THE VOYAGE HOME
By D. W. BROGAN
WITH the exception of three dreary weeks in a convoy, all my journeys to and from America since the war have been made by air. So the decision to return by one of the ' Queens ' instead of flying back, stirred my expectations. How would I take the comparative slowness? To cross in the old days in the 'Queen Mary' or the Normandie ' in less than five days had seemed nearly miraculous, but after being used to being in England one day and the United States the next, might it not be trying for a very impatient,' experienced and incompetent traveller?
Well, expectation was deceived. I learned, from the moment that I saw the bulk of the 'Queen Mary' rising above Pier 90, that I belong to the pre-air age. They may call their planes "ships," but this was a real ship. I could remember her well and I can't remem- ber the name of any plane I have ever. flown in. And this obsolete attitude was shared by the public which was not travelling at all. The taxi-man who took my baggage to the pier, the idlers under the elevated road, all felt that the sailing of a great ship was an event, was news, not merely an occurrence like the departure of a plane. The press shares this view. Ship news is again printable, and the old routine, endlessly repeated but not yet a merely boring ritual, the announcement that the 'Queen Mary' was sailing with 500 pas- sengers, was being carried out with gusto. It was a sign that some- thing of the old world had survived. But that there were less than 500 passengers was one sign of only partial normality ; the other was that on the westward voyage she had carried 15,000.
For the 'Queens,' classified too hastily as white elephants, have played a great role in this war, transporting whole divisions at a time, ferrying to Europe a considerable part of the armies that broke through the Atlantic and the West Walls. Now they are pouring back into an almost hysterically welcoming American society, the young veterans of the great campaign. To accomplish this feat, ;t has been necessary to gut the great ships in a way that must have made their designers wince. Almost all of the public rooms have been turned into vast dormitories, packed with tiers of wire beds. Most of the old private cabins have been fitted with three wire beds in place of one bed and stripped to the lowest austerity level. (I had a cabin to myself and a private bathroom but no chair.) The organisation of the mass transport taxes all types of ingenuity and some types of endurance. In bad weather with bad sailors, there must have been a good deal of the Black Hole about the dormitories. Only two meals a day were served and the deck space (proportion- ately less than in older and smaller ships like the Aquitania ') must have been terribly inadequate. But in war the ships moved at their highest speed, so that the ordeal was brief and now, at any rate, the human sardines have the satisfaction of knowing that they are being rushed home.
We were not rushed home Dollars are now about as precious
as rubies and no attempt was made to use our maximum speed on the eastward voyage. So the 'Queen Mary' did the trip in six days, she who held—and holds—the blue ribbon of the Atlantic! One agreeable consequence of this (plus fantastically perfect weather) was that the vibration which used to distress the sensitive passenger in the old record-breaking days, was not perceptible. Indeed, from the promenade or sun decks, at times it was hard to believe that we were moving at all ; at fifteen knots we slid over the languid and balmy North Atlantic in a type of weather that I had never known on that normally cold and disagreeable piece of water, even in July.
Most of the passengers were people with official or public functions. There were some children returning with their parents to an England that either they had never really known or that had grown very different from the England of 1939 or the America of 1945. There were other passengers not much better prepared for what they were coming to. There was the Austrian, naturalised American, continually asking questions about the conditions of life in England, and finding it hard to grasp that our rationing, our shortages were not the result of planning it that way, not the expression of a national asceticism or peevishness, but the results of necessity, of a condition of impoverishment that we had come to take for granted even though we did not welcome it. At the same table was a Belgian with experience of four years of German occupation, and his ironical eyebrows were at the end almost overworked.
With only one public room, the old first-class theatre, it was easy to spot all the passengers, or so one thought. Some of the official missions, the American team for the war crimes trials, for instance, had means of working in their rooms, but the rest of us had to write or read there if we wanted to do either. The theatre-cinema had preserved all of its old chocolate and gold decor, a composition to which only Mr. Osbert Lancaster could do justice. The only innovation was the chairs, designed for church or lecture hall to make sure that the congregation or audience at least stayed awake. I don't know where the Cunard got these atrocities, but they should be scrapped or used for recognised disciplinary purposes. There were bridge-games, but the standard was low (so I am told), and so were the stakes. The international card-sharpers, about whom one used tct be warned, have apparently not returned to their labours yet.
But it was in the afternoon and after dinner that the " lounge " played its great role. For then we had the movies. Films at sea have always baffled me. I used to think that there was some special factory where the film equivalent of trade gin was manufac- tured for ship use. I gathered that some films on the edge of this classification were shown, but most of them were standard, if a little ancient Grade A films. But the high-water mark was the first show- ing of a brand new film being hurried over to London to slake the thirst of an eager public. There is no point in naming or describ- ing this expensive effort in glorious technicolor. It will soon be loosed on the public, and I await with special interest the comments of Miss Dilys Powell. There was a division of opinion afterwards ; one school (to which I belong) held that it was the worst film ever made ; a more moderate party held that it was merely one of the worst. A small pessimistic group held that it was the worst' ever made, and that the British public would like it. This, I firmly trust, will prove untrue.
We had a meagre news bulletin and a noisy and largely unin- telligible radio, so we got behind on world news. I did see, however, one of the two great inventions of this war (the other being the atomic bomb), the new miraculous fountain pen invented in the Argentine by a Hungarian refugee, and about to be made here (I am told) by a British plane manufacturer. Since I am not in the adver- tising business, I can only say that I coveted it in a most sinful fashion.
Saturday night came, and then suddenly there were lights ; it was Cornwall. Landfall at night is always dramatic, but to realise that those lights had been extinguished for nearly six years, and that the Channel had been barred to shipping for four, gave homecoming a new poignancy. It was over. One forgot the wire beds, the non- existent chairs, the existent chairs, even the pathetic spectacle of the stewards reduced to serving nothing but coca-cola and lemonade, "Heureux qui comme Ulysse ont fait un beau voyage." The day of the ship is not over, and the Cunard may earn us dollars vet.
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