Life and Death

When I was a child I remember going to Blackpool on a number of occasions. To our left, as we walked along the front, was sky and sea, invariably drizzly and grey. To our right were long terraces of old-fashioned Boarding Houses, all with big windows. One in particular I remember. It revealed a cosy breakfast room and tables clothed in white linen and silver. The lighting was subdued, pink; and it appeared truly magical, like nothing I’d ever seen before. And it was this lure, I’m sure, that attracted ‘regulars’ to Blackpool, year in and year out. It was perhaps a northern thing, dating from a time when factories closed for holiday weeks; there were special trains, and holidays were almost a communal activity. 

I was reminded of this on the ship with the realisation we had become part of a cult. The ‘cruise cult.’ There are cults within cults, in this case that of Fred Olsen or ‘Fred’—referred to in reverent whispers. 

People spoke in quiet pride of the number of cruises they’d been on, some happy to stay on the ship having been to these places before. Like the northerners that once flocked to Blackpool, they liked what they already had. Why change a good thing. We’re talking about people on their fifteenth or eighteenth cruise—far better than any care home alternative—speaking of which, they should just give the care home franchise to Fred. He’d make a far better job of it. Assign their pensions to Fred and be done.

It's foolish to generalise or cast judgement. Every person has their own story. One lady in her eighties ruefully described her knee and hip replacements and upcoming shoulder surgery, the amount of metal in her, and how airport security alarms bleeped from a mile away. She’d booked five cruises for the upcoming year. In her case the impetus to cruise was not just making the best of things, before she became totally immobile. It also reflected a lifetime of  adventuring. As a child she’d experienced the Liverpool blitz and grown up amidst bombsites. In 1957 she bought a Vespa and with a friend drove all the way to a Paris largely untouched by the war. The beauty of a foreign city had proved an eye opener and prompted a life-long wanderlust. Age shouldn’t, and in her case hasn’t ended an adventurous spirit, even if cruising is now the only way it can be released.

Another lady, from Kenya, had travelled all the way from Africa to Liverpool for this particular cruise because she had always wanted to cross the Atlantic to Canada. This lady came from what you would call ‘good stock.’ She had a thousand-yard stare, the kind that examined your soul as you talked. It’s one the of secrets of the Royal Family and the aristocracy in general, an ability to rivet you with a gaze as though what you were saying was the most important thing in the world at that moment. It’s a neat trick, even if at that particular moment we were talking about chocolate eclairs. 

I’ve mentioned the feuding ukulele players, but I mustn’t forget the Irish travellers. They constituted of a patriarch who spent most of his time in the bar getting drunk, and glammed up young ladies, one of whom had a baby in tow. They never got farther than Newfoundland. One account has it that at St Johns they went on the rob, stuffing their loot into the baby’s pushchair. The police were waiting for them at the port and the ship sailed off without them.

And then there was Fred Olsen himself—the actual Fred—a thin ninety-two-year-old man walking with the aid of sticks. He was on board, but I failed to spot him amidst the multitude of elderly gentlemen leaning on sticks. Even so, it was interesting that the owner or other members of the family regularly sail on their own ships and so sample customer experience first-hand.

Our final passenger was ‘Death.’ The first indication manifested itself in two nurses rushing a bent-up figure in a wheelchair down a long corridor enroute to the Medical Centre. We were enroute to the restaurant and our evening meal. A moment or two before dessert—pavlova, my wife had the apple tart—a tannoy switched into life, along with a sombre request for ‘a stretcher party’ to attend the Medical Centre. Speculation was rife, but we had seen the first manifestation, and there was of course only one destination after the Medical Centre when a stretcher is called for.

Being a simple soul, I assumed they’d commandeer a fridge and imagined how over the next few days they keep pushing the ice-cream and sorbets to make space. Later I discovered cruise ships necessarily have their own morgue capable of carrying up to three bodies, more on the very large ships. A cheery thought. 

Though usually close to the medical centre, some can be situated near food fridges as the photo below shows. 

There was of course life outside the ship—and also an absence of it. Whether it was Baie-Comeau, Trois Rivieres,  or Saguenay, we were struck by the absence of traffic. Normally you have to wait some time before you can take a photo without the ubiquitous white van. Here you can almost walk on the road with your eyes shut, assuming there's room in the ship's morgue.