Page 219 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

Next day the change was effected, and I began to very much look forward
to the voyage ahead. (Recall that we were ten knots slower than Canberra; time
was with me.)

The pre-dinner (and sometimes post-dinner) routine quickly established
itself, and it went extremely well. Mary and I got together for a brief and anodyne
drink – she was no drinker – and did a bit of keyboard practice. I learned very
quickly that, again, the Catholic sensibility was a road-block to complete success
in my primary area of interest but having never come across anyone who enjoyed
canoodling so much, that was no hindrance to much enjoyment. The typing
lesson occupied almost ten minutes each session, if I could stretch it that far,
but did not progress very well … not that that mattered a tittle. Additionally,
it was not entirely unrewarding to see the Flash Harry frustration, for he could
be a bit pompous, and in my opinion, though entertaining enough at meals,
would probably not make a great bank manager; although he didn’t know it, he
benefitted from being taken down a notch or two.

There were, of course, other things to learn. For some reason, I had been
given the job of giving the ship’s morning broadcast, and in sailing on and on,
day after day, and seeing land only in arriving at and leaving Cape Town, I had
to exercise ingenuity in saying anything interesting. The Pilot Book, however,
usually offered something enlightening. On the way to South Africa, for example,
we had passed by the Namibian Skeleton Coast (though it was too far away to be
visible) which the Portuguese had declared to be ‘The Gates of Hell’ a name now
forever associated with the wreck of Dunedin Star in 1942 on the storm-tossed,
foggy desert shore. Again, when traversing the northern part of the Mozambique
Channel, we passed over the spot where the coelacanth had been discovered
by fishermen in 1938. I had not heard of this particular fish before, it having
been thought to have been extinct for millions of years, but pictures revealed an
ugly, almost half-formed denizen of the deep ocean; had those fishermen not
accidentally brought it to the surface, we might still be ignorant about its survival.

Whether anyone listened to my broadcasts I did not know, but it was an
enjoyable little excursion into finding out about things of which I would otherwise
have been unaware; with a passenger load of only 250, there was little enough to
occupy active minds.
Early in September we arrived at our anchorage in Colombo and discharged
our few passengers bound for India and Ceylon, and departed later in the
afternoon, rounding the south-western point of the island – redolent of the Khyber
chapter – after a few hours. In the meantime, at lunch, Flash had important news
to impart; “Did you know that two girls have boarded?” he asked. I declared that
I did not know this important fact, but he dug deeper. “I can get them up on the
bridge during your watch tonight,” he said, to which undertaking I responded

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