More Old News From Jupiter

Still following the story as it happened, my next stop had to be Australia. As idylls go, my idyllic time on the commune in Northern California lasted longer than most, but after almost four months I had to move on. The Sunday Times had engineered a free crossing of the Pacific for me and my bike on the P&O cruise liner SS Oriana. In return I wrote another in the series One Man’s Week (it was 1975: I don’t think they’d got around to One Woman’s Week).

Saturday

The great leap – more than 7000 miles across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Sydney, from winter to summer – begins tonight. It’s hard to grasp the size of the Pacific from the usual maps of the world. Only on a globe does one see it in true perspective and viewed in this way Europe and America seem to huddle quite close together. Friends from the city (now under a grey drizzle) have come to see me off on the SS Oriana. She’s one of the last great ladies of the ocean, a 42,000-ton steamship. I’ve never sailed like this and probably never will again. Not a time for half measures. We have champagne and the biggest streamers I have ever seen. Twelve of us packed into my cabin, laughing and crying, woven together in a cat’s cradle of coloured paper ribbon. When they leave, when I look down from the rail at their last laughing antics on the quayside below, the impending separation is a great hollowness inside me. After saying goodbye almost daily for two years I’ve become a connoisseur of farewells. A shipboard parting, I think, offers the sweetest sorrow of all.

Out of San Francisco at 6pm, under the Golden Gate (actually terra cotta) into a choppy sea. Try to get my own bearing on the ship and fail. She’s vast – an infinite progression of lounges, bars, dance floors and swimming pools. As a favour to help me on my journey P&O have given me a first-class cabin, which suits my taste better than my wardrobe. Now that the Oriana is a one-class ship, the only remaining privilege of we upper class passengers is to dine in the forward restaurant where we enjoy a more discreet atmosphere as well as the Captain’s presence. Ties and jackets, it seems, are de rigeur at dinner. My only jacket is leather, and I haven’t had a tie in more than two years. What am I to do?

Tuesday

It has taken all Sunday and Monday just to explore the ship. For all the sumptuous appointments, peculiar deck games, and opportunities for sloth and gluttony, no attraction is so splendid as the chance to fulfill childhood fantasies. There’s a fragment of some ancient newsreel that lodged itself in my infant memory – the launching of the Queen Mary perhaps. It was at about the same time that I saw the Princess Margaret Rose on her pony and planned to marry her. Anyway there were “socialites” in shining silks and tails popping off champagne corks and betting on horses in mid-Atlantic. The princess, alas, slipped through my fingers, but I shall at least get my mid-ocean horse race with bubbly. The horses (which nobody explained earlier) I now discover to be wooden. The jockeys are women passengers who sit at the wining post and furiously wind in their horses along wooden rails. I have the race card here and I see there are some very old chestnuts running. I shall put 10p on Faux Pas, by Remark out of Place, Mrs M.Polski up, and I shall try to nobble Miss N.Woodberry who is on Short Pants (by Runner out of Breath).

Dinner crisis partly resolved by Australian gentleman kindly insisting that I borrow his tie.

Thursday

I have cheated and skipped a week. We’re now eleven days out of San Francisco. (Last Thursday while I was ashore in Honolulu I went into a bookshop where the owner stared fixedly at my cameras and with virtually no preamble said “A good way to bring in cocaine is to stuff it into cameras. Have you got any in those?” I still wonder who he was working for.)

Today we came alongside at Suva in the Fiji Islands. Greeted by police band in skirts and sandals. I walk around the town and along the coast until it rains. See hardly any Fijians – mostly Asians, as in “Sunderjee’s Chinese Emporium: save more than ever before.” Come to small strip of beach where all the sea shells get up and walk away. Every one had a hermit crab inside. Yesterday never happened. We crossed the Date Line and I had to return all the hours I’ve been borrowing since I left Greenwich two years ago plus another 12 hours deposit as I proceed. So, no Wednesday.

Friday

This ship has two captains, Philip Jackson who wears four gold rings, and John Wacher who wears one very, very broad one. Since one very, very broad one beats four of a kind Wacher is boss and Jackson is deputy. No job I suppose carries greater prestige than captain of a great ocean liner but how one man can combine such wildly different roles puzzles me. Are you Captain Hornblower, or Chairman of the Board, or a Super Redcoat, I ask. He leads me briskly through the mysterious areas of the ship labelled Crew and Officers Only.

His pride in the ship could not have been simulated.

“Look at that!” he kept exclaiming as we rushed down through the bakery, past the master pastry cook, alongside the cauldron where the bone stock simmers for the soups, and further down still to the generators, the distilling plant, the refrigerating plant (all imposing enough, I thought, to drive the ship) and finally the vast boilers spewing steam into the two turbines at 800 lbs per square inch. “If that tube were to burst, we’d be cut in half. The men who worked down here in the war were awfully brave.”

Saturday

Today there is a glorious sun. A ship like this must attract a high proportion of elderly people, concentrated in the more expensive cabins, but there’s a vigorous band of young people on the lower decks. On fine days they burst up through the geriatric crust and overflow the ship. Golden Australian bodies everywhere with white triangles of zinc oxide on their noses. Action centres on the swimming pools, where they throw each other in, race with their left feet held in their right hands, retire for beer, and then repeat.

Hear of a stowaway who has been caught by a simple error. He tried to pay for his continental breakfast. Like the movies, and the tea and biscuits in bed, it’s free. Also hear that somewhere on the ship is a girl riding around the world on a motorcycle. Must track her down.

Sunday

Found her. She isn’t. Maybe I’ll still make the Guinness Book of Records. Arrive in Auckland.

New Zealand is a pretty, green old-fashioned English country. Everybody and everything seems correct, so it astonishes me to see a girl with naked breasts on a busy public beach and nobody appearing to notice, except me. Makes me happy for New Zealand. Not quite so happy with myself.