Sunshine, storms, singing and sex at sea: 1973-4-5

 

There is a vague chance that my family history and its papers and photos may be 'accessed' into the archive of the NZ National Library. So I have been sorting out the 25 volumes of international photo albums and diaries ... and my ancient letters and scrapbooks ... and finding all sorts of forgotten things.

Some, should, perhaps, not really be preserved for posterity. 

But why not ...

In the early 1970s, due to a combination of circumstances, I went to sea on the beautiful SS Northern Star, as an entertainer. The couple of seaborne years that followed were some of the most enjoyable years of my young life. I was seasick before the ship left Portsmouth, bonked the purser on Night One, and lived in a cabin in the bowels of the ship (no window) with Andy Betts and 'Polly' Pullman, where I had a curtain installed for privacy, just occasionally needed when a gentleman caller came by ... sang to my heart's content, saw the world and got paid (although not very much!) for it ...

Season two, we had (alas!) a different purser, a very, very much more accomplished company of performers, and, since our shows had become a Feature of the Shaw Saville line cruises, much better accomodation. A beautiful young lead soprano from the Guildhall, dancers from the Royal Ballet School et al, and performers from J C Williamson shows, me from NZ Opera and a brilliant baritone, Glanville Evans, from Welsh Wales, with whom I shared a cabin (with a porthole!), and of whom I was truly very fond. Hearing him sing 'The Olive Tree' was a West-End-worthy treat. He was the best cabin-mate I could have wished for. He later became an agent in his native Wales, and I, by that time a caster, tried to give his clients every chance.

Oh. And I was introduced to the joys of heterosexuality. Well, Daddy wasn't around, this time, to say 'not till you're married!' Enter my life, Alison Temple Savage.    Oh Lord. The moustache! My attempts to look older. I was 27-8, playing age 19. Ali was 20. 

Anyway, we all became a glorious group of comrades ... and lived on and off ship-life to the full ...  but sometimes, when I wasn't bullying beefy Aussie footballers into fitness and suppleness with a mixture of Dad's gymnastic exercises and ballet training, or rehearsing (every afternoon), or performing (twice nightly)  ... I gave in to my old habit of writing.  Occasional doggerel. 

Every new cruise began with The Captain's Cocktail Party. Or several. I suppose the invitees were the payingest customers. But we, the 'Entertainers', were the decoration. How surprised some trippers were to find that they were talking to an MA (Hons) classics graduate!  Anyway, one evening, after a particularly naff Cocktail do, Ali and I went downstairs and I penned this doggerel for our amusement ...

Oh damn Blogger ... 

We all had a good giggle and the other girls said 'oh! do one for me', so I did. And somehow they've (or some of them) survived ... 

This was for the lovely Sarah Lowe of talents worthy of ... but, hey, why were we all working on a cruise liner ...?

Why won't this bloody thing revolve?  (Apparently if you swipe them to desktop they can be put right way up).

OK. I, as I have said, took the men's fitness class (Ali took the rather less strenuous women's equivalent). 9 am upper deck. Make the overweight, non-agile footy players SWEAT for six weeks!  (They had their revenge, I was chucked in the ship's pool). And downstairs, our lead dancer, Barry Collins, and the delicious Joan Golden, took the 'Brush up your dancing' class ...  the poor, poor dears!  But it was in the contract!

Then there was our Linda.  2nd soprano, 2nd danseuse, but she teamed up with the ?3rd officer, known to us as 'the gorgeous Geoffrey'. I'm sure she did better later, and is now the luxurious Mrs Linda  *** somewhere in England ...

I don't know if I wrote any more. 1974 is a long time ago. Dang it! Half a century!!!!

But this one is with them.  This must have been a 'commission' because it doesn't sound like me .. maybe an aria for Alf Garnett the musical?

I don't think there was a no2 Songs for Today. But I wonder who asked for this!

Oh, Lord, what else will I find. 

Photos. Not many. I didn't have a camera. 

This one, of course ... Hawaiian Night. Something for everyone ....

Me and my muses: Sarah, Joan and Linda

Ah! This day. I remember this day. Dave Wootton, 2nd or 3rd engineer, 'borrowed' a life boat and ?rowed Ali and I to a desert islet ... beautiful day ... silly fun and photos ... there was a wonderful one of me on Dave's shoulders, while he clutched a pirate knife in his teeth. Ali promised to make me a copy but, alas, it never happened ... We discovered an abandoned hut, scrumped mangoes from somebody's trees ...

The photo is fading, but the memory never will, as long as I'm alive. Unless Dave (last spotted in Hobart!) is still of this world ... Ali is long, long gone ...  (PS I'm told Dave is departed. I wonder if he ever regretted ultimately chickening out of our 'threesome')

Huh! This one. 'Look dramatic', cried the photographer. Ali and I put on our best radeau de Méduse poses .. the rest just gawked, so I've cut them off

And here we are at the Acropolis ... a slightly boozy night out with a delightful Greek javelin thrower ... I see he signed the back of the photo 'To a very good friend, love' .. I think it was (oh my Greek!) was it Georgios? ... xx

We were having such a good time, that we nearly missed boarding time and, not for the only time, had to leap across the gap to a quivering Piraeus gangplank!

Here we are at the place of my birth. Wellington, NZ. Mount Victoria. It was a childhood treat to be taken up to 'the trig' and 'the gun' at the top. When the ship stopped at Wellington we visited nana Rudi and grandfather Welsh (Mum and Dad were in Europe!) and were taken up to 'the gun' for the familiar view and this photograph ... 

Ah! I knew I wouldn't have lost these. 

'Merci pour l'après-midi d'un faun' she wrote on it ... well, it was a bit like that, I suppose. Chuckle. Quite a long afternoon.

Yes. Like many other men, the photographer was in love/lust with her. But they weren't satyrical sprites of the forest and waves, so ... 

This wasn't meant to be paean to Ali. But ... she was such a memorable episode in my life ....

Oh look! Malaga. 

Fancy my keeping that. Another of our adventures ..

When we hit a port, if there was anything around to climb (while the others souvenired and coffeed) we climbed it. I remember Pico do Arriero in Madeira. We spent the night on top of the Pico in the hay loft of a hut. In New Zealand you just turn up at an Alpine Club Hut: you don't have to book. The next morning we headed down the other side. Wrong. It is much easier but much longer on that side. Sailing time was approaching. A priest passed by and I hailed him. He spoke only Portuguese and I was, alas, only up to chapter 2 of Teach Yourself Portuguese. Bright idea! I tried Latin. It worked. Predicament explained, the holy man flagged down the next truck driver and told him to take us to the ship. I'm sure my thanks were much less appreciated than the kiss Ali planted on his cheek!

But to get back to Malaga. Malaga had a nice green hill above the bull-ring so ... nice leafy path ... what's that in the bushes? I scrambled down. A handbag. We looked inside ... OK, it had clearly been snatched, the money stolen, and the bag chucked into the shrubbery. But there were passports .. We scrambled down again, and found the local police station. The Spanish Garda speak French and English. Hurrah! So we handed in the bag and thought no more of it. Until a few weeks later a parcel arrived at the ship for us. Delicious German cakes and a letter of thanks.

Ah me. In our long afternoon as a couple, we had so many memorable episodes together. Then we went ashore. Our beautiful ship was going to Taiwan to be turned into teaspoons. Well, her left boiler had spat the dummy in the middle of the Mediterranean. That was a fun time!  We bobbed around, and Barry and I, who had become an amazingly proficient bridge pair, amused the remaining passengers with long evenings of cards ..

Back iin Britain, I went into Hans Andersen at the Palladium, Ali into Kismet at the Shaftesbury and Hay Fever at the Haymarket ... and the end of the afternoon had arrived. I moved in with the older man who would be my partner for the next 30 plus years, Ali made an attempt to find another Faun, but then tragedy struck. 'I keep falling over'. I knew. Multiple Sclerosis.

She sent me this photo ... I have later ones, but by then she was strapped in a wheel chair, lifted in and out of bed by a hoist ... the writing on this is already almost illegible .. 'me now in a chair lift ....'

Still as beautiful as ever. We flew her to St Paul de Vence with a nurse to stay with us ... alas, she developed an infection and the visit was not what it might have been ...

It was the last time I saw her. She had lived on 'happy pills' for twenty years .. if you call that living. I think her memories of our time together were as special to her as they still are to me ...

I know. An afternoon cannot go on eternally... but I never tried to repeat my glorious bout of heterosexuality. I knew I would be constantly comparing ... and nothing and no one could ever come up to Ali. I tried to repeat the ship experience. Our (reduced) company was hired for the Queen Elizabeth II. Horrid. No atmosphere, no stage, no keep-fit class, no porthole and no companionship apart from my dear friends from the Star. Barry and Rosie. No Ali. Plastic where the Star had been wood-panelled ... 

QE2. Kurt, Rosemary (sop) and her husband, by now, Barry Collins.

 The 'reduced' company. 

Ali would have been 70 last 8 October, had she lived. We played a game once, snuggled up in my top bunk (with the three other bunks in the cabin occupied!), childishly ticking off our past bedmates (very few!!) and saying what we thought the other would be doing at age 70. I remember she was quite indignant when I saw her as one of those ballet mistresses with a pole, rapping out the time ... she sweetly said she saw me rich and famous. I was wrong, of course. She was kind of right, if the 'r' and the 'f' are lower case.

Well, amazing what thoughts a bit of ephemera can bring on. 

The cathedral in Malta, where ladies had to have head covering and men not-nude legs. Ali whipped off her wrap-around skirt, I put it on. I handed her my foulard, she made a head-scarf of it ... and in we went ...

Hawaii, where we visited a dance hall-cum-bar. The locals cheered us into a solo performance, They didn't know Ali was Royal Ballet School. And that I, in spite of her patient coaching, the worst dancer in the world. But I was young, slim, uninhibited and I could wriggle like a wraith, and that seemed to go down a treat!

The castle in Lisbon with the white peacocks, where a lurking laddie tried to leap on Ali. The day she trod on a sea urchin (the last spine came out a month later) ...

Then, there was the episode of the Diary. Ali kept a very large, very green, very personal, very frank, very detailed Diary. No one was allowed to read it, not even I, who featured in it largely. 'I'll leave it to you in my will' she joked. (She didn't). It had to happen. One day she left the volume on deck. It was found by the Gorgeous Geoffrey who kindly, fairly quickly, returned it. But he'd clearly had a dip. He ever said anything, but therafter he looked at me shall we say 'respectfully'. I think I may have had good reviews!

There are more tales ... oh, so many more tales ... adventures ... maybe I shall paste them in, if I can catch them in my net as they flutter by the open window in my mind's eye ...

And maybe they don't need to be enshrined in the National Library! And maybe they do .. :-)