22
The last thirty seconds of the Titanic was terrible to watch. As the stern rose higher and higher into the air, dozens of people dived off into the sea. Dozens more slid down the deck, bouncing off rails and hatches as they went. I heard four massive explosions and then all the lights on board the ship flickered and went out.
With the bow so low and the stern so high, the pressure on the middle of the ship was too great. With a deafening crack, the Titanic broke clean in two. The front half of the ship disappeared beneath the sea and the back half crashed down onto the water, knocking yet more people off its deck.
The back half of the ship did not last long. It tilted to one side, tipped up on end and entered the water vertically like the tailfin of a diving whale.
The screams. The screams. I will never forget the screams as long as I live.
In the minutes that followed, sixteen people joined me on the flooded lifeboat: twelve men, one woman and three children. We sat along the rim of the boat and stared in horror at the patch of dark water where the ship of dreams had disappeared. We could hear it under the water, imploding and disintegrating as it went deeper and deeper.
I remember the floating wreckage around me: a deckchair here, a suitcase there, a couple of restaurant menus. I even thought I saw a crate marked ‘dragon’s blood’ floating by, but maybe I imagined it.
I didn’t imagine the people, though. They were all around us, gasping and splashing and dying.
The worst deaths were the ones that happened in our lifeboat. We managed at last to raise the canvas sides but there was so much water in the boat and not enough room for everyone to keep dry. The grownups decided they should take it in turns to kneel in the freezing water. Over the next hour, three of them died right there in front of us. They stopped shivering, went very still and slipped silently beneath the water.
You know what I remember most about that night, apart from all the terrible stuff? The stars! We never used to see many stars in Kilkenny, what with all the fog and streetlights, but that night afloat on the Atlantic, the sky was full of them: Orion, the Seven Sisters, the Big Dipper, the lot.
Thoughts tumbled over each other in my mind. What time was it in Kilkenny? Was it morning yet? What time was it in Detroit? Had Pa gone to bed yet? Was he asleep under these same stars? Was he dreaming? Was he calm and happy in his dreams, or tormented by distant screams and shadows?
Many of the survivors in the lifeboat were weeping for those they had lost or left behind. There was this man in a bowler hat sobbing like crazy, and he suddenly leaned over the side of the boat and called “Beryl!” at the top of his voice. Turned out, he was Beryl’s father. He had stayed on the Titanic until the very last minute, searching in vain for his daughter.
“Sir, she’s alive,” I told him. “She got on a lifeboat with Wilbur Wigglebottom. I saw her with my own eyes.”
The man made a strange sound, something between a laugh and a sob, and he hugged me so hard I thought we were both going to fall overboard.
I could not help wondering what kind of sound Pa would make when he heard of my survival.
Or my death.