Worst Journies

About a century ago, a man named Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote a book called The Worst Journey In The World. (The title was suggested by his friend George Bernard Shaw.) It was a true account of the author’s participation in the second Scott expedition to Antarctica, in which its leader, Robert Falcon Scott, lost his life, after failing to beat the Norwegian team, under Roald Amundsen, to the South Pole. That entire ordeal of 1912 was indeed such a harrowing experience that it probably deserved Cherry-Garrard’s title.

Fortunately, I can’t claim any such taste of Hell. (You may like to know that Cherry-Garrard perhaps in compensation, subsequently prospered, and survived until 1959.) But I can tell you about my own worst journey, though you may think it lacks the perilous panache of sledding across Antarctica.

Mine happened in 1972, and involved an ocean voyage from London to Australia. My wife, Dorothy, and I had been living in London, where we had succeeded in setting up a happily profitable branch of the postcard business, based on my “Pot-Shots” epigrams, which we had established in San Francisco. The plan now was to use our new funds to go and purchase land somewhere on the coast of Western Australia – an area which had always interested me, ever since I’d learned that it had a Mediterranean-type climate, similar to that of California.

We both enjoyed sailing, and the long journey from London to Perth was even longer than it would otherwise have been, because troubles in the Middle East had caused the Suez Canal to be closed, requiring the alternative route – all the way down around the bottom of Africa. But there was still at least one shipping company – the Greek Chandris Line – offering passenger service along that route. So, we booked a passage on what turned out to be probably one of their least glamorous ships, the “Britannis.” I will not go into all the details of that nightmare voyage – which began with a disappointment, by not letting anybody go ashore when we stopped at the Canary Islands.

For some reason (partly because of language), we could never pleasantly relate to the crew, or even to our fellow passengers. But one particular point of friction involved SMOKING, to which I have always had an antipathy amounting to an allergy. This was, however, back in the days before anti-smoking movements became more powerful, and finally prevailed. Moreover, we were on an easy-going Greek vessel, on which it was taken for granted that those who wished to smoke at the dining-table might do so. And apparently nobody had even thought of organizing a separate table or section for non-smokers.

Somehow, I had never anticipated that this might be a problem, especially on a long voyage.

Eventually, because of my emphatic protests, a solution was worked out – but for us, it was not a happy one. Instead of being seated at a larger table with other passengers, we were given a small table to ourselves – and it was in a sort of alcove in the remotest corner of the dining room. My poor sweet-tempered and sociable wife did not share my strong feelings about smoking, and I still cringe inwardly to think of how I made her suffer, in this and many similar episodes of our 51 years together.

Worse trouble was, however, yet ahead. If anything sets off my irritant-alarm more than smoking, it is NOISE. Our small cabin had only a thin metal wall separating it from an adjoining one, which was inhabited by two parents, and a young female child, whom they would leave alone for hours at a time. There she screamed, it seemed endlessly, just inches from my head when I was in my own bunk.

Talking or writing to the parents did no good. As with the smokers, in this regime, there were no company rules against such behavior.

Was it any wonder that, long before we reached Australia, I became seriously ill? Or that the ship’s doctor, whom I naturally consulted, took little interest in my condition? Or that, when we finally got off at Perth and I went see a doctor there, it turned out that I had pneumonia!

You will also not be surprised that, after that long, terrible voyage, the Perth area (of which we did finish up buying a beautiful piece) seemed as much of a paradise to me as England must have seemed to Cherry-Garrard, after his return from Antarctica.