There was a nursing sister who visited for two hours every afternoon and did preliminary examinations for the worker’s compensation claims. She was a valuable ally who tended my latest array of hurts and harms to fend off infections but was good enough not to fill in the appropriate forms.
    I would wait until just a few minutes before she was due to leave and then, under pretext of the call of nature, slip off to her office. There was never anyone else around by then—the workers were always keen to get their compo claims in as early as possible.
    I would present myself—often I carried a list of my ailments just in case I forgot something.
“You know,” she smiled warmly. “I can arrange safer work for you, if you want.”
    I thought of what Horrie would think of that. “Bloody sook!” he would declare. Whereas, my mother would respond: “Poor dear—he does everything so hard.” which was even worse somehow.
“No thank you,” I said stoically, while she dabbed at a running sore with stinging stuff.
“As you wish,” she smiled sweetly. She understood what no one else, not even I, could have—that there were pains far worse than those caused by injuries.
“You won’t tell anyone,” I would usually beg her, just to be sure.
“No. If you don’t want to make a comp claim, there’s no reason for me to report this... these...”
    And then there would always be some parting advice. “Try moving slower, all the time. Slow deliberate movements, whatever you’re doing, okay?”
    I tried slow deliberate movements. I had been doing it all my life. I had become the slowest moving animate object on the planet. And it worked too. Stop. Think about every movement. Go slow. Make sure of everything. There was no problem. Unless something unexpected occurred necessitating a reflex action... and wham! Blam! Down I would go in a horrible heap.
“You’re gonna really hurt yourself one of these days,” Bert usually remarked.

...Another Belfast Trip...
...There’s talk of an iceberg, ma’am...
...God himself could not sink this ship...
...You go and I’ll stay a while...
...I believe she’s gone, Hardy...
...That’s the way of it at this kind of time...
...There is your beautiful nightdress gone...
...It reminds me of a boomin’ picnic...
...We’re going north like hell...
...Go away—we have just seen our husbands drown...
    The chapter headings, each actually spoken by the people involved, from Walter Lord’s excellent chronicle of the last hours of the Titanic—A Night to Remember. It was this careful account that was made into a splendid movie by the British with the redoubtable Kenneth More as the brave young officer though whose eyes we see most of it, but the remarkable thing about it was that it had over fifty recognisable characters, each of whom we follow to their individual fates, and all of them clearly distinguishable. Quite an achievement in less than two hours.
    Of course we know a lot more about the Titanic disaster these days than they did then— especially since the discovery of the wreck—and the modern, far more spectacular (and expensive) version benefited from that knowledge, but it borrowed most of its best scenes from the 1959 version and failed hopelessly in its attempt to recapture the charm. Titanic was truly titanic, but despite it, A Night to Remember continues to live up to its name. In fact, the trick is to watch this one until the ship hits the iceberg, and then pick up James Cameron’s far more spectacular version of the sinking, thus avoiding the tedious love story. But more of that later.