What the Traveller Saw (6 page)

A
S YOU COME OUT
on Pier Hill at the foot of Southend High Street you get your first smell of the sea, so strong that it is like a biff on the nose. This is what puts Londoners in a good humour, for this is one of the things they have come for – an escape from The Smoke and a whiff of the sea. Or is it mud? Or a mixture of mud and water? Or something else? It is a question one feels entitled to ask. With the tide out the nearest sea is a mile away. If there is fog in Sea Reach you may not even be able to see it. Whatever it is, it has a strong maritime flavour, and it is best to make the most of it as it is certainly the best smell you’re going to smell while you’re here.

The smell and, on a fine day, the sight of the sea make the journey worthwhile, because seawards there is always something going on. In 1962 the Signal Station at the end of the pier reported 53,209 vessels to Lloyd’s. For this reason, if no other, Southend has the edge on Blackpool. It is not one of those places where the visitor gazes despairingly at the horizon longing for a puff of smoke to break the monotony.

See Southend on a fine Saturday morning any time from June to October. If the tide is out the cockle boats will be on their sides, stranded. Out towards the North Sea, off Shoeburyness, a line of tankers is waiting for the tide; beyond them the Great Nore Tower is like a cluster of skeletal birds up to their knee joints in water. After early rain the sky is the colour of pearls. Sea, mud and sky merge into one another. The atmosphere is the sort from which mirages are made. If there wasn’t the pier with the statue of Queen Victoria pointing lugubriously
down it, as if banishing you to govern New South Wales, it would be difficult to tell where the elements begin and end.

Three miles across the estuary is the Kentish shore, and places with lovely names – All Hallows, St Mary’s Hoo, Sheppey, the Isle of Grain: not all of them so lovely now. Between Grain and Sheppey three Thames sailing barges are anchored: another, with a gaff topsail set and flying a red burgee with a white crescent on it, is beating down channel. The scene lacks only a great fish stranded on one of the banks and it might be a drawing by the elder Brueghel.

All the way from London, unless you travel by the arterial road, you have tantalizing glimpses of ships and water, the widening reaches of the river. On the old Southend Road in the no-man’s-land beyond Dagenham, part country, part desert, where the chimneys of the cement factories point sad fingers to the sky, Southend begins to put its spell on you. Around half past ten the coaches with outings on board – beanos as old cockle sellers on the front still call them – draw into the lay-bys – great glossy monsters with incongruously sylvan names like Bluebell and Primrose. The beer crates and the big jars of pickled onions are unloaded from the boot and the beanos themselves cluster round the crates, rather solemn-looking, as though they were taking part in a ritual, which in a sense they are.

These are all-male beanos, mostly Desert Rat vintage or even earlier, going back as far as Passchendaele. There are mixed coachloads and whole coachloads of girls and coaches full of old ladies, but they stop at different lay-bys, with amenities, and they don’t have beer and onions. They have more ladylike refreshments, mostly, and make themselves comfortable for the final run in.

If you travel on the
Royal Sovereign
or the
Royal Daffodil
from Tower Pier you have water all the way, plus the smell of engine room and beer in the bars; but in addition you will
have seen strange, isolated places which, like me, you may have planned to go to, brooding over ordnance maps in the loo on winter evenings, but never reached because when you have the time the Dolomites seem nearer. The seventeenth-century fort at Tilbury that one would certainly have been to long before if it had been in France; the Isolation Hospital on the marshes at Lower Hope, surrounded by wire, waiting for a solitary Lascar with smallpox or a Dutchman off a boat from the Indies – ideal setting for a play by Dürrenmatt; and the marshes themselves, places on which, during the war, they exploded nasty things where now the sheep nibble the grass under a cat’s cradle of grid lines, the sound of the bell buoys tolling mournfully in the stream over the dyke accentuating their loneliness.

Land on the pier and you instantly become a statistic, albeit a misleading one. In 1962, according to the official report, 246,025 people landed and embarked on Southend Pier, of whom 123,012 are ‘presumed’ to have become visitors. Before you leave for the shore, see for yourself what happened to the missing 123,013. You will find them on the sun deck laid out in orderly rows, cheek by jowl in deck chairs. The majority are elderly, which may account for nobody having worried about them before. Although they are not the sort of people who would make beasts of themselves with pickled onions in lay-bys, you will find them all hard at work eating. They eat silently and continuously. Most of them are eating a rather indigestible-looking sugar bun, like a lightly cooked sausage with a coating of shaving cream on it.

You cannot visit Southend without sampling the shellfish at one or other of the numberless booths at the entrance to the pier. Study the price lists, by all means, but they all seem to be the same. Oysters don’t look so good? Try the whelks. Rather like chewing an India-rubber bone. (Who organizes the retail price maintenance of whelks?) Whilst champing, consider the merits of a whelk tea, also on offer. But allow me to warn
you: the effect of strong tea on whelks is similar to the effect of whisky on oysters, which is no good at all.

‘W
HAT IS IT ABOUT
being on a boat that makes everyone behave like a film star?’ Lady Julia Mottram (née Flyte) asks Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
, while crossing the Atlantic in one of the Cunard
Queens
between the wars. She had just, against all common sense, settled for a bout below deck with a hefty
masseuse.

If Ryder had recorded his answer, it would probably have been to the effect that scarcely ever, except on a transatlantic liner, are there four days and a half with absolutely nothing to do except summon up a massager, spend the morning entombed under a mud-pack, or have one’s toes seen to. It was still true in 1965 of the
Queen Mary
and the
Queen Elizabeth
and, in descending order of size, of the
France
, the United States Line’s
United States
, the Italia Line’s
Raffaello
, the Holland-Amerika Line’s
Rotterdam
and the Norddeutscher Lloyd’s
Bremen.

To travel in the
Queen Elizabeth
, as we did, from New York to Southampton, was an experience. There were ships that were far more modern, but there would never be another in which there was so much space. It had 37 public rooms, some of them three decks high and rather overpowering. It had three acres of deck. It had one open-air and two indoor swimming pools. The open-air pool, like the teenage room, was a daring innovation, the legacy of a recent refit. It had a Turkish bath, staffed by a squad of men and women who would knock hell out of you for a consideration, just as their predecessors had beaten it out of Lady Julia.

Altogether, there were 12 bars on the
Queen Elizabeth
, some of them impossible to find without help in the space of an average crossing of 4 days 13 hours. There were two gymnasiums equipped with weird cast-iron machines built with bits of bicycles that brought to mind the Marx Brothers on their transatlantic crossing with Margaret Dumont. There were two cinemas. And there were kennels for 26 four-footed friends (once they conveyed a deodorized skunk).

There were operating theatres and little rooms equipped with live stenographers to help you get on with your business. And somewhere on board there must have been a garden, because there was a gardener. There was even a squash court which must have been a pretty hazardous place until they equipped the ship with stabilizers.

The decor of most of the public rooms resembled that of a 1930s country house designed for Lord Beaverbrook: all panelled with petula, patapsko pomla, avodire, tiger oak, makore, bubinga, zebrano and black bean, woods which no one but a timber merchant had ever heard of, much less seen. One half-expected to meet Garbo, wearing a turban, marching up one of the countless grand staircases for an assignation with John Barrymore to the strains of music played by the Marcel Torrens Palm Court Orchestra in the Main Lounge, Reginald Foort on the organ. If you were too young to know what the thirties were like, the
Queen Elizabeth
was the ship to travel in. Even the First Class suites had as much chintz and as many doors as a bedroom in an Aldwych farce, and the plumbing was of a solidity and splendour matched at that time only by that of the North British Hotel, Edinburgh, which had been installed in Edwardian times.

The service was terrific. Men wearing rows of medal ribbons stood all day by lifts which some passenger might conceivably decide to use. Many of the stewards had been stewarding for forty years. Unlike the French with their
France
, such men as these were not given a prize at the end of
the year by their government to encourage them to fresh heights of service and affability. It came from the heart, and by the time we had tipped them in the manner to which they were accustomed there was no need for such incentives. (Cunard, unlike P & O, for example, didn’t publish a list of suggested tips for the guidance of passengers such as ourselves.)

These men and the stewardesses would do anything for you – well, almost anything – and if you had an overwhelming desire to eat buttered toast at 4.30 a.m., eat it you could, and uncongealed. They were all things to all men and women: matey without being impertinent in Tourist Class, reserved in Cabin Class; while in First Class they had the air of privilege of a family butler, which was why to multitudes of well-off Americans who travelled in the
Queen Elizabeth
it was a foretaste of what they believed to be the British way of life, perhaps the only part of their visit to Britain which really lived up to their expectations.

It was the food by which such a ship was ultimately judged, and if you were so minded you could eat your way into an untimely grave (there were no burials at sea). In Tourist Class the food was copious and wholesome; in Cabin Class it came from the same kitchens as First Class, but they were less reckless with such commodities as caviar, which, in First, came up in big dollops. The First Class breakfast menu listed more than ninety separate items, including onion soup, fried yellow perch, cold roast lamb and mint sauce (we never actually saw anyone eating this), eight different coffees and fourteen different kinds of bread.

If all this was insufficient to see you through until lunchtime, a deck steward would swaddle you in a red and blue blanket, like a great baby, and feed you beef tea from 11 a.m. onwards. The blanket was the best refuge from such tedious amusements as bean-guessing and funny hat competitions, which flourished on all passenger ships, and still do.

For an extra ten bob you could eat in the Verandah Grill. Just as the Royal Enclosure at Ascot had other more select enclosures within it, on a
Queen
there was always another restaurant that was classier than the First Class. In it you could order almost anything, from Westphalian ham to bouillabaisse, and get it. You could order entirely black meals, starting with caviar and ending with Finnish black pudding eaten with blackcurrant jam, or entirely white meals of boiled fish, tripe and junket. We met an English lawyer and his wife who were eating their way through all the puddings they had not eaten since they were in the nursery – spotted dog, treacle pud, jam sponge, and so on. All were delicious. They ought to have been. These were the dishes the crew liked best and there were 1190 crew members to just over 2000 passengers.

By 1972 both the
Queens
were out of commission and the largest liner in the world was the
France
(66,348 tons), taken into service in 1962 by the
Compagnie Générale Transatlantique
(English alias, the French Line). When we sailed in her from New York to Southampton, she had just completed a three-month, one-class, round-the-world winter cruise, which ended in New York. All 1200 berths were occupied. On this marathon an outside cabin on U deck (
luxe
) cost £5920, and the most expensive suite, £30,000 (
grande luxe
), for four passengers. Among the two thousand passengers on ‘our’ crossing there were no readily identifiable film stars, but there was M. Salvador Dali, carrying a sort of wand and looking like a cross between a necromancer and
Le Roi Soleil.
There was also a cross-section of an entire Arabian royal family, attempting, with total lack of success, to cross the Atlantic incognito in a couple of dozen upper-deck cabins, complete with their own coffee makers, bodyguards, veiled houris, servants whose feet were killing them, and lots of children and
au pairs.
In addition the ship was awash with American millionaires, as such ships always were in the autumn, who were always sloping
off to the Tourist Class Night Club because they said it was more fun. At Southampton they were met by a whole fleet of Daimler hire cars in which they purred away to the Connaught and Claridge’s. There was even a small parcel of distinguished savants.

How did this heterogeneous collection manage to while away the not-so-long days and nights? Well, we whiled them away swimming in one or other of the two swimming pools (a notice on D deck informed us that the water was heated to some agreeable tropical temperature, but all we found was raw Atlantic straight from the ocean). We were massaged, being older now and more in need of it than we had been on the
Queen Elizabeth
, had haircuts and, of course, pedicures. There was also ping-pong, bowling, a shooting gallery, dance lessons, a library of six thousand volumes, and an outpost of the
Galeries Lafayette
, which advised all First Class passengers to come in the afternoon ‘so that they will enjoy the best service’.

We tried both First and Tourist Class service and found the assistants equally rude and disobliging in both, the only people we encountered in the entire ship out of a crew of 1100 who were rude and disobliging, but then they weren’t members of the crew.

We could also go to the cinema in the biggest theatre afloat, ride a mechanical horse in the gym (a surprisingly obscene-looking machine), dial 1900 for dollops of bad news – there was also a daily paper – or give up completely, as most transatlantiqueurs eventually do, and allow ourselves to be swaddled in wrappings by the deck stewards and left to mature like Tutankhamun. Someone on board had brought with them a cougar or an ocelot, I can’t remember which. It was kept on deck, in what were intended as dog kennels, equipped with French lamp posts and kilometre stones. One wondered what it made of them and the other four-footed friends.

Most popular of all the distractions were the bars – the one
in Tourist Class was 69 feet long and said to be the longest in the maritime world. The
Bar d’Atlantique
in First Class was presided over by M. Raymond Cordier, archpriest of transatlantic barmen and most agreeable of men, who had been forty years with the company, ten in the
France.
He made what were arguably the finest Bloody Marys in the world, and never spilt a drop of liquor other than down his customers’ throats.

What many people came for, rather than to gaze at the ocean, or ride a mechanical horse, was the food. Breakfast was a sort of litany, as in the
Queen Elizabeth
, with nine different sorts of jam. But it’s what we didn’t eat that we remember. Looking at the menus today I wonder why I never had Pickled Herring in Chablis, Medallion of Huachinango Sauté Concarnoise, Broiled Rock Cornish Hen Saint-Germain (animal, veg. or mineral?), or a Religieuse with Coffee. At the Captain’s Dinner, which was followed by
Le Dancing
, there was Bird’s Nest Soup.

Nevertheless, partly because the
France
was unable to replenish its store with fresh eggs in New York for the last lap to Southampton, the palm for food must be given to the
Queen Elizabeth.
The
France
was more sophisticated but, oddly enough, less fun. At Southampton, while queuing for immigration, we heard one well-heeled English person say to another: ‘I’ll telephone
my
butler and tell him to telephone
your
butler and say we need
both
Rolls.’