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each passing day. And as leaving Venice is quite as spectacular as arrival, the day
ended with a sunny drink on deck accompanied by this wonderful view and a
long talk with Carole, who looked more perfect every time I saw her. However,
all was not sunlight and perfection with her; it had begun to dawn on me that
some of these qualities, both appearance and speech, verged on the artificial and
glib. Being totally unversed in the art of such polite but superficial conversation,
I was beginning to think that I was becoming merely a useful companion,
substituting for the wily Stuart, though I could not blame him for making use of
opportunities. After all of the Venetian ambience, the evening was quiet; a time
for contemplation – and some scotch.

It was a fairly routine trip from Venice to Athens (actually Piraeus), a day
again spent partly in cleaning boats and assisting passengers in their daily needs. I
decided that a bit of time spent in tourist-class would not be wasted, and certainly
was aware of a livelier atmosphere there than in first-class. As the deck space was
substantially less than that enjoyed by the upper echelons, but there were more
passengers in tourist, one felt a good deal more cheek by jowl with passengers.
This factor had obvious attendant advantages, one of which was called Jayne.

This young lady, travelling on her own, was a comely young model, evidently
from Birmingham (not the most ingratiating of accents) and, I noted, seemed to
dislike wearing too much clothing. Actually, everybody else apparently noted the
same, but that concerned me little; after a while we made an assignation (a more
suitable word than one might at first think) for an evening dance. After dinner,
mine being in first-class, there being oddly enough no officers’ tables being
reserved in tourist, I repaired down to their far less opulent dance-floor and had
a couple of dances, but as Jayne stated that she disliked dancing and had a bottle
of wine in her cabin, she suggested that that was a far more suitable place to talk
than was the dance-floor. She was, of course, correct, but I prefer to draw a veil
over the next hour or so, as my sheer ineptitude was once again exposed to me.

Although this cruise had witnessed some notably scenic ports, Piraeus took
second place to none. Certainly, it was more sun-ravaged and oddly bleak than
the previous two ports, but in terms of history, it surpassed in interest everywhere
that we had visited earlier. In the 1960s it was the ‘cradle of civilisation’; now,
of course, it is much more realistically regarded as the ‘cradle of western
civilisation’, there then being, excepting in the minds of a few of the enlightened,
no consideration of the reality of Indian, and especially Chinese, thought and
inventions having preceded the rather slow emergence of Western culture and
society. However, this was all pretty academic on this day; all of the officers of
any significance having gone ashore, my day was spent looking officious at the
head of the gangway. And that was all that the job seemed to entail, there being

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