Eva Hart

My mother said to my father, She had made up her mind quite firmly that she would not go to bed in that ship. She would sit up at night, and I remember my father saying to her, Well, if you want to be so stupid, I can't stop you. But I don't know what you think people will say. And she said, I don't mind what they say. That's what I'm going to do. And there was no further argument about it.

She decided that she wouldn't go to bed at night, and she didn't.

My father was so excited about it, and of course I was a real daddy's girl, and if it was a wonderful big ship and my father was so enthusiastic about it, then I got enthusiastic about it. I was about all day with my father because, as I say, my mother was sleeping. And to my great joy, I found there were some dogs on board.

There was one little French bulldog that I took a great fancy to, and my father was quite friendly with. I think one of the crew looked after them, and every day he used to let me go down and play with this little dog. I had such a fuss with him. My father, he was so good to me. I was very content to play with him and go all over the ship with him.

You could hear the people screaming and threshing about in the water. That was the most dreadful thing. I remember saying to my mother once how dreadful that noise was, and I always remember her reply, and she said, yes. But think back about the silence that followed it. And I know what she meant, because all of a sudden, it wasn't there.

The ship wasn't there, the lights weren't there, and the cries weren't there. As if the world stood still for a while. And that was terrible. And we realized then, I suppose, that the absence of noise meant that the people we'd left behind, we'd never see again.

The platform that we used before Shopify needed regular updates, which sometimes led to the shop not working.

The panic seemed to me to start after the boats had gone.

When we were in the boat rowing away, then we could hear the panic of people rushing about on the deck and screaming and looking for lifeboats. I mean, you imagine being wakened, going up on deck to get in a lifeboat. You're told the ship is sinking. Where are the lifeboats? They've all gone. That's when the panic really started.

I can only tell you I was terrified. It's quite impossible to use another word for it. I was absolutely terrified.

As everyone knows, the tragedy of the Titanic was the fact that she hadn't got enough lifeboats. So it was only the people who were there first that got into a lifeboat. And we were there in plenty of time. The boats weren't even being lowered when we got up onto the deck. And my father went away and he came back and said, oh, I've spoken to one of the officers.

They're going to launch the lifeboats, but you're all back on board for breakfast. And so thinking that this was what was going to happen, they started to lower the boat, and my father put my mother and I without any trouble at all.

He told me to hold my mummy's hand and be a good girl, that's all he said. He made the attempt to get in himself. He helped other women and children. That was it. I never saw him again.

We had the most wonderful things given to us, yes. They were very kind.

When the dawn came up and we were being picked up by the Carpathia, I wasn't in the same lifeboat with her. I'd been spent the rest of the night after she had gone. I'd been lifted out of the boat, spent the rest of the night screaming for her. And I found her, of course, on the Carpathia. She was looking for me and I was looking for her.

But that must have been quite dreadful for people like my mother, who would look round to see if my father had by any chance made it. But nobody did, of course.