That Fatal Night: A Review and Reflection

I remember reading Dear Canada and Dear America books when I was a kid in middle school. That was the only good part about my days in public school: the libraries. I read as many books as I could get my hands on. As a result, I don’t remember details of a lot of them. Before the day I started writing this, I couldn’t tell you much about the Dear America or Dear Canada series except what anyone could tell you by simply glancing at the books: that they are written to be the diaries of young girls living through momentous events of history.

I left public school even earlier than most, and the seemingly endless supply of books from the libraries left my mind with everything else about that world. For over a decade, I didn’t think about the Dear America or Dear Canada series’ again.

I don’t know why that changed, to be honest. I was doing historical research, as I always do, and suddenly they popped into my head again. So for the first time in over 10 years, I found a Dear Canada book, and I read it.

I was not prepared for the heart and depth that went into that book.

Immediately after finishing “That Fatal Night: The Titanic Diary of Dorothy Wilton” I wrote a review on Goodreads, as I do with every book I read:

This is an amazing story. Despite being fiction, it gives such a realistic take on coping with the sudden tragedy of April 15, 1912. It takes a while for Dorothy to write about that night, but even before then you can see how it changed her, how it still haunts her. I think these books are VASTLY underrated and underappreciated.

The Dear Canada and Dear America books are vastly underrated and underappreciated. I read several books during my school years that were required reading, we all did. Some of them, as much as I may have enjoyed the stories themselves, I still don’t understand why I was reading them for school. What was the lesson I was supposed to learn from these tales of adventure? School worked too hard to draw education from books meant for entertainment alone, while books like That Fatal Night sat unrecognized.

I chose That Fatal Night as my first Dear Canada book in over a decade because the sinking of the Titanic just happens to be my current research topic. One of the great things about these series’ is that they are vast, covering what seems to be every memorable moment in modern history. I didn’t know beforehand that one about the Titanic specifically existed, but I remembered the vastness of the series and was not disappointed to find That Fatal Night quickly.

I devoured its story almost as quickly.

I was curious how the story would play out. The sinking of the Titanic lasted only a few hours, and its lifespan before those few hours was still only a few days. I couldn’t remember how much time these fictional diaries usually stretched across, but I knew it couldn’t possibly only be written for one night, for one week.

Dorothy Wilton started writing in a notebook given to her by a teacher a month after Titanic’s sinking. During that month, Dorothy refused to talk about that night. After receiving the notebook that became her diary, she still wouldn’t write about it, despite that being the intention behind the notebook, gifted to her by a teacher.

During the first half or so of the book, Dorothy writes about the conflict with a classmate that led to her recent expulsion from school, and largely about the trip to England to visit her grandparents that would put her on the Titanic to come home. Throughout even these passages, however, we get glimpses of how the Titanic’s sinking has affected, changed, Dorothy.

The first indicator is obvious and immediate: the conflict with her classmate. She’d never gotten in a fight before, never struck another creature outside of play, but she slapped her classmate hard enough to send the other girl to the ground. The other girl came out of the conflict with a few stitches from hitting her head. Dorothy came out of it with an expulsion and a new notebook. One of her teachers gave her the notebook, suggesting that she should write about that night.

This is the first thing (in talking order, because I have no order of favorites) that I love about this book, about these books. About journals and diaries as a whole. Writing is power, in more ways than I think people remember. Published books create new worlds, news articles report this world. But diaries can keep our individual worlds from falling apart. Writing down our thoughts and feelings and what happens to us is so cathartic and healing. Along with simply recording things we might want to remember some day, it can help us process the things we’d rather forget. Journaling itself is underrated and unappreciated, but I truly believe that if more people did it, there’d be less instability in peoples’ minds.

The second indicator of how the Titanic’s sinking changed Dorothy’s life is the publicity of the event, which is obvious enough that I won’t go into.

But the third indicator is also the first subtle indicator. It’s written about in bits and pieces, these minor little mentions that could be overlooked so easily. Dorothy herself doesn’t seem to realize there’s a connection between this new behavior and her trauma.

Dorothy has developed OCD. Her bed must be made perfectly and she can’t tolerate splotches of ink in her notebook. Things must be neat and perfect and tidy now, but before it didn’t matter so much.

At first I thought this development was a trauma response, but after finishing the book I think it goes deeper than that. More than just needing control of a world that suddenly feels so beyond her control and anyone’s predictability, Dorothy blames mess for the death of the woman who was meant to look after her during the voyage home from England. She blames herself for creating the mess.

It takes time for Dorothy to begin writing about the late late night of April 14th, the early early morning of April 15th. She fills the pages instead with memories of happier times. When she does start writing about the sinking, she does it over the course of several days, only able to handle a little bit at a time. She says at the end of it all that writing it out didn’t help one bit. It was certainly not the magical cure for her PTSD that I believe she hoped it would be, but I do think it was an important piece of her healing: facing her fear, unraveling that night.

But in the end, it was not the biggest or most important piece of her healing. That came in the woman who saved her life that dark, cold April night, and who healed her soul months later on a sunny summer day.

But there’s more, beyond the story, that brings the story to life.

History is important to Sarah Ellis, the author of That Fatal Night. As well as writing about a child’s loss and trauma in such a realistic and relatable way, she included real photos taken aboard the Titanic the short trip between Southampton and Queenstown. She wrote about the importance of history, of documenting history, of luck and fate and fortunately and unfortunately. She mentions other passengers of the Titanic: survivors and those who lost their lives with the ship, the notable and the forgotten. She writes about the importance of all of them. She writes about the legend of the Titanic, about how other tragedies just as great or greater were shadowed by its grandeur.

This book should be required reading in schools.

One of the reasons I dropped out of school (twice) is because I’ve never been good at learning from formal education. I couldn’t sit in classrooms and read from textbooks. I can't remember facts recited to me. It led to failing grades, when the truth was I always knew more about history than anyone else my age. Books like this are one of the reasons why.