oil tankers and merchantmen heading east. I was having an expeditionary pink gin in Navy House, enjoying the well-ordered peace of the RN, when a 10,000-ton American Liberty ship called, typically, Joseph E. Brown rammed the jetty with a fearful crash and nearly came upstairs.
Crunching through huge concrete slabs, the bows of the misguided Joe narrowly missed the stern of our cruiser Cleopatra. In keeping with traditional naval fun I urged my hosts to signal their Lords of the Admiralty: “Cleopatra raped!” They would not buy it. The captain gave a thin smile; I could tell he was thinking: “Look, Whicker—we do the jokes.”
Inside the docks I hunted for the Empire Sovereign. “That’s it,” said a sentry. Nothing in sight except small harbour craft. “There,” he said, pointing at the kind of boat which takes trippers from Richmond up to Kingston. “No, no,” I said patiently, “I’m looking for a troopship, ocean-going. Probably around 15,000 tons, promenade decks, restaurants, staterooms…” At that moment the words on the tiny stern came into focus: Empire Sovereign. “Oh,” I said weakly, “that’s it, is it?”
Some troops were being handed lifebelts and ushered below decks and a few Cypriot workers were already being seasick. I was allocated a cabin the size of a medium wardrobe, with eight bunks. Eight! Two passengers were already established; the others, wiser, must have gone by air. Even with three, it was jammed.
When our little craft began to shudder we stumbled up on deck. A fusspot of a tug, only slightly smaller, nudged and chivvied us into mid-stream and we glided towards the Mediterranean, past the Simon Artz store, past the sky-high KLM sign and the broad beach, and those posh passengers travelling port-out-starboard-home.
Deck loudspeakers blared music and people waved from other ships. It was pure Golden Eagle. I felt we were bravely sailing to Margate, watching out for the Luftwaffe.
As we left the shelter of the harbour wall something odd began to happen. The Med, as far as the eye could tell, was a millpond. Ignoring this, the Empire Sovereign forced herself through the water with a peculiar corkscrew motion—none of that straight up-and-down style ships have known and used for centuries. Passengers began to notice, and retreat below.
The troop commander, a pleasant CSM, came round with anti-seasick pills. “I’m never sick,” I said, waving them away. We spiralled into another treacherous swoop. “Well,” I said, clinging on, “practically never.” He then delivered the clincher: “It’s 249 miles.”
We gathered silently in the miniature saloon: a sprinkling of army officers on swans of varying legitimacy, a middle-aged man with little brown hair and a lot of peroxide wig, a thin subaltern freshly married to a young army nurse. She, pale and about to be ill, disappeared morosely to spend her honeymoon night in the Ladies’ Cabin (Gentlemen’s, with chintz) and the groom mooched off down the companionway, kicking things.
A few of us attempted a meal, mostly at a very acute angle, and afterwards I rummaged through the ship’s library. “Real sailors’ books,” mumbled an old Merchant Navy officer. He was wearing a beret, half-glasses, a woollen cardigan and looked like someone’s granny. It turned out he meant 1928 throw-outs from seaside libraries, well-thumbed love stories about counts and heiresses. Certainly no meat strong enough to take mind off motion.
I bought a bottle of whisky for 15 shillings, and settled down with a paratroop officer who confessed he would have flown over but was frightened of landing in an aeroplane. Nobody would play poker, so we lurched off to our cabins, reminding each other it was only for twenty-four hours, after all.
I struggled up into a top bunk, and waited to be rocked asleep. During the night a gale blew up and it began to seem doubtful whether our gallant little ship could make it through the night. I was thrown to the deck three times, which is enough to wake anyone.
In the morning the weather was so bad we could not put into Famagusta, so while my Cypriot friends waited on the quayside my ship waited in a bay up the coast. We lurked there, a mile offshore and heaving, for four days. Nothing to read, nothing to do, drink all gone, madness coming fast.
On the fifth day the weather broke and I stumbled ashore, took a taxi to Nicosia and flew straight back to the Canal Zone and the khamsin. “You look much calmer,” said James, when I reached the press dorm. “Nothing like a holiday, eh?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing like.”
They were the generation of women who went into the ’39 war and came out at the other end, unscathed but changed. Well-mannered, well-dressed, determined and resourceful, the Scarlett O’Haras of the post-war years. Brought up expecting to live the opulent lives of their parents, they were aware such a world no longer existed, so, instead of clinging to the past, they reinvented themselves and became the bridge between Mrs Miniver and The Beatles.
Edana Romney was South African, creamy-skinned and red-haired. In the late 40s she starred in films, notably Corridor of Mirrors—remembered fondly by film aficionados for her endless close-ups. It was directed by a youthful Terence Young, who went on to tackle various James Bonds. She was married to John Woolf who, with his mischievous brother Jimmy, dominated much of the British film industry in the Fifties and Sixties—John a producer of significance, Jimmy a powerful agent and lover of Laurence Harvey.
Pictures of Edana show her in billowing evening dresses, waist cinched, a glittering show-business figure in a drab time of rationing and clothing coupons. All plain sailing until her marriage ended. Abruptly she did another Scarlett and began a new career in a new medium: she became BBC television’s first agony aunt, with Edgar Lustgarten.
She moved into a stylish flat overlooking Hyde Park, rented Rose Cottage on the D’Avigdor Goldsmith estate near Tonbridge, and settled down with her elegant mother Min and Freddie the butler. It was an eccentric, stylish ménage that would survive some forty years of adventures on both sides of the Atlantic.
Chintzy Rose Cottage was transplanted lock, stock and steaming crumpets to San Ysidro Drive, a charming house in Beverly Hills, then to Summitridge, once home of Corbina Wright, a notorious gossip columnist. They lived well, though by Hollywood standards frugally.
None of them had ever given a thought to driving a car—so here in California, where only the criminal or the eccentric actually walk anywhere, they lived in grand isolation. Connected to the world only by an overworked telephone, Edana settled down to a new career as a writer.
She had fallen in love with Richard Burton. Not Burton of the velvet voice and Elizabeth Taylor, but Burton the nineteenth-century adventurer and explorer. He translated the Kama Sutra, wrote about and patronized male brothels and polygamous Mormons and, risking death, coloured his skin for a forbidden visit to Mecca, Islam’s most holy place.
For Edana it was almost an eighteenth-century life. She would stay in her boudoir most of the morning on the phone to friends, handing out advice and dreaming dreams of the dashing Burton. She wrote and rewrote her screenplay in a book annotated with ideas for location, strips of fabric for costumes and grand delusions: Sean Connery would play Burton, Richard Attenborough would direct. Someone once suggested that Tom Stoppard might rewrite the script. “Tom who?” she said, grasping the project ever closer to her. She forgot that Hollywood promises have a shorter life than celluloid kisses.
Over the years, many years, Burton became an obsession. To finance her dream she visited the Sahara, courted the sheikhs
