Page 148 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

tankers and cargo ships. In fact, variety was still to come; in the days following my
return I was told that my next appointment was to be senior cadet on Comorin, a
somewhat drab choice, but one with some good features.

The intervening days between the two appointments I spent alone at home,
the family being away on vacation, a rare event. Actually, ‘alone’ was not quite true,
as I had been able to arrange with Karen to come down to the countryside with
me for a few days (I didn’t know her friend Vicki very well, but she seemed to be
amazingly diplomatic, rarely needing to be together with her close companion).
The days were actually spent very innocently and pleasantly, for although she had
not been to university and had no intention of doing so, it not being part of her
family’s personae, she had read widely and well, and despite our very different
upbringings, we got on unusually well. But some canoodling, I was to find out,
was all that I could expect; I found that I didn’t mind!

One of the pleasures of living in South-East England was that London was
a mere train-ride away (though actually getting to the station was the hardest
part; two wheezing busses a day came to our part of the village, an introverted
community that hardly saw the need to know much of the outside world)
and the summer saw the appearance of the Promenade Concerts at the Royal
Albert Hall, in London, only one hour away. David and I used to go with some
frequency when living in Woolwich, but my being at sea had greatly curtailed
such opportunities. Late in August I journeyed up and enjoyed a program that
nowadays I believe would be considered too long for public consumption;
‘Mozartiana’, Rachmaninov’s ‘3rd Piano Concerto’, Arnold’s ‘2nd Symphony’
(unknown to me, but after which I was not concerned about re-acquaintance),
Debussy’s ‘Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune’, and ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’. Very
nice, but for the first time I became aware of the size of the place (it held about
5,000 souls) and the resulting cavernous and opaque sound (the BBC broadcast
the Proms every evening during the summer, and I was quite unaware of how
much better the aural spectrum was through the ether rather than heard in this
vast cave; it was a better venue for boxing matches!).

On September 7th I joined Comorin in London. This was one of three ships,
,
the others being Cathay and Chitral, both referred to earlier, comprising a trio
providing monthly passenger and cargo service from London to the Far East.

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