Once upon a halcyon time ocean travel brought to mind the mighty monarchs of the sea, from SS Normandie to Cunard’s great queens Mary and Elizabeth.
Notions of onboard life conjured up images of gala dinners with the captain, severely elegant women sashaying down the ship’s grand staircase, deck games of croquet and quoits, beef tea served by stewards in starched whites… and a band to welcome the ship as she docked at one of the world’s great ports.
When my long-awaited chance to live life on the ocean wave did come, the reality was a bit different. The ship, for a start, was a scabrous old tub long since retired from service in the calmer Mediterranean and pensioned off to South Africa’s backwaters. And she vaguely but distinctly smelt of vomit and a few other unidentifiable things.
My fellow wayfarers, meanwhile, weren’t exactly the linen-suited scions, cigar-puffing plutocrats and enigmatic minor European nobility of my boyhood fantasies and reading. Rather, they mostly looked vaguely familiar, and for a while I battled to place them as we milled about the customs shed and then traipsed up the gangplank.
Then I got it.
They were the people you see at your more egalitarian beach resort, from the no-name-brand T-shirts to the acres of pasty, exposed flesh, that would soon turn a pretty pink in the tropical sun, to their truffle-pig rooting out of the on-board bars.
Back then, I should add, I was pretty much a card-carrying member of the same tribe, and joyously joined in the jollity – even though part of me had been hoping for bridge games in a wood-panelled card room and elevenses while tucked up under steamer blankets on deck chairs.
The accommodation itself could best be termed “cosy” – although I think the ship owners’ actual description was a bit more euphemistic. Along with a magazine photographer I shared what classed as a positively palatial outside cabin on the boat deck.
This meant that we had a window – yes, a window, not a round little porthole – with a sweeping view of the lifeboat outside, and ample room to almost make it to the bathroom without tripping over each other.
We were fortunate. Below decks most travelled steerage, with some fellow passengers cooped four up in windowless cabins that resembled nothing so much as the inside of beige rubbish bins. Not that they seemed to care very much.
They – and I, admittedly – spent every waking minute engaging in foolish frivolity, be it in the pint-sized casino or clustered around the glorified plunge pool that constituted the ship’s focal point of entertainment during the torrid daylight hours. Ahoy polloi, indeed.
Then there was the crew. I think “polyglottal” is the kindest way to describe them, with the senior officers coming from Mediterranean countries and most of the rest from the sort of places where foreign aid constitutes a sizeable part of the GDP.
But I did get to sit at the captain’s table one night. And while treating us to a soliloquy on shipboard life, he described a marvel of maritime engineering saying, with appropriately vigorous gesturing: “The propellers… sometimes she goes this-a way. But then sometimes she goes a-that a-way.”
The service, however, was not what you would have expected on one of yesteryear’s great liners. One evening while clearing away my plate, the waiter spotted a speck of food on the less-than-pristine table cloth and ejaculated: “You eat like a peeg!”
A little later when this empress of the ocean went down to a watery grave – with minimum loss of life, I had better add, lest anyone think I’m tasteless enough to dance on mass graves – my emotions were mixed. - Sunday Independent