April 17, 2015

Finest Hour 121, Winter 2003-04

Page 29

By JOHN MALCOLM BRINNIN

Transportation writers hold a handful of passages in special respect: Ken Purdy’s sketch ofTazio Nuvolari, the greatest racing driver who ever lived; Lucius Beebe’s paean to The 20th Century Limited, greatest train in the world; Don Vorderman’s tribute to Simon Templars Hirondel, the greatest car in all fiction. Churchill’s long association with the Cunard-White Star Queens suggests that another such piece by John Malcolm Brinnin, reprinted by permission from his book, Sway of the Grand Saloon (NY: Barnes & Noble, 2000), is not out of place here. —Editor

Twelve-ten AM, 25 September 1967. The Royal Mail Ship Queen Elizabeth, largest ship in the world, twenty-seven years old, is bound westward. At some point in the early morning she will meet and pass the Queen Mary, the next-largest ship in the world, thirty-one years old, bound east. This will be their final meeting, their last sight of one another, ever.

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For more than two decades they have been the proudest sisters on the ocean, deferential to one another, secure in the knowledge that they are the most celebrated things on water since rafts went floating down the Tigris and Euphrates.

Notices of this encounter have been broadcast and posted throughout the ship. But as usual at this hour most passengers have gone to bed, leaving only a few individuals strolling and dawdling on the Promenade Deck. Most of these have chosen to be alone; and they are a bit sheepish, a bit embarrassed, as though ashamed to be seen in the thrall of sentiment, even by others equally enthralled.

As the appointed moment draws near, they begin to disappear from the Promenade Deck, only to reappear in the darkness of the broad, glassed-in observation area on Boat Deck Forward. They stand apart from one another and do not speak, their eyes fixed on the visible horizon to the east as the vibration of the ship gives a slightly stroboscopic blur to everything they see.

The mid-Atlantic sky is windless, a dome of hard stars; the ocean glows, an immense conjunction of inseparable water and air. Entranced, the late watchers try to pick out some dot of light that will not turn out to be a star. Hushed, the minutes pass. These ten or twelve of the faithful in their shadowy stances might be postulants on a Vermont hillside, waiting in their gowns for the end of the world.

Then the light of certainty; almost as if she were climbing the watery slopes of the globe, the oncoming Queen shows one wink at her topmost mast, then two.

Spotted, she grows quickly in size and brightness. In the dim silence of the enclosure there are mutters, the clicks of binoculars against plate glass, an almost reverential sense of breath withheld. On she comes, the Mary, with a swiftness that takes everyone by surprise: together the great ships, more than 160,000 tons of steel, are closing the gap at 60 mph.

Cutting the water deeply, pushing it aside in great crested arrowheads, they veer toward one another almost as if to embrace, and all the lights blaze on, scattering the dark. The huge funnels glow in their Cunard red, the basso-profundo horns belt out a sound that has less the quality of a salute than one long mortal cry.

Standing to attention on the portside wing of his flying bridge, the Elizabeth‘s captain doffs his hat; on the starboard wing of the Mary her captain does the same. As though they had not walked and climbed there but had been somehow instantly transported to the topmost deck, the few passengers who have watched the Mary come out of the night now watch her go.

All through the episode, mere minutes long, have come giggles and petulant whimpers from sequestered corners of the top deck. Indifferent to the moment, untouched by the claims of history, youngsters not yet born when the two Queens were the newest wonders of the world cling together in adolescent parodies of passion and do not bother even to look up. As the darkness closes over and the long wakes are joined, the sentimentalists stand for a while watching the ocean recover its seamless immensity. Then, one by one, like people dispersing downhill after a burial, they find their way to their cabins, and close their doors.