I write to you this week from a ninth-deck stateroom on the Queen Mary 2 after my second appearance in the week before an audience of a thousand assorted people in the ship’s Royal Court Theatre, situated on decks two and three, standing room only… followed by a buffet lunch in the Britannia pick-and-mix restaurant on deck seven and a blustery walk three times around the deck to get our steps above the current meagre 2,370.
“What would you do if I blew overboard?” I shouted at David, my travelling companion and background screen images provider. “I’d wave,” he retorted.
I have to stop myself from being an Eeyore all the time, visualising disasters in my mind with great clarity, while he is blindly optimistic. Later after a game of table tennis, lying on a deck listening to kids playing in the pool, my mind went like this, in 30 seconds: “Aw, I’d love to bring the grandkids here for my big birthday, they’re old enough to be up here in the pool on their own. What if one of them went in the deep end? The other one would come to my cabin and say, ‘Sacha’s in the medical centre…’”
This is what comes of having a mother who regarded Valium as a substitute for chocolate and a dad who said, “Go pamelakh” (go slowly) every time I went upstairs.
It is an education being aboard this elegant Cunard ship. If people-watching is your thing – and it has always been mine – then book now and bring a recording device. If I was a singleton on board I’m not sure I could cope. There are special events for “those travelling alone”, and a friend of mine recently met her now significant other on day one practically as she marched up the gangplank, but I suspect, without David, I would sit in a wind-free corner with a 600-page novel and take all my meals in my cabin.
And, yes, there is a preponderance of people over 60, but that doesn’t bother me. I’m coming up to 75, which I regard as “fake news”. I have to face facts, they are the audience who grew up with me. They loved the stories about Agony, my mother and BT. Mind you, I also had a one-year-old baby, Hermione, seated contentedly at both of my talks.
Be nice to them on the way up – they’ll be employing you by the time they’re 12.
At the Q and A today one of the sillier questions was: “Can you get me a seat at the captain’s table?” signed Tom “Chutzpah” Fitzgerald. I had explained at the first talk that a definition of the word chutzpah was a small boy peeing through someone’s letterbox then ringing the doorbell to see how far it went. Another serious one asked if I still had the blue blouse with yellow inserts that she sold me in Muswell Hill 41 years ago. I said: “No, but my mother had it to the end.”
Someone else wrote: “Everybody OUT!” We all remember that. What he hadn’t remembered was that phrase was uttered, not by me, but by the incomparable Miriam Karlin. It led me to tell them how Miriam once rang me asking if she could book me for her memorial.
I replied that I was completely booked up for the next 20 years but if she was prepared to wait I would put her near the top of the list. She wrote back, saying: “OK, but let me know if you get a cancellation.” Then she added: “Just think, all you’ll have to do is read out this correspondence” – which, in time, I duly did. The memorial was at the Royal Court Theatre in London, not known until recently, for its philosemitism, and my first words were: “Miriam and I agreed never to discuss Israel. But we will.”
Back to the Cunard vessel. On Wednesday, we docked at Malaga and took the tour to Córdoba, hoping to learn more about the great Sephardic rabbi, astronomer, philosopher and physician Maimonides – the Rambam – who was born here in 1138.
He wrote The Guide for the Perplexed. And from where I sit on deck nine, sipping a golden, salted margarita, surrounded by Americans hanging their poor heads in mortification at the words and actions of their unbearable president, and Israelis and Jews split into more schisms than a conclave, we have never needed a guide for permanent perplexion more.
As it happened, the tiny, stucco-panelled 1315 shul on Calle de los Judios was a hasty stop on our tour, which focused on the Mezquita, the Visigoth temple-turned-Mosque-turned- Cathedral of 961, which does what it says on the minaret – takes away your breath.
I would have liked to hear more about the building restrictions, which forced the Jews to humbler dimensions and paucity of height compared to other places of worship. The dimensions are no more than five square metres and the ceilings are vaulted to make them appear higher. There it stands though, as a relic of a country that got rid of its Jews with brutal efficiency. Almost 150 years before the Inquisition, Maimonides (fleeing fanatical Muslims, not Christians) ended his life exiled in Egypt and lives in every book of prayer modern Jews pray from every week. Result!
The last stop off was Cadiz and, rejecting the slight herding of the tours, we strolled around the squares in a little cruise of our own and came upon a small monument to Ángel Sanz Briz, the Schindler of Spain. He was a Spanish diplomat who saved more than 5,200 Jews in German-occupied Budapest in the late stages of the Second World War by issuing passports to Jews of Spanish origins. He was allowed to do this for 200 Jews. He did it instead for 200 families, whom he housed during the waiting period for visas at his own expense. He took other postings, including The Holy See, and was rewarded with the Order of Merit from Budapest. Sanz Briz is honoured by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile Among the Nations. How rare for a brave humanitarian to be honoured in his own lifetime.
We are almost into the English Channel now and there are bags to be packed and passports to be handed in and perhaps one more deck walk in a vain attempt to recover our gut microbes after the dubious joy of a pre-packed kosher Friday night dinner. I must have shaken 2,000 eager hands and encountered nothing but kindness, sweet service and a community at sea.One lady said: “It felt like talking to a friend.” Result again!
Noël Coward wrote in his ship-to-shore musical Sail Away: “Why do the wrong people travel, travel, travel and the right people stay at home?” Perhaps, for once the Master was wrong. Or on the wrong ship.
