Free What the Traveller Saw by Eric Newby

black meals, starting with caviar and ending with Finnish black pudding eaten with blackcurrant jam, or entirely white meals of boiled fish, tripe and junket. We met an English lawyer and his wife who were eating their way through all the puddings they had not eaten since they were in the nursery – spotted dog, treacle pud, jam sponge, and so on. All were delicious. They ought to have been. These were the dishes the crew liked best and there were 1190 crew members to just over 2000 passengers.
    By 1972 both the Queens were out of commission and the largest liner in the world was the France (66,348 tons), taken into service in 1962 by the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (English alias, the French Line). When we sailed in her from New York to Southampton, she had just completed a three-month, one-class, round-the-world winter cruise, which ended in New York. All 1200 berths were occupied. On this marathon an outside cabin on U deck ( luxe ) cost £5920, and the most expensive suite, £30,000 ( grande luxe ), for four passengers. Among the two thousand passengers on ‘our’ crossing there were no readily identifiable film stars, but there was M. Salvador Dali, carrying a sort of wand and looking like a cross between a necromancer and Le Roi Soleil. There was also a cross-section of an entire Arabian royal family, attempting, with total lack of success, to cross the Atlantic incognito in a couple of dozen upper-deck cabins, complete with their own coffee makers, bodyguards, veiled houris, servants whose feet were killing them, and lots of children and au pairs. In addition the ship was awash with American millionaires, as such ships always were in the autumn, who were always slopingoff to the Tourist Class Night Club because they said it was more fun. At Southampton they were met by a whole fleet of Daimler hire cars in which they purred away to the Connaught and Claridge’s. There was even a small parcel of distinguished savants.
    How did this heterogeneous collection manage to while away the not-so-long days and nights? Well, we whiled them away swimming in one or other of the two swimming pools (a notice on D deck informed us that the water was heated to some agreeable tropical temperature, but all we found was raw Atlantic straight from the ocean). We were massaged, being older now and more in need of it than we had been on the Queen Elizabeth , had haircuts and, of course, pedicures. There was also ping-pong, bowling, a shooting gallery, dance lessons, a library of six thousand volumes, and an outpost of the Galeries Lafayette , which advised all First Class passengers to come in the afternoon ‘so that they will enjoy the best service’.
    We tried both First and Tourist Class service and found the assistants equally rude and disobliging in both, the only people we encountered in the entire ship out of a crew of 1100 who were rude and disobliging, but then they weren’t members of the crew.
    We could also go to the cinema in the biggest theatre afloat, ride a mechanical horse in the gym (a surprisingly obscene-looking machine), dial 1900 for dollops of bad news – there was also a daily paper – or give up completely, as most transatlantiqueurs eventually do, and allow ourselves to be swaddled in wrappings by the deck stewards and left to mature like Tutankhamun. Someone on board had brought with them a cougar or an ocelot, I can’t remember which. It was kept on deck, in what were intended as dog kennels, equipped with French lamp posts and kilometre stones. One wondered what it made of them and the other four-footed friends.
    Most popular of all the distractions were the bars – the onein Tourist Class was 69 feet long and said to be the longest in the maritime world. The Bar d’Atlantique in First Class was presided over by M. Raymond Cordier, archpriest of transatlantic barmen and most agreeable of men, who had been forty years with the company, ten in the France. He made what were arguably the finest