Each year my family and I go on holiday and this year we decided to go to New York on the luxury cruise liner Titanic.

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Each year my family and I go on holiday and this year we decided to go to New York on the luxury cruise liner Titanic.  My name is Rob Smith and I am a twenty five-year-old working class male with a wife and two children.  My wife’s name is Jill who is two years younger than I am and my children’s names are Jack who is thirteen and Joan who is sixteen.                                                                                               We are a typical family from Manchester; we live in a fairly small house in the middle of a fairly large housing estate, which is a bit of a squeeze.  Having the four of us in a small house often caused arguments, as there wasn’t much space.  This is one of the reasons why I bought the tickets for the journey on the Titanic; it would be a break from the arguing and also a time to relax.

  To afford the tickets I had to work all the hours I could which put a huge strain on my social life.  A trip on the unsinkable ship Titanic wasn’t cheap and I had to work overtime and save for months to be able to afford the 1st class tickets.  I had a typical job working in a factory for a large firm and the pay wasn’t very good, but it was a job.  

I decided to get first class tickets, as we had never before travelled 1st class before and all my work colleagues had told me how fantastic it was and how you had every luxury possible.  To get the tickets I queued up for hours in the freezing weather on the night of the 29th February.  There were loads of us queuing from 10pm the previous night.  The tickets were like gold dust, everyone wanted them but there was only a limited amount.  I paid for the tickets and was overcome with joy at the thought of travelling on the finest cruise liner in the world.  I was told that it had every luxury available and as a bonus we were going to be one of the first to use the facilities on board.  I was told that the 1st class passengers got the best treatment and were able to dine in the finest hall on board the incredible ship.  I had only one fear about travelling on the Titanic; I hated ships, every time I got on one I thought it was going to sink, but after reading all the leaflets about the Titanic my fear disappeared as I read that the Titanic was ‘the unsinkable ship’.

We began to pack days in advance for our trip on the Titanic to America.  Jack and Joan were excited at the thought of travelling on the Titanic, as they had never stayed on a ship overnight before.  This was going to be an experience to me as well.  As the day of sailing came closer I got more and more excited.  The day before the sailing none of us could sleep as we were all thoroughly looking forward to the trip ahead.  We all rose at around sunrise and got prepared for the trip to Southampton.  I double-checked a list of everything we were going to take.  The list consisted of Clothes, food for journey, money, passport etc.  The Titanic was in ever newspaper in the whole of England; the front page on the front of the papers was “Unsinkable ship to sail in two days”.  In one of the papers in compared the advantages and disadvantages of the ship the one I remembered most was the ships capacity over 3000-Life boat capacity 1178 this made me feel uneasy about travelling.  But in the next days paper I forgot all about the lifeboat problem as the papers reassured the passengers by again publishing the title ‘Unsinkable Ship’.                    

The train journey down to Southampton from our house in Manchester was long and tiring, by the time we reached Southampton we were exhausted and it had gone dark so we stayed in a hotel next to the harbour.  The room we got was small and damp but it would do for the night, and it was all we could afford.  We could make out a faint outline of the Titanic from our window; the size was indescribable.  The four funnels took up all the whole ship; we could see some of the light from the docks reflecting off the side of the ship.  We could hear some White Star Line crew members doing final checks on the ship to make sure it was ready for sailing in just a couple of hours time.

We were woken early next morning by the sound of thousands of voices shouting down on the harbour next to the Titanic.  We got dressed and then walked down to the port and took a look at the amazing vessel.  There wasn’t a spec of dirt on it and the deck was already full of passengers waving to their friends and families who they wouldn’t see for a couple of weeks.  We felt like royalty as we were all dressed in our finest clothes and were walking around the docks next to the third class passengers whose clothes were old and tatty.  The ship was enormous and sparkling bright in the sun.  It definitely was the ship of dreams.  The four funnels were by now smoking away as people of all classes were boarding the ship.  The different classes boarded the ship through different doors.  Friends and relatives of all the passengers were shouting their goodbyes to their loved ones.  The noise from this was deafening.  We walked up the walkway onto the Titanic at around 11:00 on the morning of April 10th; as we walked through the door we were not expecting the sight we saw.  The corridors were spotless and the smell of the freshly painted walls hit us in the face as we walked down the corridors nothing was out of place.  We walked to our first class cabin and opened the door and the room was exactly as we had expected it.  Everything was in its correct place.  There was a king size double bed and two single beds, none of which had ever been slept in.  The view out of our cabin window was the best as it was on the side of the boat facing out towards the crowd and the ocean.  The ocean was glistening in the sun and it was very relaxing watching the waves crashing into the side of the harbour.  The children ran off onto the deck of the ship, we followed and as we got there the Titanic was just pulling out of the harbour.  The ship glided smoothly out of the harbour and the waves made a quiet crashing sound on the side of the ship.  The four funnels were now thick with smoke and there were mixed emotions in the crowd, some were smiling and some were crying all the little children had wide smiles across their faces.  The Titanic was now at sea, the water was calm, the weather was fine and most of all, all the family was together laughing and joking and there wasn’t any tension in the air.

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Jack and Joan went off to explore the ship and arranged to meet us at a later time.  We had arranged to meet in the main dining hall for tea at 7:30pm.  Jill and myself went into the dining room and were amazed at what we saw, the tables were neatly set out, there were candles on every table with napkins neatly set out for four on the small tables and several on the longer tables.  The cutlery had never been used and the waiters were all dressed in white shirts covered over by black tailcoats.  It was like a ...

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