ONE LUCKY GIRL
Chapter One
Over the course of my life, I've
had more than my fair share of luck. I've been through and survived a lot more
than most people. Not that I laugh in the face of fate. I've never made a habit
of thinking myself immune to bad luck. In fact, every time I was faced with
death, I thought to myself, This is it. I'm going to die. Any minute now...
But hold on. I'm not making sense
to you. I'll start from the beginning. Then you'll understand. My name is
Violet. Violet Constance Jessop. Daughter of William and Katherine Jessop,
oldest of six surviving siblings. I was born in the Argentine, where my father
worked as a sheep farmer. I was the first of a total of nine brothers and
sisters, six of whom survived--I guess lucky isn't a family inheritance.
Originally from Dublin, my
parents traveled to the Argentine so my father could farm sheep in 1886. This
was a year before I was born, and we stayed in the Argentine until my father
died. After the tragic death, my mother took me and my siblings back to Great
Britain, where we stayed. I attended a convent school there and continued my
education until I started work on board the R.M.S. Olympic.
My first lucky escape came when I
was a mere infant. Sick with tuberculosis, the doctor told my parents to fear
the worst. Though destined to die, I miraculously survived the illness with no
last aftereffects. Nothing short of a truly lucky escape.
"You even had the doctor
baffled, Vi," my mother told me when I was older. "Fooled us all, you
did. All the doctor could say was that you were one lucky girl."
One lucky girl. Ironic, isn't it?
Maybe that doctor was a soothsayer, but he dubbed me right. Throughout the
course of my life, I proved myself worthy of the title. Only now that I’m
taking the time to write it all down have I realized just how lucky I am. After
all, any normal girl who can survive tuberculosis as an infant, the near
sinking of the Olympic, and the sinking of the Olympic's two sister ships, the
Titanic and the Britannic, surely deserves to be called One Lucky Girl.
But I'm only going to tell you
about my experiences aboard the Titanic. That was the one that changed my life,
the one I'll remember most for the rest of my life. So, here it is, the story
of One Lucky Girl's escape from the biggest disaster at sea of the twentieth
century.