The stateroom tickets and the Not Wanted on Voyage labels were on the sitting-room mantelpiece although we were not sailing for another three weeks, when Mother suddenly stared at them and said, 'The Lusitania is going to sink on that voyage. Jack, change the reservation!' Then she noticed I was in the room and told me to run along to bed.

Father began to argue with her even before I had shut the door, which was rather surprising, as he must have remembered her taking us out of the tennis court before the roof fell in, and after that there was her foreseeing of the Titanic.

The Titanic in the Solent channel, maiden voyage, 1912

Seacourt, on the Solent, c.1912

That had happened two days before my fifth birthday, so it was on the 10th of April 1912. We were all on the roof of the Seacourt watching the Titanic go down the Solent past the Isle of Wight on her maiden voyage. Mother, who until then had been as cheerful as everyone else, clutched Father's arm as though she were dizzy and cried out, 'That ship is going to sink before she reaches America! ' He tried ro soothe her but she only became more agitated. By now everyone was listening. The scullery-maid exploded into nervous giggles and the other servants looked embarrassed and hastily withdrew to the far end of the roof. People gathered round Mother and tried to convince her that the Titanic had been built in a new way which made it impossible for anything to sink her. All this did was ro make her angry. 'Don't stand there staring at me! Do something! You fools, I can see hundreds of people struggling in the icy water! Are you all so blind that you're going to let them drown!'

I whispered to [my sister] lris, 'ls the ship really going to sink?' But she did not answer until we had slipped away and were out of earshot. 'l don't expect so,' she said consolingly. 'Mother has always been afraid of shipwreck because her best friend and the best friend's daughter were on a ship called the Waratah which vanished without trace.'

During the next five days everyone was careful not to mention the Titanic, but Mother was nervy and Father looked harassed. It must have been almost a relief for her when everyone knew that the Titanic had struck an iceberg; not nearly so lonely as waiting until it happened.

Joan Grant c.1912

I remembered all this so clearly while was having my bath that when they came up from dinner, I crept out of bed and listened at the sitting-room door. 'Well, it's the best I can do,' Father was saying saying resignedly. 'I spoke to nearly everyone in the Cunard office, but the only alternative accommodation they could offer was for a sailing the day after to-morrow... on the same ship.'

'Oh, that's all right,' said Mother calmly, 'the Lusitania is not going to sink until the voyage we were going on. I suppose she will be torpedoed as it is too warm for icebergs. Poor things, I feel so sorry for them! However, there's nothing we can do about it in wartime, so I had better go and tell Kate to start packing.'

Mother was so relieved at the change of plans that she was not even put out when he gloomily told her that we should all have to travel in very inferior cabins. Margery grumbled a bit at having to share with Iris and Kate and me, but I thought it far more fun to climb a little to a bunk than to sleep in a stateroom in an ordinary bed. The parents had a two-berth cabin next door. There was so much luggage in it that Father had to climb over a wardrobe trunk to get to his bunk--which must have been tiresome for him as he had to keep climbing out again to hand nux vomica pills to Mother from a blue morocco medicine-case with dozens of little bottles in it. Mother had recently become a very ardent homeopath.

It was not nearly so enjoyable as the outward journey. The ship did a lot of zigzagging when we were chased by submarines; and Father told Mother--which was rather tactless of him--that he had overheard one of the ship's officers say to another that they would probably sink. Jules Verne--luckily I had bought the volume which contained Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea--was a great solace when the others were too busy being sick for me to keep comfortably asleep. When I could not avoid thinking about submarines I imagined myself having dinner with Captain Nemo in the Nautilus; with Father sitting on the other side of him, smoking a seaweed cigar.

There were no other children on board, and as Father spent most of his time with other men having grown-up conversations about the war, I made friends with Hal the lift-boy. He drew very well, especially caricatures, and let me run the lift so that he could get on with his drawing. He was doing a particularly funny one of an old man who was asleep with his mouth open on a sofa opposite the lift, when the old man woke up and caught him at it. Instead of being angry he was amused, and said he was an editor from New York and would give Hal a very good job on his newspaper. Hal accepted eagerly--he had always wanted to be an artist, but said he had another two voyages to do to finish his contract. The editor praised him for being so conscientious and bought the caricature for twenty dollars. I did everything I could to make Hal promise to stay in America as soon as he got back there. But it was no use. He said it would look as thought he was afraid of being torpedoed, and that he would send me a postcard to prove I was only fussing.

I never received the postcard. A little later Mother met an old lady plodding up the stairs in a hotel and asked why she did not use the lift. 'I never go in lifts,' said the old lady. 'I was on the Lusitania when she was torpedoed. The explosion made the lift-gates jam, and all the people in them were drowned like rats in a trap.' Hal must have been one of the poor dear rats who would not leave the ship that was going to sink.

Last known photo of the Lusitania, leaving New York harbor, May 1, 1915.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Joan's frustration and grief over Hal echoes her mother's with everyone. It's a universal problem for intuitives: how do you convince people who don't share it? No problem in primitive times; you could go your way and they could go theirs. But the modern world, obsessed with speed and convenience, traps us (like rats) in a maze of schedules and commitments hard to alter.

And yet, just speaking up can help. Blanche loudly and defiantly predicted the Titanic disaster when it was embarrassing and useless. Or was it? Maybe her vindication in 1912 shook her husband just enough so that three years later he grudgingly changed their Lusitania tickets--saving their lives.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Far Memory: the Autobiography of Joan Grant, 1956 (Ariel Press reprint, 1985), pp. 43-6. Powerful & highly recommended.

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