It was a cold, grey day, spitting snow and with a brisk breeze which promised choppy seas outside the estuary, when I sailed from Tilbury in the M.V. "Leicestershire". This was a British India vessel on loan to the Bibby Lines, a cargo ship of nearly 9,000 tons, built on the Clyde in 1949 and carrying about a hundred passengers.

My parents came to see me off, partly out of curiosity to see the accommodation I had been allotted, and also because they knew that this time I was going away for two and a half years and I suppose to them that seemed like forever. When we arrived on the dock some of the cargo was still being loaded - some sad-looking cattle were being urged through a large hatchway into the bowels of the ship, lowing miserably as they went. It must have been a long and uncomfortable trip for them, three weeks confined to the lower regions without sight or smell of blue skies and green grass.

I found I had been given a pleasant little cabin all to myself, which was a nice surprise. It had an outside porthole, and I quickly estimated that this would be big enough for me to wriggle through should the ship decide to sink. It was very similar in its fitments to the cabins we had had on the Elder Dempster ships, but more spacious and I had all the space to myself. I was after all travelling first class, courtesy of the Company J.R. was working for, and I could see my parents were impressed. None of this travelling steerage, eight to a stuffy inside cabin, which is what I think they were expecting.

After a steward had delivered my luggage to the cabin, there didn't seem a great deal more to say. At this point in a departure, one only wants to get it over. I therefore now urged them to leave me. I was thirty years old, three years married and going to join my husband. Its true this time I was going to be away for longer, but I promised faithfully to write every week, and told them the time would go by in a flash, see if it didn't.

They eventually went ashore, final whistles were blown, and as the ship quietly pulled away into the river I stayed on deck at the stern, waving until the two figures were reduced to a far-off misty blob. I found myself feeling very homesick for disappearing England.

Standing next to me was a tall, middle-aged woman who was making her first trip abroad. She said her name was Charlotte and she was going out to Kenya to keep house for her brother, recently widowed, and was travelling with her two dogs, a collie and an afghan hound, who were down in the hold.

"It's sad, isn't it, to say goodbye?" she remarked, sympathetically, as I strained my eyes for one last look. We chatted for a while, before the cold and damp drove us finally down the main companionway in search of tea.

For my part, it was sadder than I knew at the time.

I was never to see my father again.

I found out quickly that travelling on this ship was going to be a vast improvement on the Elder Dempster "banana boats". It rode through the water with an ease and smoothness which was quite a revelation to me, and with none of the rolling from side to side which afflicted the Elder Dempster ships. Whoever it was had designed and built this craft certainly knew what they were doing.

It was also a very happy ship. It's strange how some ships give out an air of happiness and others do not. I think in this case the feeling stemmed from the Captain, who looked exactly like the bearded sailor on the old packets of Players cigarettes, which my father smoked constantly. He had a bluff, jovial manner and rapidly came to know most of us by our Christian names, especially those of us who were young.

The first part of the journey passed in a succession of wet, windy days, but I quickly found my sea legs and never actually missed a meal. By the time we had passed Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean most of us had sorted ourselves out into little groups of twos and threes. You have to be careful who you make friends with on a ship, because for the length of the voyage you can't get away from people and it is ghastly to find yourself stuck at the outset with someone who turns out to be the ship's bore.

I was lucky. On that first evening when I entered the dining saloon for dinner, I found myself ushered to a table for four in one corner. My three companions were a dapper little middle-aged man called Mr. McNellis (we never did find out what other names he had), a plump blonde Scottish lady with the name of Margaret McKay, and a young man, Dick Fairlie, on his first trip to Africa. Mac was going back after three months' leave to his job in a shipping warehouse in Mombassa, and Dick was a qualified motor mechanic, starting work somewhere up country from Dar es Salaam, both of them having left their wives in England to follow later. We two ladies were sailing out to meet our husbands. We formed our own little group and did most things together, intent on having a good time while on our own, (but not too good, if you see what I mean).

The rest of the passengers were an exceedingly mixed bag, as we were able to observe from our viewpoint in the saloon. There was a fair smattering of old Africa hands, the ones who looked sunburnt and a trifle blase, but there were also a good few elderly couples who were going out to visit their children in various parts of Kenya and Tanganyika. One in particular, a farmer, used to pay frequent visits to the animals in the hold as he was very sorry for them when they were seasick, and he would talk to them in an effort to cheer them up. There were one or two V.I.P.'s seated at tables with the Captain, the First Officer and the Doctor, several young girls going out to be nurses in Nairobi, and various families emigrating. Plus one very chatty American who said he came from Hollywood and that I reminded him of his wife, except she was prettier than I was.

As usual, there were one or two passengers who would have stopped the traffic even if they had been walking down Oxford Street in London, where there are always a few outlandish sights to be seen at any time of the day or night. In particular, a tall 30-ish woman at the next table to ours, who even on the first night out was wearing a skin-tight grey satin garment, cut long in the skirt and low in the bosom, with a small matching diamond shaped appliance (you couldn't call it a hat) perched cunningly over one eye, and a long curling feather boa which twined round her head and came to rest on one shoulder. She was an eye-stopper, all right. We all gaped at her in an embarrassed fashion and were not long in finding out that she was in fact an aspiring dress designer known as Camilla, and had brought two or three trunk loads of her ambitious designs with her, hoping to sell them in Nairobi. If this was a sample, I didn't think much of her chances. It was not exactly safari gear.

There was one other character who made his presence felt from day one. I will call him George, and George's trouble was that he drank - that is, he drank too much. There always seems to be one person on a sea voyage who makes himself a general nuisance, for one reason or another. George was desperate for a girl friend but nobody was willing to take him on in his permanently inebriated state, and throughout the three weeks we were at sea it was a pretty safe bet that if one was to walk past a group of people anywhere which contained George, one would be bound to hear at least one female voice raised in protestation "Oh, do go away George!" or "Don't be so silly, George!" He would subside, looking very downcast, and we would all start feeling sorry for him.

By the time we had survived the vicissitudes of January in the Atlantic and had progressed into the Mediterranean, we had discovered the benefits of a stiff brandy and ginger ale as a remedy against sea-sickness, and our days developed a routine very similar to that on board the "Apapa" and the "Accra". Ten times round the deck after breakfast to blow away the cobwebs, followed by deck tennis for the energetic and letter writing or reading for those of us feeling lazy, then shortly before midday we would descend en masse to the bar for the first of the brandy gingers. Two of these and, feeling no pain, down another deck to the dining saloon in a warm glow to face a massive Indian curry. The cooks were Goanese and did they know how to make an Indian curry! I have never tasted its equal, before or since. A quiet afternoon to recover, another walk round the deck to inspect the sights, if any, then a leisurely bath and change into evening clothes for dinner and what ever amusement was laid on for the evening.

There was very little to see during the first week. We passed Gibraltar early one morning before it was light, so our first glimpse of land since leaving home was later on that morning, a brief view of the snow-covered Sierra Madre mountains in southern Spain. After that there was nothing but fairly unfriendly-looking sea until we slid into Port Said on a warm, dull morning, passed the de Lesseps statue and dropped anchor in the harbour.

We stayed in Port Said for a few days while several other ships joined us to form a convoy down the Suez Canal. Those were the days when the British were still in control of the Canal, although not very popular, and we were not pleased when Egyptian troops came on board our ship, for what reason was not made clear to us, and sat around with machine guns on their laps and no smiles on their dour faces. Those guns looked decidedly lethal. We gave them and the men a wide berth and no one felt inclined to go ashore, as it seemed fairly obvious we would not exactly be welcomed with open arms. In any case, if you did go ashore you had to leave your passport on board, and this did not appeal to us at all. In those days, a dark blue and gold British passport was a treasure to possess and you didn't part with it lightly.

Alongside us came a British troopship, the "Empire Windrush", loaded with soldiers evidently on their way to one of the few remaining outposts of Empire. It towered above us while we, glorying in the first warm weather, were sun-bathing on deck in our two-piece swim suits. We had a nice feeling of security to have our own troops so near at hand in this obviously hostile environment and we waved to them happily, but they were sunk in gloom and couldn't raise many smiles. They must have thought we were on a pleasure cruise, and of course in lots of ways we were. They were probably thinking - "lucky so-and-so's! Her we are, on our way to keep the peace in some miserable, inaccessible hole, where they most likely don't even know the War is over, to get shot at for our pains before we have worked through our National Service. It's all right for some!"

Poor "Empire Windrush". Little did we guess as we gazed up its steep sides that it was doomed; that on one of its return journeys, once again laden with troops, it would hit a storm near Malta and sink with all hands, as they say.

Come to think of it, poor "Leicestershire". A few years later it suffered a similar fate. In 1965 it was sold to a Greek shipping line, was turned into a car ferry and re-named "Heraklion". Then one day in December, 1966, on its usual route from Crete to the Greek mainland, it was caught in a violent storm near the rocky islet of Falkonera in the Cyclades, and the last radio message received said that huge waves had smashed holes in the starboard side of the hull and the sea was pouring in. Only about 20 of the total of nearly 300 passengers was saved, and now the proud ship "Leicestershire/Heraklion" rests on the floor of the Aegean. It was not meant to be a car ferry.

However, back in 1952, here we were cooling our heels in Port Said harbour with nothing to occupy our time. We were amused for half an hour or so by a ragged, bearded Egyptian, called the "Gully Gully" man, who came on board and went through some baffling tricks with several dozen fluffy, newly hatched chicks, which he kept on producing from up his sleeves and under his robes. Conjurors have always defeated me and this one was no exception. Try as I would, I could not see where he was producing all these chicks from, and one of the ship's officers told me that this man met every incoming ship with the same performance. I am always told, by those who purport to know, that there is a simple explanation for all conjuring tricks, but I think it is I who must be simple, because I continue to be completely stumped by all this sleight of hand.

Later on that evening, our First Officer announced that to save us from too much boredom, a ship's concert would be organised for the next evening, and anyone who could sing, dance, or tell jokes was expected to offer their services forthwith. It turned out to be a very lively evening and was just what we needed to take our minds off the tense and uncertain position we found ourselves in, surrounded as we were by trigger-happy Egyptians.

He started the ball rolling himself with a sterling rendering of "Shenandoah", and a couple of sea shanties as an encore, then someone else offered a piano solo of Katelby's "In a Monastery Garden", (or it may have been "In a Persian Market". They were family favourites of my mother and aunts, and I always did get them mixed up). Ralph Kruger, a young South African, gave us some robust Afrikaaner songs which no one could understand but him, followed by some equally robust clog dancing. After which, Mr. and Mrs. Roston Bourke (of the Captain's table) sang a tender duet, and then Mrs. R.-B., who should have known better, decided to have a go at the amateur soprano's biggest test, the "One Fine Day" aria from "Madame Butterfly". I need hardly add that the last impossible high note floored her completely, and the following enthusiastic applause was largely occasioned by the general all round relief that she had actually finished.

At this point, Dick Fairlie had to be forced under the table with a napkin stuffed in his mouth to attempt to stifle his unrestrained hysterics, and the beer and wine was flowing freely. The party threatened to become a trifle out of hand when our American friend from Hollywood offered to sing all forty nine verses of "Oh, dear, what can the matter be?", but the situation was saved by Mr. McNellis jumping up onto the small stage and launching into A Room with a View", unaccompanied, in a surprisingly deep bass voice - surprising because it was issuing from such a small, compact body - and as I was singing along with him I found myself being dragged up there with him. Before long, the evening developed into a community sing-song, ending up with a conga chain winding in and out of the doors and onto the mess deck .

Next morning a lot of people felt rather fragile, including me, and I was surprised to be congratulated from several directions on my excellent contralto voice and my good choice of song. Not "A Room with a View" but something else which apparently I had started up with no encouragement from anyone and had sung all the way through.

Now, I knew I had never sung in public before, having no very high opinion of my voice, and I was therefore rather puzzled at this information.

"So, what did I sing?" I asked Ralph, who was the third person to voice his congratulations.

He couldn't remember, except that it was a song to which I knew all the words.

I looked at him in silence, considering.

"I don't know the words to any songs all the way through", I said. "Except the National Anthem, both verses. Sure it wasn't God Save the King?"

No, it wasn't God Save the King. This was a mystery which was never solved. No matter how we racked our brains, no one could ever remember the name of that song and I was as anxious as anyone to find out what it was, but it was lost forever in the hazy alcoholic mists of the warm Egyptian night.

Perhaps it was just as well that this was the morning we at last started on our trip down the Canal - calm water, hot sun, and the unfriendly Egyptian troops finally departing the ship. At that time, the British Forces were still in occupation on the African side of the Canal, which was a comfort to us as we glided along. We were warned not to hang over the sides and expose too much of our white bodies, as there were plenty of armed Arabs in evidence, galloping up and down on horseback or loping along on camels, to the delight of some of the elderly passengers - ("Look, dear, real camels! Ships of the desert!"), and it had been known for those passing through to collect the odd bullet. At one point we saw the wreck of a train which was lying on its side with steam still escaping from the boiler, evidence that disaster had overtaken it not very long before.

The canal itself was exactly what we had expected, a strip of water flanked on each side by sand dunes, and a stately procession of ships gliding quietly along. At one place the canal divided itself into a loop, and there across the flat sand we could see another line of ships making their unhurried way northwards.

The thing I remember most clearly about the journey from then on was a dream-like quality which took over. There we were, floating along in our luxury hotel, more or less marooned and isolated from the rest of the world, unable or unwilling to go ashore at the brief ports of call. Wars could break out, the British Isles could sink without trace, but it wouldn't cause a ripple on the surface of our placid, untroubled lives. We seemed to have lost touch with our roots, and a lot of us, like myself, had only a vague idea of what we were going out to. We lived from day to day eating, drinking, playing deck games or swimming in the morning, sleeping in the afternoon, dancing or watching movies in the evening. And every day watching the magnificent desert sunsets, of which there cannot be any better anywhere in the world, a galaxy of crimson and gold filtering through the dust and sand. We mostly sat and watched in silence, our pre-dinner drinks in our hands. Soft music wafted round us from the ship's loud speaker system, we were sun-tanned and lazy from hours spent round the ship's pool, not thinking seriously about anything, completely divorced from reality.

We called at Suez, which from the ship appeared to be a pretty town with many white buildings and minarets, but once again most of us preferred to stay on board and watch over our passports. But at Port Sudan, halfway down the Red Sea, the restrictions were eased, and for the small charge of two shillings we could board a motor launch to be ferried across the harbour and view the town. Once we arrived there we wondered why we had bothered, as it looked like a shanty town with most of the buildings on the point of falling down. The local Sudanese who took us across the water were tall, athletic looking and dark skinned, with fuzzy black hair standing out all round their heads. They understood very little English, and the only coin of the realm which they recognised was the florin. Offer them a shilling or a half crown and the odds are they would toss it contemptuously into the water. They also, as we quickly found out, had a great antipathy towards being photographed, and if they managed to get their hands on one of our cameras, these would very quickly follow the shilling or half crown.

Our Captain had an exceedingly low opinion of them, calling them Fuzzy-wuzzies and allowing them onto his ship only to unload cargo. Should any of them - and one or two did - escape to the passengers' quarters they were immediately dispatched by this ever vigilant man, who was usually standing at the top of the main companion way, waiting for just such an eventuality.

"Get off my ship!" he would roar, advancing towards the interlopers and waving his arms in a menacing fashion. "Get back on the dock and take your vermin with you!" I once heard him explain to a passing passenger, who was viewing him with a certain amount of alarm - "Won't have fleas on my bloody ship!"

And when he noticed another couple of natives sitting on the deck in full view of everyone, the one picking lice out of the other's woolly head, his fury knew no bounds and the ship echoed from stem to stern with choice Naval epithets, few of which I had ever heard before. We kept out of his way for a day or two after that, to give him a chance to simmer down.

We drifted peacefully down the Red Sea and the temperature grew steadily higher, but as it was still only the end of January it never became unbearable. (I was to discover some months later just how unbearable it could become). Two days before arriving in Aden we had a fancy dress party. This stirred up great excitement amongst those of us who were good at improvising costumes, but my mind immediately goes blank when I am asked to think up a fancy dress, so I decided to ignore it and appear in one of my three evening dresses. However, one morning our embryo dress designer, Camilla, wearing a trouser suit in diagonal red and green stripes which hurt the eyes to look at, came up to me, accompanied by her two hangers-on, and announced that she had thought up the ideal costume for me to wear.

Flattered that she had even bothered to give this problem any thought, I was at once curious to know more.

"Well", she said, slowly, with a peculiar glint in her eyes, (and I should have been warned by the way her two companions at once collapsed in hysterical giggles) - "well, I thought I would go down to the galley and ask the cook to give me all the spare cabbage leaves he could find, then we would sew them all over your swim suit to cover it completely, make up a bunch for your hair, and you could appear as Queen of the Cabbage Patch!"

Luckily, I took it as a joke and we all had a good laugh. I say "luckily", because if I'd had a few minutes to think about it I should probably have punched her on the nose. But at that moment the luncheon gong sounded and we all turned in the direction of the saloon, but the more I thought about this remark, the more irritated and hurt I became. Can you imagine what those cabbage leaves would have smelt like after an hour or two in that heat? I could see the three of them out of the corner of my eye, drinking their soup and still chortling away, but I lifted my chin and gave them a dignified view of my profile. I was forced to the conclusion that they didn't like me but was puzzled as to why this should be. As far as I knew, I had always been polite to Camilla and her group and was rather hurt to be treated in this way. It was the first time in my short life so far that I had come up against this unreasoning antagonism, and of course it was not going to be the last, but I was not aware of that at the time and continued to feel put out and mystified.

The fancy dress party was, however, a great success.

Finally, after a great deal of thought, I draped myself in a white sheet from my bunk, pinned it together on the shoulders with small gilt safety pins, pushed several bracelets up my arms, arranged my hair on the top of my head and went as a girl from Ancient Greece. It was on a par with most of the other efforts and a bit better, I trust, than Margaret's which was so awful it was embarrassing. The B.I. line colours were black and white - the funnel and the hull were painted in these two colours - and her inspiration was to wear a short black dress covered all over with pinned-on circles of white lined exercise book paper about an inch in diameter, on each of which she had scrawled the letters "B.I." in black Indian ink. They weren't even proper circles, either, some oval, some flattened, and all looking as if they had been cut out with a small pair of curved nail scissors in a very great hurry.

She appeared at my cabin door and twirled in front of me, a pleased smile on her face. "What do you think of this?" she called. "All my own work!" I thought it was dreadful but hadn't the courage to say so.

Suffice it to say that neither of us won a prize. But the surprising thing to me, when we all paraded round the deck, was that several people had obviously brought their costumes with them in anticipation of such an occasion as this. There was Camilla well to the fore in an absolutely stunning creation all in black and white like Margaret's, but that is where the similarity ended. There was no way this costume could have been cobbled together in her cabin. She was dressed in a beautifully tailored man's evening suit, complete with top hat, everything black on her right side and white on her left (including the hat), and she had even blacked the right side of her face and whitened the left. If she was out to make an impression, this she surely did. Everyone was speechless.

One of the other people who made me stare was little Mr. McNellis. There he was, prancing round the room as though he had had too much to drink, with a leather thong round his head which supported a miniature gallows in wood sticking out in the front, and dangling therefrom was a tiny model of a hanged man. Printed round the leather head band were the words "The Last Drop". Once again, it must have been-packed in his luggage, ready to produce if the occasion demanded it.

But neither he nor Camilla were among the prize winners. The prizes went, and rightly in my opinion, to those one or two passengers who had put together a clever or interesting fancy dress from the materials available on the ship. And it all made one more entertaining evening to pass the time away.

At the southern end of the Red Sea came Aden, which we were told was a "free port" - duty-free, that is, not helping-yourself-free - where one could buy all sorts of luxury goods which were still unobtainable in England, such as Elizabeth Arden make-up, German cameras and Swiss watches. It looked a pleasant enough place from the ship even if, according to the guide books, it was built in the crater of an extinct volcano. We swarmed ashore in the launches and descended like locusts on the shops, feasting our eyes on the displays therein, buying small amounts of goodies since none of us had much money to throw around. Except for Ralph, who had seen his precious camera tossed into the drink at Port Sudan and who now proceeded to spend the unheard-of amount of a hundred pounds on a brand new Leica. The "Empire Windrush" accompanied us into the harbour, with envious faces once again watching us as we scampered into the boats. I don't think the troops were allowed ashore. At any rate we didn't see any of them there.

After a specially good lunch in a small restaurant known to Mac through previous travels, the four of us took a taxi for a trip out of town and up into the hills which we could see in the distance, having been told that the surrounding country was worth taking a look at. I can't remember whose bright idea this was, but when the car breasted the last rise and we saw what we were headed for, we unanimously decided to return to the ship with all speed. This was the district known as Crater and it looked just like that, in fact a moon landscape was what it reminded me of most, black hills and valleys under a brooding grey sky, and not a leaf or blade of grass to be seen. Back to the ship! This is no place for us!

Around this time, our days were enlivened by the peculiar antics of Camilla and George. Camilla announced one evening to her gang in the lounge that she was very sorry for George, and she thought he needed someone to take him in hand, (whatever that might imply). The rest of us who heard this provocative remark were naturally all agog to see what would happen next, and over the next few days we were treated to the unlovely sight of the pair of them walking about, hand in hand, gazing into one another's eyes like a couple of love-struck teenagers. Whatever the ramifications of this development, one good thing was that it did get George out of everyone's hair. Poor George!.

Our journey was now nearing its end. Rounding the horn of Africa, we entered the Indian Ocean and the weather immediately became hotter and more humid Most of our time from now on was spent in and around the pool, in a vain attempt to stay cool. We were due to arrive in Mombassa in three days' time, and we knew we should just miss seeing Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh setting off in the M.V. "Gothic" for their official tour of Australia. In fact, they were in Kenya at this moment, having a brief holiday at the Treetops Hotel, and the "Gothic" was waiting for them in Mombassa harbour.

We were talking about them idly one sticky morning, while languidly making paper costumes for the children's fancy dress party which was due to take place that afternoon. I was cutting out a pair of pale blue wings for a fairy costume and cursing because my hands were sweating too much to hold the scissors properly, when without any warning whatever the news burst upon us - news which signaled the end of an era, dispelled the tranquil clouds upon which we were floating, and brought us all down to earth with a mighty bump. Or a splash, seeing where we were.

Pat, one of the trainee nurses, came racing across the deck towards us, white faced and goggle eyed.

"Have you heard the news?" she asked in a hushed voice.

Well, judging by her voice it was obviously bad news, and we just as obviously had not heard it, or we wouldn't have been sitting there so unconcernedly sweating over our needlework. No, what's happened?

"The King is dead!" she whispered. "King George the sixth has died!"

The children's party was immediately cancelled. Shaken brutally out of our complacent dream world, we wandered about, talking quietly in small groups, held together only by the unchanging routine of shipboard life and living from one meal to the next. We gathered round the radio at news bulletin times, listening to what news there was and all feeling very far from home. We had known the King was ill, of course, but the seriousness of this illness had evidently been played down by the Press, and I suppose we all thought that the Princess and the Duke would not have set off on this trip if they had had any idea that his illness was terminal. We could imagine the scenes in London, and could picture the Princess (now the Queen) being met off the plane by the Prime Minister, and our hearts went out in sympathy to the widowed Queen Elizabeth, and Queen Mary who had now lost two sons. I think we all wished to be back home at this sad time, but had to accept the fact that there was nothing we could do about that. In fact, all any of us could do now was to start packing, ready to leave "Leicestershire" as soon as we docked.

The evening before we arrived in the harbour, we were sitting around in the lounge, having last drinks before going to bed, when Mr. McNellis, with his penchant for the dramatic, put it all in a nutshell. He suddenly leaped to his feet, raised his glass on high, and shouted, "The King is dead! Long live the Queen!"

Feeling somewhat embarrassed, we also raised our glasses, though not quite so high, and mumbled "the Queen".

And that was that. Nothing to do now but go to bed, and next morning say all the good-byes and then depart our different ways, to get on with our individual and separate lives.