When I was ten years old, I embarked upon a grand adventure with my parents and my brother David. A trip abroad was usually only something that the rich and famous did—and our family was neither rich nor famous—but my father, who had been working for the Anglo Vaal mining company for a number of years, became eligible to take what was termed “long leave". In those days, long leave was an extended period of leave which lasted four consecutive months—something that was relatively normal for senior employees back then, but completely unheard of today. My parents decided that we were going to travel from South Africa to England to meet some of my father’s many relations.
The trip was planned for the middle of our school year, in May 1957, with my parents wanting to pick up the European summer. Before we could set sail, my parents had to approach our school to inquire whether it would be possible for us to miss four months of school. They scheduled a meeting with our headmaster, Mr RB Green—I remember his name because we used to see his signature at the foot of our dreaded report cards—and our teacher, Miss Smiley. Duly consulted by my persuasive parents and with much clicking of tongues, they agreed to allow us to go, the one proviso being that we were required to do at least one hour of homework every day for the duration of the trip. Upon hearing this news, David and I decided that we would wear our parents down and that the homework idea would be a short-lived experience, but we agreed that we would engage in that one hour of torture a day.
We travelled to England on a ship called the Sterling Castle RMMW (Royal Mail Motor Vessel) and returned to South Africa on the Carnarvon Castle. Both were steamships with multiple smokestacks—three of them, if I remember correctly—that belched either black smoke or white steam, depending on what was powering the ship at the time. These ships were from the Union Castle line, a line of ships that had been used during the war effort a little over a decade earlier. Many of these ships had been used as troop carriers, made evident by the scars of war having not been completely repaired. I distinctly remember that the Sterling Castle was not a troop carrier, whereas the Carnarvon Castle most certainly was.
There being no air conditioning available back in the days when the landed gentry from England went out to the colonies—and to India in particular—they would choose the cabin that faced the port because those cabins were always cooler.
While on the ship, we were given a tour of the engine room and I will always remember the constant thump, thump, thump of the powerful piston-driven engines. As young, curious boys, David and I took great pleasure trying to remember all the specs of the ship—the length, the beam, the number of passengers, and so on, although David always seemed to recall these facts far faster than I did when the information was called upon.
The Sterling Castle sailed from Cape Town and up the west coast of Africa to Southampton, stopping at the Portuguese island of Las Palmas on the way there, and the Portuguese island of Madeira, another island in that particular chain of Portuguese islands, on the way back, each trip taking approximately fourteen days. I was never quite sure why these stop-offs were necessary, but I can only imagine that they were possibly for fresh water and produce, since Las Palmas and Madeira were both well known for their abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables. As an aside, I learned that during the 1940s, many people from the island of Madeira left Portugal to begin new lives in South Africa, and that it is from this island that most South African Portuguese people originated.
Three pieces of valuable information we were given by experienced traveller friends of my father were that upon boarding the ship, we should find the cabin steward, the bath steward, and the dining room steward. Having swiftly located the cabin steward, we were taken down a myriad of intricate corridors and passages to our rooms where we would sleep for the duration of the trip. With every activity on the ship being highly-regulated, especially meal times, my parents knew that if they could quickly locate our dining room steward, they could book a first sitting—an early dinner meaning an early bedtime for the children. My parents’ plans to have us tucked up in bed at a respectable hour were short-lived, however, because as soon as we were finished with dinner, we would be let loose on the ship, heading off to find our friends and disappearing for hours at a time.
Next up was the bath steward. In order to make sure that the children were clean for the following day, my parents need to book a bath appointment. The bath steward wore a pair of white trousers and a white t-shirt, and his arms were covered in tattoos. Being cooped up in a steamy room all day did nothing for his body odour, and I remember David and me referring to him as “Smelly". Thankfully he never heard us repeating his nickname, or we would have undoubtedly been in for it. Being late for bath time was not advisable, especially with Smelly in charge—if we were more than five minutes late, we would lose our bath time appointment. Because of this, my parents did their damnedest to make sure that we were never late, and we did our damnedest to make sure that we were always late.
Bath time was a horrible experience because we had to be dragged away from our friends and the games on the boat in order to perform this cleansing ritual, much to the amusement of our friends who did not have to suffer a similar bathing routine. Being unable to carry sufficient fresh water for all the passengers (other than first-class) bathing, for the tourist class, was in salt water. This was quite a new experience for us—regular soap would not lather, so special saltwater soap was used. This soap left a film on our skin that we never quite got used to.
The routine for the first day or two was that we would bath and get dressed into our pyjamas, although the thought of returning to play with your friends up on deck and the sun still high in the sky while dressed in our pyjamas was mortifying. I think our protestations became loud enough that my parents soon agreed that pyjamas would be reserved for the cabin only.
I do not remember how many people were on the ship with us, but I do remember that all our luggage was marked with a large label denoting the first letter of our surname. There being no space in the cabins for our luggage, our suitcases were duly marked with a large “F" and placed in a luggage hold. If we needed to remove anything from our suitcases during the voyage— since we would not unpack everything we needed for the holiday at once—we would head down to the luggage hold, find our suitcase amongst the melee of other suitcases, and retrieve what was required.
In an attempt to stick to the agreement with Mr Green and Miss Smiley, the unpopular homework pastime would be taken at the quiet time after lunch, between two o’clock and four o’clock. During this time, children were not permitted to run around on the boat because the passengers, many of them elderly, wanted to have an afternoon nap. The ship’s swimming pool was filled with salt water sucked up from the sea, and we had great fun watching it being emptied around midday to prevent us from being tempted to swim in it until it was refilled a few hours later. It was with the discovery of the simple pleasures of an empty swimming that our homework routine literally went overboard. The filling and emptying of the swimming pool happened quite quickly because the pipes doing the job were rather large. We noticed that the sand that had been sucked up with the seawater was left to dry at the bottom of the swimming pool and, within an hour or two, it would be as dry as the sand on the beach. Being the little shits that we were, we would go down and collect this dry sand, knowing that there had to be some use for it.
The ship’s rudimentary air conditioning system was an ingenious feat of engineering: as the ship moved forward, the cooler air from outside would be forced into forward-facing ducts on deck, moving down into the cabins below. Above each bunk in the cabins was a little air vent that could be turned on and off and directed onto, or away, from you. These vents were, of course, connected to the external funnels. Having collected the dry sand from the bottom of the swimming pool, we would stand at the entrance to one of these funnels and toss the sand inside, knowing full well what would happen. The sand would travel through the air conditioning system and land on the face of some unfortunate victim lying on their bunk, fast asleep with their mouth wide open. Either that, or it would fill the cabin with sand, much to the annoyance of the person inside.
Having gotten away with this for a number of days, the captain, after receiving numerous complaints, issued a general order—a general order being one that everybody was required to take heed of—that whoever was throwing sand into the vents should stop immediately, or face stern action. Unsure of what this stern action might entail, we figured it probably meant being thrown overboard (or something of that nature) and we stopped our antics immediately.
Making new friends on board the ship was difficult in the beginning—especially with the girls—firstly because I was not a particularly sociable child, and secondly, because David and I attended an all-boys school where there was no contact with the fairer sex at all. Because there were so many girls on board, my father, who fancied himself something of a lady’s man, decided that this would be the perfect opportunity for us young boys to make friends across boy-girl lines. With David refusing point blank to be pulled into this situation, my father decided that it was me who would be schooled into his crash course in making friends with girls.
I decided that I wanted to make friends with the pretty girls, although I am sure that my perception of prettiness changed somewhat from then until now, but I do remember having my eye on a particular girl by the name of Solvé Yurel, who was part of a group of four or five other children. At ten years old, and under my father’s tutelage, this was a done deal. With my newfound boldness, I decided that the following day would be the day that I would capture her heart, and I would do it with sweets. According to my father, anything could be bought with sweets—sweets being part of his daily routine. He gave me some of his sweets, and we wrapped them in a little piece of brown paper—there wasn’t anything like plastic and cellophane in those days. The plan was that I would walk up to Solvé and her friends while they were looking over the deck and into the sea and say, “Hello, my name is Bruce. Would you like a sweet?" My father assured me that this would be the icebreaker that would win the heart of this young woman and that we would remain friends for the duration of the trip. I don’t remember the initial reaction to my little speech, but I do remember making friends with her and becoming part of her group of friends for the remainder of the trip.
There were several traditional events that took place on the ship as it ploughed through the deep seas, one of them being The Captain’s Dinner. Seen as quite a privilege, an arbitrary adult would be chosen from amongst the passengers to sit at the captain’s table for dinner. Heaven only knows why my mother was chosen, but my father was unashamedly proud that his lady had been selected from all the passengers on the ship to rub shoulders with this four-stripe naval man. For my mother, this was undoubtedly her magical moment on the ship.
There were a number of competitions on the ship, one of them being the children’s fancy dress, which took place on the return trip to South Africa. There was nothing I hated more than a fancy dress, being at the behest of my mother who had the strangest ideas at the best of times. Having been unable to come up with any ideas of my own, my mother decided that I would go as “The Captain’s Souvenirs". My clothes for the duration of the trip were short khaki pants with my boy scout belt (even though I was never a boy scout) and a short khaki shirt—my stock and trade wardrobe always and the kind of clothes that children from Africa wore. Because my mother knew that we were going to be involved in events like this, she had packed in a set of short white pants and short-sleeved white shirts. The white shirt and pants were chosen as the basis for the dress-up and, pinned to my shirt and pants, were all manner of little souvenirs that we had collected on the boat and on the trip. I was chosen by one of the family members—and I cannot for the life of me remember who—to collect little dolls in their national dress. Can you imagine a little ten-year-old boy collecting little dolls in their national dress? I remember there was a sailor, a man in a Highland uniform, a person in Holland’s dress wearing clogs, someone from Luxembourg with lace all over them, and so it went on. These national dolls were duly pinned to my outfit. My mother then got hold of a paper plate, and placed it on top of my head with a piece of elastic, almost like we would do with a headlamp nowadays. On the front of this paper plate, written in multi-coloured letters, was “The Captain’s Souvenirs". Can you imagine a parent doing this to a child? It smacks of child abuse!
I don’t think that I was old enough to realise how ridiculous this all was, but my mother (and everybody else who saw me that day) thought that it was quite a cool idea. With the adults applauding and their hapless offspring sneering, I joined my comrades up on deck. I’m not sure whether the other mothers were lacking in ideas, but, much to my surprise, I was placed in the first three. I cannot remember which place I took in this humiliating experience, but I do remember that at the end of the judging period the prize winners were made to stand on a three-level podium for a photograph with the captain of the ship.
When we arrived in Madeira, the ship, being unable to enter shallow water, was anchored a little way away out in the harbour for several hours. No sooner had the anchor dropped than myriads of little boats began making their way out to the ship, filled with local people selling their wares. Pulling up to the side of the ship, they would throw a light rope with a weighted string onto the deck, which would be fastened to the side rail by some of the passengers. They would then hold their wares up from their little boats, waiting for a passenger to vigorously nod when they saw something they liked. This item—an embroidered tablecloth or placemat, a doll, or perhaps a pair of shoes—would be placed in a basket and pulleyed up on the rope and onto the railing, after which the negotiations would begin. Negotiating was fair game, and you would say, “No, no, no, far too much," and they would drop their price, and eventually, the price agreed on, money would be placed in the basket, and it would be pulleyed back down. The trader would say thank you graciously and then show the passenger another item. I remember watching the other ships in the harbour, each of them surrounded this interesting bevvy of traders in their little boats, their little ropes going up and down the sides of these gigantic machines of the sea.
We arrived in England two weeks after having set sail from South Africa. My parents had pre-ordered a little Ford Prefect before we left South Africa to transport us around England, and it was waiting for us when we arrived. We collected Uncle Morris who was to accompany us on our travels, and the five of us set out to meet our different relations throughout England. With the car being a four-seater, I spent the drives perched over the handbrake on a cushion, with Dad driving, Uncle Morris in the front seat, and Mum and David in the back. Over the course of this two month period of driving around, we managed to meet fifty-three different family members.
Most children wore short pants up until the age of thirteen, but once a child turned thirteen, they were seen to have “arrived", and were allowed to wear long pants. It seems strange to imagine that we would only wear our first long pants at this age, but that is how things were done in those days. David, having turned thirteen shortly after our arrival in England, was duly taken off to a shop in London to purchase his very first pair of long pants. I remember a few shops that impressed me when we first arrived in London, one of them being Hamley’s—a complete paradise for any child. We purchased numerous toys that we had never seen before and were unlikely to see again and, although I don’t remember exactly what I bought, I do remember thinking that they were marvels of scientific creation.
Towards the end of the trip, we spent about a month on a bus tour visiting various parts of Europe with a group of other people of different nationalities. I still remember the countries we visited because when you're a child, you remember these kinds of things—the countries being Italy, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, England, Scotland and Wales.
After many adventurous months of visiting family members all across England, it was time to board the Carnarvon Castle for our passage home. When leaving the harbour, the tradition was that all the passengers up on deck would throw streamers down to the people on the quayside. It was exhilarating to see all these ships with hundreds of multi-coloured streamers pulling out of the harbour. As the ship moved further away from the quay, the streamers would stretch and become tighter and tighter until eventually, they would snap, and we would lose our contact with the shore. This was always a poignant moment for the passengers, and I was reminded of the beautiful song by Vera Lynn, the darling of the forces in the Second World War, “We’ll meet again".