Other aspects of the diary are not quite so cosy. My parents’ marriage was never a tranquil one, and Mum confined every rebarbative misgiving between narrow feint bars. ‘These,’ she writes at one point, ‘are the wages of meaningless marriage.’ Which leads me to consider whether or not the virtues of air travel are not emotional quite as much as economic. True, couples can argue quite as well on planes as they once did on liners, yet there isn’t the time for this kind of festering despair.
Still, it was all drawing to an end. On 3 September Mum reports: ‘Land outside the porthole’; and then, for the next ten days, the Franconia wends its way up the St Lawrence ‘taking on one pilot after another’. We finally docked in Quebec on the 13th, and the passengers were confined to the non-air-conditioned theatre, while the luggage was offloaded. Here I disgraced myself with diarrhoea, soiling my clothes, and a chair in first class, much to Mum’s distraction. Ah! Even at two, I was an anarchist abroad.
Endnotes
1 Then British Home Secretary.
2 Then British Defence Secretary.
3 Then British Foreign Secretary.