Long life
View from a single cabin
Nigel Nicolson
No sooner have people returned from this year's cruise than they are bombarded by brochures advertising next year's. Some travellers swear that nothing would induce them to join an organised cruise. Until I was 60 I thought the same, although when I was 16 I was taken on one of the first Mediterranean cruises to be promoted for philhellenes and experienced a moment of such joy that few incidents have since equalled it. My father woke me at six one morning and brought me up on deck.
`There', he said, pointing to low hills on the horizon, 'is the Peloponnese.' It was the period of my life when I was drenched in the classics and had never seen Greece before. I almost sobbed with excitement at the sight of it, and my father, Byron's biog- rapher, put a hand on my shoulder in sym- pathy. It was the moment when we came closest together. We said nothing.
For the next 40 years I despised cruising as the lazy man's alternative to serious travelling, and then discovered its enor- mous attractions. They are obvious. You are not required to arrange anything except to turn up on time. Your luggage remains in the same place for a week, two weeks, three. You are taken to places which you could never otherwise reach except by debilitating effort. You are fed, transport- ed, instructed. Instruction is essential, for no cruise is worth joining unless you can learn from scholars the history of places you will visit next day. It is adult education without the menace of exams.
For me another essential is a single cabin. Daytime and evening gregariousness is all very well, but I must be able to look forward to solitude at the end of the day. This luxury enhanced the most enjoyable cruise I have ever experienced. It was in 1982, and it was organised by Serenissima in the wake of the Crusades. There were great moments, like a service in St Anne's church, Jerusalem, and entering the Grand Harbour of Malta at dawn, but mostly it was the companionship of like-minded people on board that made it so exception- al, many of them the young of both sexes. Too often cruises are the refuge of the elderly. I joined one of them last year, round the coasts of Spain and Portugal, and apart from the crew I believe that only one person on board was below the age of 50. She was 23, the daughter of other pas- sengers. One sunny morning she appeared on deck in a bikini. 'Excuse me, miss,' said the officer of the watch. 'We do not allow two-piece bathing-dresses on deck.' Is that so?', she replied. 'Then which piece would you like me to take off?' I think, and hope, that her remark was spontaneous, but it may be an old chestnut. In any case, it was quickly circulated round the ship with hor- rified delight. I managed to find the seat next to her at dinner that night. It was a change from the seven widows who had been my companions hitherto.
But I make no complaints. It was on that cruise that I saw for the first time the church at Santiago de Compostela, the library at Coimbra and in Sardinia the astonishing nuraghi, those cone-shaped towers contemporary with Stonehenge. How else than by cruising could one com- bine such rewarding experiences within ten days? We may not be able to choose our company, nor they us, but from a long pas- senger list one would be unfortunate or severely misanthropic if one did not make at least one new friendship that will last the remainder of one's life.
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