Ruth Brown: “On the Good Ship Lollipop”
In 1969, I finished the last remaining course work for my doctorate, passed my orals and written exams and my second language exam (in Latin). I though I had completed drafts of two chapters toward my eventual dissertation –I was wrong in that — and I’d made a stab at the critical bibliography that would be required when I finished it. I’d been awarded a research and travel grant that would pay for a year (ten months) in Europe digging up documents and researching my topic. In September, Esther and I flew to Luxembourg and within the week were settled in Paris, where we lived for two tres plaisant months in a one-hundred-year-old hotel named the Plaisant.
My research year became a research seven-and-a-half-months when two weeks later, we learned Esther was pregnant. We’d been trying for pregnancy for a long while so it wasn’t a disappointment in any respect but there’s no question it changed our plans for our year abroad. We hadn’t owned a car for five years (ever since we were married) but with a baby coming, we purchased one now: a Volkswagen fastback. They were a lot cheaper in Europe and we knew we’d need one when we got home. With the car got ship home and Esther pregnant, I checked around and found that the best deal was us taking an ocean liner and bringing the car with us below deck. We booked passage on the S. S. Rafaello, the Italian Lines, departing from Barcelona at the end of March.
What ensued in the coming months was far from linear. The shipping line switched the Rafaello’s docking from one place to another in Spain, where we would be living from December on. (My research was in Spanish documents. Most of it was conducted at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid and the scholars’ library at El Escorial, across the mountains from Madrid. I did some preliminary work at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The old one, not the the news. The cold one. In winter.
We had thought about traveling to Barcelona en route to Madrid. But we were scheduled to leave from Barcelona so we decided not to stop in Barcelona en route but head straight to Madrid instead. We’d see Barcelona at the end of our stay. Then, too late for us to change plans and backtrack, we were informed that Malaga was the new embarkation site for our ship[. That was still okay because Malaga, and the coast, were cool. We’d just have to visit Barcelona some other time.
Too late for any adjustment at all, the embarcation site was changed to Algeciras, adjacent to Gibraltar by the exit point from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic. Gibraltar was held by the British then, so you left from Algeciras instead. Algeciras was, to be frank, a hole.
En passage to Algeciras, we passed through through bull country. and attended a bull fight The official season didn’t begin until Easter but all that it meant was that the matadors didn’t wear the traditional clothing. The fight we saw was a big deal: an occasion for area breeders to display their best wares. We saw Orodonez, then the greatest living bullfighter, and Miguelin, who was prominent among newcomers, take on two bulls apiece. We didn’t see it all, alas. After three bulls had died, spilling their blood copiously onto the sand, Esther said we had to leave, so we did, just as Miguelin was closing in on his second kill. I don’t approve of bull fights at all but after watching three passes and three bloody murders of the poor animals, I saw why the fights grabbed your attention. Bulls, even young ones, are big animals and potentially quite dangerous. In the ring, they exude a tangible air of menace. The risk was real. Watching was an exciting, though morally dubious, experience. I’m glad I experienced it but I probably shouldn’t be.
We stayed two nights in a waterfront hotel whose primary virtue was cost. Our room –everything!– reeked of decayed fish. But it was there, sipping bitter black coffee at an outdoor cafe next door to the hotel, that I managed to finish reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book I’d tried to read three times before and always failed but now I loved it, absolutely loved it!
We moved out of town for the rest of our two weeks stay before our ship arrived, living at a pension called the Hotel Solimar (Sun and Sea), where we had a cottage of our own. It was lovely in all respects except for the plumbing, which worked on the average of one day out of two for the two weeks we stayed there. One weekend, we took a day trip to Morocco but it became a two-and-a-half-day trip when we arrived just before the Muslim weekend and the ferry back to Spain wouldn’t run for two days.
The time to leave finally came. We boarded the ship and off we sailed. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were on board the ship too, though we never met–their loss! They traveled luxury class and we tourist. Actually “tourist class” turned out to be worse than that because off season and desperate to make its e its nut ($$), the company had taken on immigrants, peasants mostly, from southern Italy and Sicily, who were traveling to the States but paid much less than the full fare for the trip. We ate together and shared the same social spaces, so the food they and we ate was … horrible. You’ll never known how bad wine can taste until you drink wine mixed from wine powder and water.
We shared our dinner table on the liner with an elderly couple, Les and Marie S. When we first saw them, we thought, “Whoops, okay!” They were old and we were young –seventies compared to thirties. Worse, they looked like prunes on first sight. They turned out to be the best companions we could possibly have asked for on the trip. Les had written an investment column for upstate New York newspapers for several years. He’d socked the money he earned doing that into land. By the time he retired, Marie and he owned seven plots of land on which they grew trees. Christmas trees! They were Christmas tree farmers! They had seven plots of land because it takes seven years for a tree to mature. Every year, they harvested a plot, sold its trees and replanted it for harvesting seven years later.
the S. S. Rafaello
We had fun on that cruise. One story Les regaled us with was of a vacation they’d taken in Mexico a year or two before. After a bit too much tequila, Les had bought several burros and a set of decorated tables but didn’t remember any of it. A month later, at home, he got a message to come down to the train station right away to pick up his delivery. When he got there, there were the tables and the burros waiting for him to take them home. I forget how he got rid of them afterwards.
That aside, it was a rough trip. Aside from the wonky food and drink, we had women in black dresses nursing their babies in our cocktail lounge. It just wasn’t very cocktail lounge-y and given the money we’d paid for the trip, we’d expected a little elegance. Worse still, the crew, including wait staff, were simply waiting for New York, where they intended to go on strike immediately. On board, they acted as though they’d already gone on strike. Then to cap it off, our ship was three days behind schedule and though we were passing through a hurricane strength storm, the captain refused to put down stabilizers because they would slow down the ship and delay the arrival.
One night, we were watching the movie version of Finian’s Rainbow in the ship’s theater. We didn’t make it through the movie, though, because the ship was listing so badly that the curtains on either side of the movie screen swayed back and forth, back and forth, and for anyone with the slightest tendency toward sea sickness, which includes Les and Marie, you were toast. After the first day of the storm, I was the only one of us who could hold down a martini during cocktail hour.
It was quite a trip.
We made it New York intact, docked and soon were going on with our lives. A month or so later, Jeremy was born –he’s now 48. We visit Les and Marie with him a year later so they could see what the looked lie. We never saw them again after that and gradually we fell out off communication with them. Marie came down with MS or Parkinson’s, I forget which, and by now, of course, they’re both dead.
But we have our memories.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Bing Crosby: “How Are Things in Glocca Mora,” from Finian’s Rainbow