It was strictly forbidden to ‘fraternize’ with the pupils, although over the next two weeks we spent a huge amount of time with the pupils. It was our job to spend time with the pupils. The pupils thronged around us. We gave the pupils visas and advice and smiles. In the evenings, we were expected to organize a disco for the pupils. But there was nobody for these pupils to disco with, except some of the junior officers (unfashionably short-haired and just a little straight), those hundred or so Canadian boys (well, never mind them) and us. We quite badly wanted to fraternize with the pupils. There were, it seemed, rather a remarkable number of pupils who wanted to fraternize with us. They weren’t our ruddy pupils. Some of these pupils were older than we were. And we weren’t teachers either. We were like prefects, weren’t we?
Alas, there was absolutely nowhere on the ship where it was possible to ‘fraternize’ in private. We looked. It was reputed that a previous school office assistant had decided to use the ironing room to get to know a pupil better. It had two open doorways and an ironing board. Unsurprisingly, he had been caught in the act. Apparently there had been a bit of a fuss.
I dutifully informed my mother that the passengers were ‘either very fat or very beautiful’, that I was making ‘an awful lot of friends’ and that my bar bill was £1.45 for the week.
But day by day the sensation increased that we were taking part in a not very convincing late-sixties sex comedy. It was a new experience, having come from a boy’s school, to walk down corridors and be greeted with winks and endearments by either the fat or the beautiful. The dashing Leslie Phillips had been pursued around the decks by his female passengers, but it couldn’t happen in real life, could it? When it did, it became acutely difficult to remain responsive to six or seven admirers at a time.
The ship sailed off to Greece, passing down through the Aeolian Islands and into the Corinth canal. And it was spring too.
The Uganda carried a full complement of old-fashioned Empire certainties. The crew, for example, were Goan. Dinner and lunch were ‘three-course blow-outs’, enlivened by kofta curries and tarka dahls. We ate well away from the steerage pupils, at tables of gleaming silverware, with teachers and officers and passengers. ‘Do the crew all eat at this dinner?’ I asked one of the third lieutenants.
He scowled at me. (It was central to officer-training to be able to scowl authoritatively) ‘The crew,’ he said pointedly, ‘make their chicken stews in their own quarters.’
One of the ‘matrons’ recruited exclusively from ex-captains of hockey teams leaned across. ‘The crew is black, darling. Never call the officers crew.’
‘You should try to eat one of their chicken curries if you can,’ said the deputy headmistress between mouthfuls. ‘It’s a real treat.’
The ‘crew’ were paid four pounds a week, same as us. But unlike us, they had been recruited as entire villages in Goa and would serve four-year stints. Their ‘quarters’ were squeezed into the stern of the boat.
‘Most modern ships have black crew,’ I was told.
One of the other junior officers giggled. ‘If white crew don’t like your orders, you can disappear over the side in the middle of the night.’
But this knowledge didn’t seem to make the officers much warmer to the black Goans. ‘The problem is that these natives have to be doubled up. We have twice as many of the blighters on board as we ought to need.’
My letters home, when not about my search for the perfect Afghan coat, are full of righteous indignation. ‘My steward shouted at me,’ I wrote, ‘because everybody shouts at him and that’s how he thinks English is spoken.’
Our duties were not taxing, but two of us had to get up at five in the morning and deliver the daily news. It was my second encounter with a seventies office techno-nightmare in six months. Two or three typed pages of ‘the news in sentences’ arrived from somewhere up in the radio room, each with several backing strips and a flimsy They were attached, by means of punched holes in the top of the paper, to matching holes on the Roneo machine and then had to be smoothed on to a drum. Once in place, the backing pages were ripped off. The machine was turned once with a massive handle to ensure that the ink was oozing through the punched type face, and then we pressed a button. It was supposed to clank out fifty copies.
It was a deadly business. Too little ink and fifty pages of blankness would emerge. Too much, and the black, adhesive gunge would spit out over my Mr Byrite trousers. The pages of used paper had to be delicately transferred to a bin without getting them stuck to a shirt. None of this was made any easier by the early hour, the cramped space or the hangover. We would run around the ship, trailing paw marks up the companionways to the chef’s office in his smelly kitchens, delivering the news-sheet to the thunderous engine rooms (where an engineer would mutely hang it on his clipboard), up to the bridge, into the lobbies of senior officers and under the doors of the cabins of the passengers. The ship, of course, chugged on all night.
Reaching Kos, the headmaster of the ship and the captain went ashore at dawn. Callow as I was, I never really spotted that the headmaster looked out for us. He took two of his school office assistants, although we had no function at all except to look on. We clambered down into a lifeboat and chugged over a limpid bay in that early, violet, tremulous Mediterranean light, before the rest of the ship had even woken, slinking to the town quay, on an insiders’ visit, always the most exciting way to go. It was the best way to arrive anywhere — by boat. Waiting at the top of the steps was a little knot of men in suits — the mayor and dignitaries of the town — probably seeking assurance that the ship’s juvenile complement weren’t going to pillage their island.
By nine everybody else was ashore. The islanders somehow found a bicycle for every passenger aboard. The girls pedalled off across the island. A thousand sturdy Canadian legs pumped through mountains smothered in wild flowers, up to the temple of Hippocrates and along empty coastal roads. We set off in pursuit. I was with Jon. A handsome bearded Canadian himself, he had wildly overstretched his fraternization. He bad planned at least six or seven separate liaisons. We pedalled furiously around the island to preassigned meeting points. But wherever we settled with one of his girlfriends, another would come cycling along the street calling his name and waving plaintively.
It was a relief when the ship docked back in Malta, even though my vicarious fraternizations with Bev, Beth, Dale, Karen and Jill had all, somehow, to be concluded simultaneously On the last night, the band played ‘Auld Lang Syne’, all the girls burst into tears, and I collected a lot of Canadian postcodes. I had to explain, where I could, that poor Jon had been held up by his duties, while he hid in his cabin.
The school office assistants decided that we would plan more carefully for the next voyage and try to stop behaving like starving monkeys in a banana shop. Unsuccessfully we attempted to make sense of the passenger manifest and repaired to our eyrie above the dock as the buses took away our girls. The returning coaches disgorged six hundred screaming Scottish schoolchildren between the ages of eleven and fourteen, and they roared aboard. With the hiss of a. pneumatic coach door, Adolescent Lust at Sea became The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s.
During five cruises in twelve weeks I visited almost every port in the Mediterranean for six hours. We trudged in a mob down the streets of ancient Ephesus. I spent an overnight anchorage in Istanbul haggling for a rhomboid leather jacket in the grand bazaar. (It was made of ‘lamp leather’.) In Santorini we ate a kebab lunch while the ship disgorged its screaming horde, mounted them-on to hundreds of donkeys for a ride to the top of the volcano rim and promptly took them straight back down again. In Izmir I found the Afghan coat which had become more smelly than fashionable by the time I got it delivered home. (‘You will have to have it treated for flies,’ I wrote to my mother. ‘Don’t worry, only ten per cent of them are infected.’) In Tunisia we peered at three or four disconsolate lumps of stone, pondered how efficiently the Romans had razed Carthage and then hurried back to our 1950
s world for supper. Later in the year, we sailed to the Baltic. I went to Finland, Stockholm and Denmark, with more Scottish kids aboard.
One morning we woke up in a fjord in Norway: the ship like a model in a slab-sided stone bath, and, at the far end, a tiny village, a needle spire and a whiff of smoke waiting in the clear back-lit air. The boats were lowered. Six hundred hollering children jumped in. A Viking invasion in reverse, we were ferried to the hamlet, and they sacked the town.
Five hours later, the masters at arms stood at the companionway, reaching eleven-year-olds out of the boats, turning them upside down and shaking them vigorously Key rings, model churches, souvenir pencils and bottles of illicit beer tumbled on the ridged steel deck to be gathered up into a hamper and returned. The ship delayed sailing that evening, so that the frightened shopkeepers could come aboard and reclaim some of their looted stock.
It was around then that the staff captain, a small man with the demeanour of the Duke of Edinburgh kept waiting by a pop star, took to glaring at me. I think it was my hair. Lounging in the saloon, running up bar bills on a chitty or chatting up the younger teachers, I would glance up to see him on the other side of the wood-block dance floor, incinerating me with a glare. Once, I was asked to set up a microphone for a lecture. He stood at the back of the empty hall for five minutes, sporting an expression of malevolence that would have felled a dog.
Perhaps it was this that made me feel that I was in an early George Orwell novel. Before we reached Alexandria, it was patiently explained to me, once and for all, that ‘these Goan people are simply not as intelligent as white people’.
I protested. ‘What on earth makes you think that?’
The officers at the table gaped in bemusement. One of them laughed. ‘Look around this room, for Christ’s sake. Who are sitting at the table? White men. Who are serving them? Black men. Do you think that would be the case if black men were as intelligent as us?’
Everybody seemed to have run away to sea. The banquets, so lavish, became repetitive. The horizons so broad, were, in fact, bounded by the bow and stern of the ship. The lovely girls, who swooned over the handsome third, were there to romance but never to touch. The visits were to the same docks, year after year, cruise after cruise, and only the intelligently curious headmaster and his lecturers seemed bothered to go ashore. The rest preferred their world hermetically sealed, but were in reality suffering from island fever. And I was only a visitor. Nonetheless, after I stepped off the boat in Naples, my letter home was filled with regret at leaving.
I disembarked from the Uganda with a tightening around the chest. For the first time in my life, my days were completely unregulated. As I write this, I am trying to check whether it can possibly be true. I was eighteen. I must, surely, have separated myself from social connections before. I must have been responsible for setting my own bedtime, or finding my own meal. For Christ’s sake, I had been to Glastonbury and eaten boiled kale, hadn’t I? But I had never faced an entire country like this.
A flush of panic washed over me. I bought a pair of bargain sunglasses to assuage it. Aviator-style, satisfyingly cheap, they were black enough, I hoped, to hide my wide-eyed innocence, but probably silly enough to mark me out to what, in my credulity, I imagined was a wholly rapacious population. I was a straggle-haired eighteen-year-old would-be cool dude, humping a suitcase through hot streets, brusquely fending off propositions from taxi drivers: ‘Where you wan’ go?’
Yes, indeed, where did I wan’ go? That magic feeling. ‘Nowhere to go.’ For the first time in my life I had nobody to talk to in the evening, nobody to share a meal with, nobody to make a joke with about the rank smell emanating from the drains, nobody to expect me to get in, nobody to tell me whether the place I was going to sleep was safe. Oh, Mummy!
I went to Rome. The train had seemed the safest emergency option. I could stick my luggage on the rack and sit down for a bit, while the auburn country wound past. I don’t think I admired the railway system. I put any differences from suburban London down to Latin primitivism. But I was happy to get away from the confusing south and anxious to distance myself from the cruise ship. Moving on felt safe. It delayed decisions. Besides, I bad to see Rome.
In the autumn of 2004 I went back there for a fortnight. Was it the first time since? It seemed so comfortable and familiar and so unchanged. At about half past six I hurried my wife Jo out into the street. It was Sunday night, and Rome was alive like a dignified cocktail party. Most of the shops were open, and the passeggiari full of people just walking, many arm in arm like us, a few with dogs, husbands and wives, men together, girls laughing. They were peering and assessing, presumably spotting tiny variations in detail in the goods on offer. Women’s fashions do, after all, change, but Roman men wear muted colours, cashmere pullovers, tweed jackets and soft shirts in subtle stripes and delicate fabrics, and a hundred small stores seem to offer them infinite tiny varieties of their discreet, unvarying, preppy taste.
Even as we joined in and thought about some serious shopping ourselves, we noticed that the shops were closing, that the streets were thinning. The carabinieri let the cars through along the Corso. The cafés were still busy. The flower stalls would stay open until late — someone might want to offer apologies or take an offering. It’s not the brisk, alienating outdoor life of Paris, London or New York, where early evening is all a frenetic rush to get on to mid-evening entertainment. There aren’t many cinemas round the old city. Theatres are thin on the ground. The promenade was the main event, and by eight it was seriously over, and the stragglers were thinking about getting off home.
Nothing seemed to have changed since 1970 except me. Then, I was burning with A-level artistic pretension, part of which involved a mini grand tour of ‘great art’ and ‘important architecture’, but I had standards. I was a good, cold, northern chapel sort of a chap and on my guard against curlicues. The Baroque dismayed me. Gold things worried me. I could just about cope with the grotesque, but was suspicious of Bernini. On first walking into St Peter’s I recoiled from what seemed an Aunty Betty, gold-plated, glittery notion of the sublime.
But I was prepared to mug up, and public collections are good companions. In Rome I busied myself with the sights. Pompously, I seem hardly to have bothered with the seventeenth century and addressed myself exclusively to the historical certainties of Ancient Rome, trudging to the Forum, tramping on to the Colosseum, wandering out to the baths of Caracallus, even managing to walk to the Appian Way, and then indeed some small distance along it; a restless vade mecum, following other people’s noses, ticking off the guide-books’ five-star attractions on a forced route march. As long as I was planning my budget, carefully calculating where to eat, comparing prices in small restaurants, estimating which place would serve me the cheapest spaghetti, or which pantel-leria could provide me with three huge slices of white-spotted mortadella, I was fully engaged with my quest. Overnight I had changed from spendthrift financial hooligan to a penny-pinching ascetic. I filled my letters with accounts of my cheap meals and careful budgeting. It probably gave me comfort too. By following my parents’ instructions, by living up to their standards. I was still in Epping in my purse.
When I had exhausted my restlessness, I went back to the little room I bad rented near the station. It was a ‘walk-up’ and smelled of cooking. The owner wore a vest. I sat and wrote up my accounts in a tiny room behind a sliding door while television jabber echoed down the marble staircase. In the morning, I pushed through a beaded curtain and ate dry rolls and apricot jam with black coffee at a Formica-topped table and then hurried out to pound on, talking to no one all day, until finally leaving the cats to the dusk around the Trajan’s Forum. One night I went to a concert presented by the British Council in an ornate room full of stacking chairs. It was sparsely attended by earnest pairs of girls in glasses and thin men, leaning demented faces on one hand. In the second half, the musicians got to their feet and plucked randomly at the piano strings through the lifted lid of
the Bechstein. I felt deliciously separate from everybody, so much so that when my school friend Andrew arrived, I actually resented his presence.
So, now in 2005 I have in my hands a plastic-backed exercise book. I would have bought it in a ‘tabacchi’ in Italy. It records everything I did from 1 April until 19 April 1972. Here, at last, is a proper record — a gate, a window into the real obsessions of the eighteen-year-old me.
I have written ‘Griff Rhys Jones’ on the first page (‘Now get out your exercise book and write your name clearly in the front of it’). There were some other vaguely figurative decorations, including bald-headed space-rulers, a female resembling Sandy Denny at a woodland folk meet, and a booted space soldier firing a ray blaster.
Despite the missing first half of the journal, I know that Andrew joined me in Rome. I know I despaired of losing my pensione, until a woman realized my dilemma and took me downstairs to find another, bigger, double room. I know that when Andrew arrived I dutifully tramped round all the ancient sites again and showed them to him as if I owned them. I know that this began to irritate him. I know that we left for Siena for three days before we headed to Florence to start our art course.
Blimey, I was reading Nietzsche, ‘taking it in easy stages because I’m not sure whether it’s deceptively easy or deceptively difficult’. We were always in the library or the pensione reading for a couple of hours before heading off to visit museums and churches. We are behaving like a louche version of Room with a View. We seek out the restaurant recommended by my school friend Douglas Adams. (I was dogging his footsteps.) A meal is described in detail and followed by a short sentence: ‘Was a bit ill in the night.’ I recount the prices of food and the lecture on Raphael (‘very interesting’) and the story of the chair: ‘I sat down rather heavily on a chair.’ (I jumped on it actually. The leg broke off, and the ‘old dame’ made us take it to get it mended amongst the fakers of the old quarter.) ‘We went to see A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum; well, we watched very hard, but we didn’t see that funny thing happen.’ Great. Not only that. By 28 March I am solemnly recording that I had received six letters in one day.
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