Wonder Cruise: A heartwarming holiday romance in the 1930s

by Ursula Bloom

  It fascinated her.

  ‘Well,’ said the cheery voice of Mr. Spinks alongside her as he watched, ‘I don’t think much of it. No more than a little hill, I think, and as to the fire coming out of the top of it, a fat lot of nonsense that is!’

  ‘I suppose it depends on when you happen to see it? At night any fire would show. It wouldn’t in this bright sun.’

  But Mr. Spinks had expected something like his kitchen stove at home, with the damper out. He was disgruntled. ‘I once saw a really good chimney on fire,’ he said, ‘and it was a lot better.’ He went down to breakfast with the air of a man who considers that he has been grossly cheated.

  Ann stood there a little while, stood and marvelled at the loveliness about her. She marvelled also at the woman who was keen on knitting a jumper, and sat there without taking her eyes from her work, but murmuring repeatedly to herself, ‘Knit two, purl one.’ Fancy knitting a jumper in Naples! In the very shadow of Vesuvius occupying yourself with purls and plains. For to Ann it was all a wonderful city. A wonderful city of terrible people.

  She hardly dared to look at the crowds on the mole; at the skeletons of horses, sweating and panting in their last efforts to appease the wrath of those tyrants who drove them. She also descended to her breakfast, for they were to make an early start.

  The dining-saloon was in a state of uproar, for everyone was anxious to be off on the day’s excursion. On E deck was situated what was known as the excursion office, where Mr. Thomas Cook made adequate arrangements for this, that and the rest of it. A fleet of large charabancs classed ambiguously as ‘private open cars’ was lined up alongside the ship at Mr. Thomas Cook’s instigation. They were to undertake the tour which was in the little illustrated brochure of the line described as ‘Exclusive tour to the ruined Pompeii, under the very shadow of Vesuvius. (Glimpses of the island of Capri to be seen). The cars run alongside the vineyards. Time occupied ‒ all day. Lunch included at the famous hotel at Pompeii. £2 9s. 6d.’ Miss Bright had considered the excursion to be too dear, even though it might include lunch. She had had previous experience of the continental lunch on a spring cruise she had once undertaken to the Riviera.

  She had gone on ‘an excursion to the little town of Grasse, giving unrivalled views of the Alpes Maritimes. N.B. ‒ Corsica can be seen en route on a fine day’. (N.B. ‒ Corsica had not been seen though it was a very fine day.) The lunch at Grasse had been what Miss Bright had called sketchy, much like the continental breakfast only more recherché. Half a boiled egg on a couple of runner beans, the inevitable veal, cheese and fruit. Miss Bright was wondering if she could inveigle the chief steward to make her up a parcel of good ham sandwiches, and picnic amongst the ruins. The chief steward however had had other ideas. He had left a little notice on the tables the night before, instructing people who were desiring picnic baskets to put in their orders before the morning. It was too late now to do anything about it.

  Ann realized when she saw Miss Bright groping about the tables, and bewailing the expensive tour and the need for a picnic basket and the obstinacy of the chief steward all in one and the same breath, that unless she was quick about it, she would be saddled with Miss Bright. She made an early escape. She met Oliver Banks on the gangway, the longest she had ever seen, and they went over the side together.

  IV

  Ann had never supposed that there could be anything so wonderful as Pompeii. And, although she hated herself for the thought, again she surmised that it would have been much more wonderful if it had not been for the hordes of sightseeing tourists prowling about. It was not a ruin as she had been led to expect; it was a town in ruins.

  ‘I did not know that it was so big,’ she faltered, half afraid to enter it.

  It was, it seemed, a town suddenly cut short in its prime. It had been. It had ceased to be so suddenly that it still was. That was the most strange part about it. These people were not dead. It did not seem possible when so much that was real and vivid and entirely of their era was still in existence, that they had long since died. The ruts of chariots, and here and there the impression of feet; the imprint of a finger against a porch; a column worn away because some long-dead sentry had leaned against it in fatigue.

  Beyond, the blue of Vesuvius, towering over it, calm and implacable, Vesuvius which had done this thing.

  It was more than a little overwhelming. Again, hundreds of years later, Pompeii flourished in its ruined beauty. Grass grew in the dead streets. A cypress curled close like a deep blue cocoon, a wistaria struggled up and tumbled about an old stone loggia in a cloud of heliotrope loveliness. Nature had forgotten that this hideous tragedy had ever been, and already the little houses growing out from the suburbs of Naples were coming dangerously close.

  ‘But supposing it happened again?’ she said in wonder.

  ‘It wouldn’t happen without warning. There is a laboratory right up on Vesuvius, you know, where men live and spend their lives, they would send word if anything were likely to occur.’

  ‘But before, it did not give warning then?’

  ‘They probably did not understand.’

  ‘The witch knew in the Last Days,’ she said, and in fancy began to plan where it had taken place. Nydia and Glaucus, the bold beauty of the arena. And now, all over Pompeii radiant in the bright Neapolitan sunshine, the excursion poured. It is always rather a frightful thing when you meet your fellow countrymen abroad, but it is a far more frightful thing when they are on an excursion and en masse. And still more frightful when the city they are visiting is the ageless, deathless, yet entirely deathly city of Pompeii.

  ‘I should think,’ meditated Oliver as he surveyed the approach of stout ladies and perspiring gentlemen, ‘that the combined tonnage of our ship is pretty gross. The majority of them seem to be fat.’

  They approached. They were very earnest about their sight-seeing. They were armed with guide-books, and escorted by a courier gentleman who bore the name of the indefatigable Mr. Thomas Cook round his hat.

  ‘Supposing,’ said Oliver, ‘that we had lunch first, while they pour over the place? Then, when they have done with it, we can come back. At the moment it is not fit for a decent person.’

  Ann was loth to leave the ruins, yet she had to admit that the excursionist party were doing their best to spoil it. They turned and went out of the ruined city, and came to the hotel built alongside, where all the tourists go.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘before we start, I want you to understand that this is all on the fifty-fifty basis. I have not come to Pompeii to sponge on you.’

  ‘Rot! Look at the fun I get out of your companionship.’

  Ann cherished no illusions about her companionship, and she coloured as she said, ‘That’s nice of you, but it makes it most embarrassing for me. It wasn’t at all my idea to let you pay, and I am not coming inside to have lunch with you unless you let me contribute my share.’

  ‘You can’t possibly go anywhere else for lunch. This is the only place there is, and it would take you much too long to go back to Naples.’

  She realized the futility of the threat which she had suggested, and was more than a little dismayed, because she was not used to people paying for her. In her world, the Miss Thomas and Miss Gelding world, the price of a lunch meant all the difference between bankruptcy and affluence in the weekly pay envelope. You just could not treat other people. And now he was being silly, because she had the money to pay, and she wanted to do so.

  She said, ‘You don’t realize how uncomfortable it makes me. I don’t know what to do about it.’

  ‘Then that’s simple. Do nothing.’

  She thought when she got back she would buy him some cigarettes, and send them to his cabin. They would probably be the wrong sort, Virginian when they should have been Turkish or Egyptian, for at any rate she knew nothing about smoking, but they would show that she meant her word.

  ‘If I get you some cigarettes, I wonder if they will be the wrong sort?’ she mused.
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br />   ‘If you do I shall be most offended.’

  ‘It is all very difficult.’

  ‘Not at all. Let it be. It is quite usual for a man to pay for a woman, I can assure you,’ and he laughed as he gave her a little push into the hotel.

  V

  There was the scent of tuber roses, and of lilies and wistaria all blending together. It was far more beautiful than anything that she had ever imagined, far lovelier than any picture she had seen, even the one inside the portal of the steamship company in Cockspur Street.

  Cockspur Street!

  How terribly far away that seemed ‒ and was!

  This was vivid and real; the cypresses were not like old ladies with dark blue cloaks drawn round them; they were alive. The light wind blew them and ruffled them, so that they broke into little blue feathers which the sun kissed to gold.

  The picture in Cockspur Street had not been able to convey the exquisite sunny scent of it all; the hot earthy smell of the field, and the acrid smell of ruins. She glanced at the grass which lay on the other side of the dusty road, and behind them in the city of dead yesterday.

  The lunch was not so sketchy as Miss Bright had thought it might be. Thin soup, fish, cold chicken (the inevitable poulet of the Mediterranean), fruit in a wire basket. There were deep dark grapes nestling against vivid oranges; there were inferior peaches and luscious peaches. Oliver insisted on Chianti.

  ‘It will make me talk,’ she urged, torn between the wild desire to drink it, to shock Cuthbert, and to cry shame on all her upbringing, and the knowledge that it would be dreadfully wrong.

  ‘Does that matter? I want you to talk. You interest me. Tell me why have you never married?’

  It might be the Chianti, it might be Pompeii which rushes to the head, but she answered the truth. ‘Nobody axed me, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Well, that’s candid enough! Tell me about yourself. You’ve lived in the country?’

  ‘In Gloucestershire until I was over twenty; six months in Balham, the rest in South Kensington.’

  He nodded. ‘A good mixture. Did Balham leave much of an impression?’

  ‘The worst of the lot. My brother is a rector there.’ She stopped dead. The loyalty to Cuthbert sealed her lips, and her colour came and went so that she turned her face from him.

  ‘I had an uncle once who was a doctor in Tooting. He got run in for illegal operations, and had to go to Nigeria and start a practice of a strange nature there. It is odd how in these respectable suburbs people’s morals go to pieces. Haven’t you noticed it? You might expect that sort of thing in Mayfair, but not in self-righteous Tooting.’

  She knew that she ought to be angry that Oliver should dare to mention such a thing as an illegal operation to her. Yet somehow the queer change that had come over her ever since this cruise was encroaching. She wasn’t angry. She was interested.

  ‘You are lucky that no man ever asked you,’ he said, ‘that’s to come. Some new experience in life. Lucky fellow.’

  Something to come! But of course she would never marry now. She felt a glow and a tingle, for is not proposal and refusal or acceptance the great adventure to every woman? When she believes romance to be behind her, then she becomes old. Women who have believed this have been old at twenty. Women who have found it still before them, have become miraculously young again at forty. Romance is the rejuvenating hand of time upon a woman’s high noon. It sets back the hours. It is without any doubt her daylight saving bill.

  Ann could actually feel time slipping from her, discarded like those dreadful tweed clothes she had brought with her; it was ridiculous!

  ‘I shall never marry,’ she said, ‘this is what you might call my swan song! I won three hundred pounds in a sweepstake, and I am spending it like this. My brother is furious. He said I ought to have invested it and left it to his daughter. She’s my godchild. I suppose I ought really.’

  ‘I don’t see why. Buying happiness! It is worth all the capital in the world. I wish I’d done it, but I met Lilia and there we were.’

  ‘Don’t you think you could go back to Lilia?’

  ‘God knows. She doesn’t want me. There’s the other chap too.’

  ‘But Lilia is your wife.’

  ‘That doesn’t give me the right to make her miserably unhappy, does it?’

  ‘No, but it insists that you should not give her up. You ought to make her see the folly of her ways, and come back to you.’

  He laughed as he lit a cigarette. ‘The six months in Balham has stuck, hasn’t it? I am afraid I find your high morality quite immoral. It’s just that we look at these things in different ways, that is all. Good God! Look at this.’

  For the excursion, hot and breathless, was arriving.

  They were red in the face. Daring old gentlemen had unbuttoned their coats and flung them wide, showing vast expanses of chest and stomach. Retired gentlemen who had obviously lived in the East at some remote time of their lives, had come in Shantung suits which gave them a feeling of superiority over their flannel-suited fellows. There were straw hats, and panamas, even felt hats and tweed caps … and one bowler. There were old ladies in Edwardian attire, in pre-war hats, in print blouses, and one trimmed with jet. There were young girls who had come for a fling and meant to get it; young men who had come for romance and had got it. Blazers and berets, little round crochet hats and large flopping hats, parasols and pince-nez, lunch baskets bought en route, sandwich parcels packed by the steward, everybody seemed to have something to carry. And in the midst of all this the tall and miserable-looking courier as supplied by Mr. Thomas Cook, who must have wished himself anywhere else in the world than where he was at the moment. And this in spite of it being one of the loveliest spots on earth.

  The excursion was bearing down on the hotel, the more opulent hopefully contemplating lunch, those with food hoping to cover the fact by ordering a bottle of something to drink, and eating under cover of the bottle!

  ‘This is where we get out,’ said Oliver, and he signalled to the waiter. The waiter was a morbid-looking fellow. He eyed the approaching people with interest.

  He said appreciatively, ‘Mr. Thomas Cook.’

  He had an eye for tips.

  VI

  Ann was very tired. The Neapolitan sun was hot; it had beaten down upon her fiercely enough and she had not realized how weary it could make you feel.

  ‘Tired?’ he asked.

  ‘I am rather.’

  ‘We’ll go straight back to the ship.’

  It seemed a pity, for she knew that she would only be here once in her life, here with the broken colonnades and the crumbling balustrades, in the dead city which still continued to live. There was something remarkable to her in the fact that it still lived, and as the car went along ‒ she thought far too quickly ‒ she wondered whether it was thought or spirit or ghost which trod those dead streets. She wished that she could have gone on walking about it, while the excursion ate heartily at the famous hotel where the lunch was provided and included in the itinerary, but she couldn’t.

  Her head ached terribly.

  She was glad to get back to the deserted ship, glad to curl up on her little bed, with the fan playing on her, and to sleep. She slept late.

  Ann had made the mistake which seems to be inevitable to the Englishman who has never left England before. She believed in sunburn and tan as being both beneficial and healthy. Always returning from Worthing she had waited with a thrill for Miss Thomas or little Gelding to say, ‘My, but how brown you are!’ That was the hallmark of a successful holiday. It meant that the fortnight had done her good. She had the purely British theory that the sun could do no wrong, instead of the superior knowledge of the Mediterranean, which believed in the sun as a god of vengeance who can kill at will.

  Although the little hat that she had bought at Fifinelle’s with such pride most successfully shaded her eyes and gave her the idea that it was protective, it left the nape of her neck naked to the rays. Ann was suffering fro
m a touch of the sun. She was sick. In her head there beat a pulse like that of a dynamo, and she could do nothing but lie there and suffer the ministrations of Miss Brown, well used to such catastrophes.

  ‘Having given her so much trouble, her tip will come to something awful,’ Ann thought wretchedly. ‘I’ll never know what to give her, and I’ll be frightened to death …’

  Still it wasn’t much use bothering about that now.

  Existing on grapes and ice water for the rest of the day, Ann rose extremely weakly the next morning, long after the second day’s excursion, as organized by the persevering Mr. Thomas Cook, had started on its way. They were doing the Blue Grotto, and the island of Capri ‒ including, so the itinerary set out, a car ride along one of the most exquisite pieces of coast road in Europe, and a delightful boat trip. The idea of a delightful boat trip set Ann dithering; she had, of course, no idea that part of that trip had to be spent lying flat at the bottom of the boat, so as to escape being decapitated when going through the entrance to the grotto. Several of the more obese had trouble with this.

  The Blue Grotto itself sounded attractive enough, but she had not wanted to see it in company with the people on the excursion. There were far too many people in the ship, she thought, far too many of the sort who had come only to get their money’s worth. In their earnest endeavour to miss nothing they managed to see only the obvious. Ann, struggling wanly on deck as suggested by Miss Brown (‘Only now do keep in the shade or you’ll find it all comes back again’), collided with Mrs. Spinks.

  She was the last person whom Ann wanted to meet, but she could not escape. Mrs. Spinks had not gone to the Blue Grotto, nor had Mr. Spinks. He had heard some home truths about the delightful boat trip, and the difficulties to be suffered by the obese, sprawling at the bottom of a boat to circumvent the entrance. He had had other ideas.

  ‘You heard what happened to us last night?’ said Mrs. Spinks. ‘And a nice thing it was too.’