It was the winter of the Great Freeze, and our train from Liverpool to London kept having to stop for long periods in order that snow could be removed from the line. I seem to recall that we had a whole compartment to ourselves, but other than that, and the repeated delays, I have no distinct memories of the journey. However, I can imagine my mum – to my dad’s thinly concealed disgruntlement – smoking incessantly in order to camouflage the intense feelings of uncertainty, anxiety and malaise with which must have been battling as she allowed herself to be peremptorily extricated from the only home she had known in twenty-eight years.
My dad, who had religion for his solace, and whose behaviour and conversation were invariably rooted in a very stark but narrow framework of moral certainty, would have suffered no such feelings of uneasiness. In all likelihood, he would have devoted considerable time to enlightening me about various aspects of our journey, as well as about the train on which we were travelling. Since his word was never to be doubted or questioned, I would have listened with genuine curiosity and interest, consigning to my short term memory arcane details of steam engine design, the names of the home grounds occupied by football teams in the towns and cities through which we passed, and other matters, probably of dubious validity, long since forgotten.
The fourth member of our party was my sister, Barbara. Despite still having a couple of months to go before her third birthday (making her almost four years younger than me) she had already begun to exhibit considerable independence of mind by steadfastly refusing to don the warped moral strait-jacket proffered with such disingenuous conviction by my dad. Despite his best attempts to get her to contort herself into the right shape to wriggle into it, she had made it clear that she preferred clothing of a less confining nature. At the time, I regarded her attitude as exemplifying the same kind of wanton self-regard that my dad had tacitly helped me to discern in my mum. Before too long, however, I would be envious of what I would begin to see as her superior sense of selfhood.
We spent the night in a warm, garishly colourful London hotel. In the morning, we sat all sat together at a table and ate breakfast, which was brought to us by servants who called my dad ‘sir’ and my mum ‘madam’. It was as if we were rich. Once breakfast was finished, we packed our things and caught the boat train to Tilbury.
My chief recollection of the three week voyage to Australia aboard the SS Stratheden is of almost continual, vibrantly iridescent sunlight. Even the Bay of Biscay, built up in my imagination from my dad’s words of foreboding as a likely place of shipwreck, was traversed with ease, beneath a sky of ardently omnipresent blue.
Whilst aboard the Stratheden I tasted cucumber and spinach for the first time, played quoits with my dad and Barbara, and splashed about in the shallow end of the ship’s swimming pool.
We stopped briefly at Port Said, Aden and Colombo. At Colombo I got off the ship for the first time since Tilbury, and we spent an entire afternoon meandering around the multi-coloured city streets, being almost deafened by a cacophony of human voices – hawkers, traders, the almost incessant exchange of greetings and farewells – and traffic noise. We returned to the ship in a rickshaw pulled by a nearly naked man whose muscles coursed and rippled conspicuously and constantly beneath his ebony skin.
A young Ceylonese girl and her parents boarded the ship at Colombo. She was about my age, with long dark hair hanging down to below waist level, and skin the colour and (I imagined) texture of dairy milk chocolate. Within moments of seeing her for the first time I had decided that she was far and away the most beautiful human being, or indeed thing, I had ever seen. The regal way in which she moved, combined with her irreproachable loveliness, convinced me that she was of royal birth, and I mentally dubbed her ‘The Indian Princess’. A few days into our voyage across the Indian Ocean, she appeared at the pool-side in a bottle green one piece swimming costume, and I experienced an unfamiliar but not unpleasant tautness in the pit of my abdomen, together with a brief surge of indeterminable yearning, and my assessment was reinforced.
The Indian Princess disembarked from the ship, and departed from my life, at Fremantle. Today she is probably fat, world-weary, looking forward to death, and never to be seen (or even worse, imagined) wearing a bathing costume, let alone going swimming - but who am I to talk?
