Page 91 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

for male company within certain strata of British society, and that, apart from
the law, such preferences were largely taken for granted. But the law was at that
time rather important. As Noel Coward wrote in ‘A Song at Twilight’ (1968),
“Even when the actual law ceases to exist, there will still be a stigma attached
to ‘the love that dares not speak its name’ in the minds of millions of people for
generations to come. It takes more than a few outspoken books, and plays, and
speeches in parliament to uproot moral prejudice from the Anglo-Saxon mind.”
These antediluvian British attitudes subsisted for many years, and it was not until
the Sexual Offences Act was introduced in 1967 that gay male sex became a non-
criminal offence, but even then, only if committed in private by no more than two
people over twenty-one years of age. (The whole iniquitous situation is limned in
Chapter 16 of ‘John Gielgud’ by Sheridan Morley, a stark tale of changing British
mores.). Consequently, stewards’ departments on British ships were very stable
societies, and by common observation notably happy; small wonder, given the
alternatives of prison, heavy fines or ostracism.

The first sight of Dubrovnik was spectacular, it being a perfect Mediterranean
day with bright sunlight and a seascape for which the Adriatic is so renowned.
The harbour had remained fundamentally unchanged since the sixteenth
century; it took the brutality of the 1990s collapse of Yugoslavia to bring it all to
rubble (though restoration has since been remarkably successful). Our lifeboats
were in service until 3am, but such a job was by no means tiring. I even had the
opportunity to sample a little slivovitz, a sampling that I did not care to repeat for
another twenty or so years … and then by mistake.

A few hours later we were in Naples, a city that resonated with History, Opera
and risqué movies. This time we were alongside a berth, although somewhat
uncomfortably so in the presence of a substantial part of the US Mediterranean
Fleet. As our next port, Palma, was another launch port, we had quite a lot of
boat maintenance to complete, but after lunch the mate let us off for the day (he
was actually turning out to be much better than reputed, one supposes because
he really did not need us to do much apart from maintaining and manning the
lifeboats, a far from onerous task). We decided on an exploratory trip ashore
and took a bus to see the sights and get a flavour of what should be one of the
world’s great cities. We quickly decided that ‘great’ was a misnomer. In part
famed for Mount Vesuvius, the very fact of the volcano being there contributes
to the city’s disorder, for it is Italy’s third largest city in population, but has scant
land and resources for its people. Further, the southern half of Italy is relatively
impoverished; the city had been deeply in debt for most of its recent existence, the
genesis for which can traced back to the Unification of Italy in the 1860s, when
the Kingdom of Naples ceased to exist and the city lost its international cachet.
It did not help that the city lies in an earthquake zone (though Pompeii has long
been an attraction) or that during the World War II the city was more heavily
bombed than any other Italian city. Many resulting scars were still evident.

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