Memorial Day

In something like twenty-four (twenty five?) years I have never once remembered my little sister’s birthday. I have no idea of the date of my parents’ anniversary. Most years now I don’t know when Easter or Thanksgiving are. But I never, ever forget the fourteenth and fifteenth of April.

The history and sinking of the Titanic in 1912 is the one twentieth-century historical event that matters to me. It’s totally out of my period and utterly random, but it’s been a part of my life as long as I can remember. My father read me Walter Lord’s classic, A Night To Remember, as a bedtime story when I was pratically a baby; he first read it when he was about ten and got hooked on the subject. I didn’t think of it as history- I would, for most of my childhood, have said I thought history was boring- it was another story, and one of the things I shared with my father. The wreck was discovered when I was five, which set us both off completely, and I memorized it the way all children love trivia and facts. In my parents’ basement there’s an extremely tattered copy of the National Geographic with those initial photographs: it sticks out in the collection because it’s the only one that’s become ratty from many years of reading. Daddy and I have amassed a fairly good book collection on the subject. I’ve gone through multiple copies of Her Name, Titanic, which I think is the most beautiful book on the subject. The one obvious item not in the collection is That Horrible Movie, by which title I always refer to the eponymous 1997 film, as I will not suffer such an abomination under my roof.

The curious thing is that I have no real connection to the Titanic. Most of my historical bats have a very direct connection to my genealogy, but this one doesn’t. It’s just the thing my father loved and I therefore grew up loving. Arguably, if I had not first encountered history through this narrative channel, through the incredibly human stories and fascinating facts of Titanic, I might never have become a historian.

So I always remember the fourteenth and the fifteenth of April. Growing up, Titanic Day was when we got out the books and re-read bits, watched the movies and documentaries, and- arguably most exciting when I was young- stayed up late to commemorate the actual sinking time (2.20 in the morning of the fifteenth). I’m not sure my mother ever saw the sense in it, and growing up my sister didn’t get all het up about it, either (she jumped on the Titanic bandwagon after she decided she really liked That Horrible Movie- I’ve tried to forgive her), but it was always a special father-daughter event.

The years when I haven’t been able to celebrate it in one way or another have been peculiar- at the very least, I try to get out my library of books and videos and have my own little commemoration. In other years, I have friends over for dinner, and we do readings and viewings and generally just immerse ourselves in an evening of history. This year, though, is the first one where I’ve been able to really do what I’ve always wanted: I am giving a proper Titanic dinner. The food is coming from recipes off the actual menu, and everyone will be portraying historical characters. Of course, the whole thing is a day off, because today/overnight is the actual anniversary. James’s work schedule, however, made a Tuesday the better choice, and it’s still the sinking day, technically.

In passive moments it occurs that there is something slightly morbid about having a big party and a dinner and, well, a celebration, so to speak, of a tragic event. (Admittedly, most of the people represented at my party were survivors. The guys carked it, but the women made it. I have promised the Jameses not to be too obsessed with historical accuracy: there will be no two-thirty a.m. drownings in the bathtub.) I’d like to think, though, that this is not totally inappropriate. It’s a remembrance, the only way any of these people live on. It’s literally “a greater feast for death”, which is one concept which I embrace wholeheartedly. This is my symbolic laying flowers at 41° 43 5N 49° 46 8 W (I list the wreck site coordinates rather than the ones cited in their CQD/SOS, because that’s where the thing is), which is the only gravesite that would make sense to me. (Leaving flowers at a memorial would seem silly.) I never knew any of these people, but their stories have been interwoven to the memories of my life, and it only seems appropriate to have some sort of commemoration.

There’s only one living survivor right now, Milvina Dean, down in a nursing home in Southampton, and I would give my left arm to be down there this week for the commemorative events. She was supposed to speak at a dinner but is in the hospital with some illness, and I realise to my deep regret that I am unlikely ever to meet a survivor. There were so many of them still around when I was a girl! But ninety-six years is an awfully long time. I will be here to see the centennial, but it’s unlikely that any survivors will live to see it. Given the rate at which it’s deteriorating, I suppose you could debate that the Titanic itself won’t be there to see it. And that is the strangest thought- that within my lifetime, the ship itself will most likely disapear. I will have been in that unique space of time where it was lost, then found, and then lost again.

And time will go on, and people will keep studying it, and making execrable films about it, and, yes, having dinner parties to honour the passing of the great ship and the decadent era that it represented.