From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Today each of us had to write a composition on the “Titanic.” I wrote….

The Titanic was a beautiful ship, and it was on its first voyage from Europe to America. The first voyage of a ship is called a maiden voyage, because the ship is still a maiden. All ships are ladies. The Titanic was like a real hotel. The bedrooms had real beds, not just berths and they all had their own bathrooms. And it had a swimming pool and a big gymnasium full of things to play with, like leather horses and things to swing on like monkeys do and heavy things to lift like exercise bars. And there was a library, card rooms and ballrooms, a real theater, a barber shop, and beauty salon, and even a jewelry shop, so that if people fell in love with each other they could buy each other presents right away.

I got just that far and I thought that I wouldn’t want to be on that ship. If I ever go to sea I would want to be on a little ship where I can see the sea and the sky and feel the wind on my face and smell the salty air like when we go out to the beach. Of course I couldn’t put all that into my composition. I finished this way….

All the people had a gay time all across the ocean. They danced and played cards and other games, and laughed and sang and bumped into an iceberg. The iceberg was so sharp that it cut the Titanic, just like you would cut an apple. The rooms where the engines were and the rooms where the sailors were and the rooms where the people were, that is, the poorest people who were in rooms way below the top deck where they didn’t have many bathrooms, they were drowned first. The poorest people were more frightened than anyone else, because they didn’t understand English, so they couldn’t understand the officers telling them to walk in a single line and that everything would be all right and to walk to the lifeboats. They knocked each other down and stepped on each other, and a lot of people were killed that way.

Grandfather said that when he came to America he traveled on such a ship, and he was then very poor and this class is called “Steerage,” and he was certain that he wouldn’t stay poor, because he never wanted to travel that way again. I didn’t put this part into the composition, but I did put a little more.

Upstairs in the big elegant rooms, the people were also frightened because everyone is afraid to die, even rich people. There were not enough life boats so only women and children could go in them. There was a wonderful woman, Mrs. Nathan Strauss, my father knew her and she wouldn’t go into the life boat without Mr. Strauss and so she stayed and drowned with him. There was also another woman who wouldn’t leave her Great Dane to die by himself so she stayed too and all the musicians died while they played the song “Nearer My God to Thee” to the last second so all the people about to drown would feel better. It was a very bad accident.

After we handed in our papers, Miss Hare said that we mustn’t forget that the eighteenth of April was the birthday of the big earthquake and fire in San Francisco. She didn’t say birthday, she used another word that I know means the same thing. She said it happened six years ago and that we must always remember it was not the earthquake that spoiled San Francisco, it was the fire. She said that the earthquake did damage buildings and knocked chimneys off but the broken gas mains started fires and that was really the worst of it. She said that people were very brave and hardly anyone cried or screamed. They packed all they could save of their things and they took their dogs and cats and canary birds and left their houses. Some of them went to stay in tents at Golden Gate Park or at other parks and some of them lived in other people’s houses that were in safe parts of the city. No one was allowed to light matches so they ate cold food, like at picnics and that must have been fun.