mayo, Ireland. Unable to travel with them, Seamus, the man Maggie loves with all her heart, has had to stay behind in Mayo. She is carrying a packet of letters from him in her coat pocket.

Private journal of Maggie Murphy

RMS Titanic, 11^th April, 1912. Day 1 at sea.

With the ‘Ireland’ in front of ours, the two tender boats left the wharf then, chugging back along the waterfront of Queenstown, passing the White Star Wharf again. We each blessed ourselves with the sign of the cross as we sailed past the Cathedral, and a tall man standing just near to me began to play ‘A Nation Once Again’ on his Uilleann pipes. He played well and the gathered passengers sang along and clapped when he finished. He smiled at me and played ‘Spancil Hill’ then, a sadder tune which made some people cry. I didn’t look at any of our group, afraid that I would take to weeping again if I did.

As we moved further away from the wharf, the boat became quieter. The men shuffled their feet and the women cuddled their children into them or stared into the distance. Everyone had their own private thoughts at that moment; mine were of Séamus and the time we had danced at Maura and Jack Brennans’ wedding. I wondered if he was thinking of me at all.

The boats then turned a bend in the channel, and that was when we saw her.

All that could be heard were gasps. The piper stopped his playing altogether.

Not one person spoke, stunned into silence by the towering mass of this ship which was anchored in the waters before us. I have never, and doubt that I will ever again, witness a sight so astonishing.

Some of our group, who have travelled on steam liners before, seemed less impressed than the rest of us who have rarely seen a row boat on Loch Conn, but I even heard Aunt Kathleen comment on how large and magnificent the ship appeared.

As our now tiny tender ‘America’ pulled alongside the wall of steel, a door opened in the side of the ship and a gangway was lowered. At the top of the gangway were the ticket inspectors and the doctors who carried out the health inspections. Slowly, we started to make our way up the gangplank, not one of us able to stop ourselves from craning our necks to take in the height of the decks and masts soaring high, high into the clouds above. I didn’t want to look down; didn’t want to see the swell of the ocean under my feet.

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.

The man with the Uilleann pipes stood next to me for a good while, but neither of us spoke.

She’s a mighty fine land,’ he said eventually, ‘you should be very proud to have known her, wherever life might take you.’

I turned to him. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Yes, I am. Very proud indeed.’ I remember feeling for the precious packet of letters in my coat pocket, still bound by their packaging and string. Grasping them and my rosary beads, I said a silent prayer.

Titanic followed the coastline of Ireland for the rest of the afternoon, past Old Kinsale Head and on, following the cliffs and the mountains. We returned to our cabins now and again, coming back up to the deck occasionally to catch a last glimpse of our country. The sun was setting as the boat turned to head out across the ocean and we were silent once again as Ireland’s coastline faded into the sea mist and was obscured from view.

The Girl Who Came Home - A Titanic Novel is available to download on the Amazon Kindle Store, priced 99p. If you don't have a Kindle, you can download free Kindle reading apps for PC, iPad, iPhone, Android and other devices from the Kindle Store.

First extract from 'The Girl Who Came Home'

For the love of .... writing. MAD Awards 2012.

When I first started blogging three years ago, lots of people looked at me sideways and asked 'why?' It was hard for them to understand why on earth I would bother sharing my innermost thoughts on a page in cyberspace which total strangers would read. I would attempt to explain how it wasn't just an online diary and would tell them all about the lovely community of bloggers, and how it was a great way to find your style of writing, blah, blah, blah but they still didn't really get it.

So, I decided to stop being over-complicated about it all and explained it as simply as this: I blog because I want to write.

Blogging has been my daily exercise, my 30 minute jog around the park, the thing that keeps my writing fit and healthy. Without it, I would never have had the confidence to tackle freelance articles for the papers or review books by actual, proper authors, let alone write a novel of my own.

My blog may have been a little neglected of late - I've moved on from the very early stages of motherhood and I sometimes don't feel I have as much to add to the 'debate' any more. But, I still enjoy this space to write about things which make me laugh, rant, stamp my feet in rage or to simply offer my view on topics as diverse as handbags, Easter eggs and my husband's irrational intolerance of fairy lights. And I still love to come here and share the ups and downs of motherhood.

My blog has, and always will be, about writing first and foremost. I love writing. I can't stop writing. And I shall continue writing until the virtual cows come home. I may not blog as regularly now as I used to when I was a fresh-faced (?) blogging newbie, but I still love my little corner of cyberspace; still love having this place of my own to write openly and freely as the mood hits me. And if my words make others laugh, cry, write an impassioned response or just tell their friends over coffee, then that's wonderful.

So, I was absolutely thrilled yesterday to find out that I have been nominated for a MAD Best Blog Writer Award. Whoever my fairy blogmother was who nominated me, I would like to say a huge thanks. I am honestly very, very surprised but utterly thrilled to be nominated and in this category particularly. Many other fab bloggers have also been nominated for this award - that's Mummy Cool, Joanne Mallon, Honest Mum, Touch & Tickle and Geek Mummy so far. I'd like to wish everyone many congratulations on being nominated and the very best of luck.

Here's to blogging and to writing.

For the love of .... writing. MAD Awards 2012.