On this day, April 10th, 1912 RMS Titanic left Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York. On the same day, fourteen members of a small Irish community left their homes and set out on a fourteen hour journey by horse and trap, and by train, to travel to Queenstown, County Cork, where they would board Titanic the following day.
The opening chapters of THE GIRL WHO CAME HOME are set on April 10th, 1912. In Ireland, we see the novel’s heroine, Maggie Murphy, and the others she will be travelling with, as they prepare to leave home. In Southampton, we meet Harry Walsh, a young steward who has been assigned to work in Third Class on Titanic.
You can read an excerpt of these opening chapters on my Facebook author page.
I will also be sharing short ‘real time’ extracts from the novel on Twitter @HazelGaynor from today until the anniversary of the sinking on April 15th. I hope these will give a sense of the different emotions and experiences of the passengers on Titanic as they sailed across the Atlantic, and of relatives they had left behind and those they were sailing towards.
What I hadn’t realised when I started writing THE GIRL WHO CAME HOME in 2011, was that a documentary was being made, at the same time, about the Addergoole Fourteen. ‘Waking The Titanic’ was aired on Irish TV channel TG4 to mark the 100 year anniversary in April 2012. The following is a trailer from that documentary, which I still find very emotional to watch.
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