Reading John Baxter's "A Pound of Paper - Confessions of a Book Addict" - yes, it was the byline that sucked me in! - I came across a passage in which he described his trip from Sydney to London on board the 'Patris', the same ship I boarded in late 1967 to return to the (c)old country:
"Our boat was the old 'SS America', now refurbished and renamed the 'Patris' by a Greek company that subdivided the once-spacious cabins, the better to squeeze in more passengers. Clive James came across on such a boat, and has movingly described in his book, 'Unreliable Memoirs', the experience of sharing a cabin with six rugby players and the crankshaft."
Fast-forward to Clive James' 'Unreliable Memoirs', of which I have two copies in my library - one paperback, the other hardcover - and which I had last read many years ago during my Clive-James phase:
"The ship sailed on New Year's Eve of 1961. She was called the 'Bretagne' - an ex-French 29,000-ton liner now flying Greek colours. The point of departure was the new international terminal at Circular Quay ... The voyage was too tedious to be described in detail ... the sense of adventure was nullified by the living conditions on the ship. Even a luxury liver is really just a bad play surrounded by water. It is a means of inducing hatred for your fellow men by trapping you in a confined space with too few of them to provide variety and too many to allow solitude. The 'Bretagne' was all that and less. Every acceptable girl on the ship was being laid by a crew member before the ship was out of the Heads. This was a replacement crew who had all been flown out from the Persian Gulf. The previous crew had walked off the ship at Melbourne after one of the officers had shot an albatross."
There's nothing better than Clive James' inimitable prose to describe what I experienced only six years later, so I won't even try to imitate him but simply continue to quote from the book which was published in 1980 but is still available from any good second-hand bookshop:
"With my two footballing companions I inhabited a phone-booth-sized cabinette on Deck Z, many feet below the water line. One wall was curved. It was part of the propeller shaft housing. If one of us wanted to get dressed the other two had to go back to bed. After we cleared the Barrier Reef we ran into a gale and spent a day heeled over at about twenty degrees from the vertical. One of the footballers chucked into the washbasin. The contents of his stomach, which had included two helpings of rhubarb crumble and custard, congealed in the basin. When the ship righted itself the surface of the solidified chunder remained at an angle, not to be removed until we docked in Singapore."
Having spent all the money he had at Singapore's Raffles, he continued:
"At reduced speed the ship limped across the Indian Ocean. The Greek entertainments officer entertained us by organising Greek dancing displays, in which the prettier girl passengers showed us the skills they had learned from the crew during the day. The skills they had learned from the crew during the night we were left to imagine. Greek dancing consists of a man holding up a handkerchief, striking a masculine attitude, and performing some extremely boring steps until a girl grabs hold of the other end of the handkerchief and performs some steps even more boring than his. Then a lot of other girls hold hands with each other and perform some steps which make everything you have previously seen look comparatively exciting. I would much rather have done lifeboat drill, but all the lifeboats had long ago been painted into position so that not even dynamite could possibly have released them. This was an additional factor to be considered when you tried to imagine - or rather tried not to imagine - the number of sharks who were following in our wake, passionate for leftover baklava.'
"For some reason the swimming pool, just when we needed it, was emptied, never to be filled again with anything except beer cans thrown into it by the circles of formation drinkers who sat cross-legged on the deck chanting 'Who took the cookie from the cookie jar?' Then the ship stopped altogether. The temperature was roughly that of the surface of the sun, which didn't look very far away. Praying for release at the ship's rail, I watched a turtle go past on its way to the Red Seea. That was where we were supposed to be going, but we weren't. That night, as every other night, the film was 'The Naked Jungle', in which Charlton Heston and Eleabor Parker battle the killer ants of South America. The next day there was Greek dancing. The day after that, the ship moved."
Aboard the 'Patris' six years later, I never stopped at Aden nor did I transit the Suez Canal which makes the next bit even more interesting:
"Aden was a revelation. Until then my belief in God's indifference had been theoretical. In the Crater of Aden there were things on show that might have made Christ throw in the towel. Certainly there were wounds he would not have kissed. Beggars whose faces had been licked off by camels proffered children whose bones had been deliberately broken at birth. Catatonic with shock, the passengers of the good ship 'Bretagne' bought transistor radios and binoculars. With the radios they could drown out the hum of flies and with the binoculars they could look somewhere else."
"The Suez Canal still featured some wrecks from 1956. Lacking the cash to join an expedition to Cairo, I stayed on the ship as it crawled through to Port Said. Nasser's MIGS went by, up above the heat. I was down inside it. Port Said was like Coles or Woolworths, without the variety. Three products were on sale, all of them cranked out by a factory on the edge of town. They sold fake leather whips, fake leather wallets and fake leather television pouffes. The fake leather was made of compressed paper. The passengers of the 'Bretagne' emptied the shops, which filled up again just behind them. Nasser's police were omnipresent, making sure nobody got hurt. Nobody was going to interfere with you as you purchased the wherewithals for whipping yourself and counting your money while watching television. You were safer than in St. Mary's Cathedral. The only danger was of being driven mad by Nasser's charismatic gaze. His portrait was everywhere."
I missed out on all this during my passage at the end of 1967 because of the Six-Day War which, despite the shortness of the war, kept the canal closed until June 1975. Instead, I sailed via Cape Town and Gibraltar to Piraeus which is where Clive James had also ended up six years earlier:
"... we did have half a day in Athens. On the Acropolis I watched one of my compatriots carve his name into the Parthenon and heard another ask where the camels were. The girl passengers raced into town to buy hats with pom-poms and handkerchiefs for Greek dancing. But I felt no less ignorant than my compatriots. The stone drapery on the caryatids seemed to give off its own illumination, as if the bright sun penetrated the surface before being reflected. It infuriated me that I couldn't read the inscriptions. Their clear, clean look only increased my suspicion that the real secrets of the tragedies and the Platonic dialogues, which I had thought I knew something about, lay in the sound of the language, and that until I could read that I would know nothing. I was right about that, but confirmation lay far in the future."
And little did I know when I landed at the Greek port of Piraeus in late December 1967 that sixteen years later I would live and work there, and that I would look down from my office window on all those ships that had brought Clive James and me there all those years ago - click here.
All those memories came flooding back to me as I read 'Unreliable Memoirs'. You do have a way with words, Clive James, don't you?
