Open Writing

Open Words by Peter Hinchliffe - I'd been aboard since 2 pm. Excitedly pacing the corridors and decks, peering into the restaurant, the bars, the library.

I had driven over from Yorkshire to Liverpool with my father in his Volkswagen Beetle. We had a quick and cheap lunch in a dreary café near the docks, then said an embarrassed and hurried goodbye.

What I didn't know until years later was that dad stayed on the quay-side until the liner sailed, reluctant to be separated from a son who was emigrating to America. A son he thought he may never see again.

I was so thrilled to be on a Cunard ship, embarking for a new life as a newspaperman in Texas, that I quickly forgot the emotional parting from a parent.

There were four of us in that cheapest--of-the-cheap cabin, down in the bowels of the Sylvania. A lad of my age from Glasgow who was bound for a new beginning as a carpenter in Boston. An 82-year-old blind Australian docker, Mr Cunliffe, a tall, strange American who looked like Dracula and had the nocturnal habits of the Transylvanian count, and myself.

The tall American slept throughout the day, arising at midnight to absent himself from the cabin for the rest of the night. Belatedly we discovered that he had spent the last 14 months in a psychiatric hospital in Eire.

In the two weeks before setting out on the biggest adventure of my life I had acute stomach pains.

"A grumbling appendix,'' said our family doctor.

"Oh dear,'' said I, having invested my last pound note in the move to the New World, with no insurance for cancellation. "Does that mean an operation.''

"I'll give you a prescription for penicillin,'' said the family doc. "That should keep it quiet. But tell the ship's surgeon about your condition.''

I waited until we were one day out into the Atlantic, with no chance of turning back, before reporting to the surgeon.

His name was de Mille. When I mentioned the word appendix he looked as though he had been struck on the side of the head with a wet salmon. Obviously mid-ocean appendectomies were not his strong suit.

Fortunately my appendix, apart from the occasional mutter, was quiescent for the next six months.

One man on the five-day crossing impressed me mightily. He wore a black cowboy hat and high-heeled boots and spoke with a Western drawl.

He lived in Dallas and was quick to point out that the Wichita in Wichita Falls was pronounced WichiTAW, not WichiTER.

For a day or so I was chastened and subdued at not even being able to pronounce the place where I was to make a new life.

Then I found that black hat was from Wigan, and had only been living in Texas for four years.

Immigration officers came aboard as we sailed up the Hudson river. I had to produce a huge negative of my chest X-ray. There was a last-minute flutter of apprehension in case some shadow was spotted on a lung - but all was OK.

Then, too overwhelmed to be able to speak, I gazed up at the Statue of Liberty and the sky-scraper tip of Manhattan.

I read this week that the new and mighty liner Queen Mary 2 is so tall that passengers will be able to look eye-to-eye with the Statue of Liberty as they sail by.

To me the old Sylvania, one of the last to sail on a regular North Atlantic passenger run, was huge. But at 150,000 tons the QM2 is six times bigger.

The new Queen of the seas is the biggest liner ever built, capable of carrying 3,000 passengers in its cosseting and luxurious water-borne lap.

If it was placed on its end, the QM2 would be 100 ft taller than the Eiffel Tower. Which means that passengers on the upper deck will be at eye level with the Statue of Liberty.

Those passengers are cruise tourists though - not travellers to a new land.

As delighted as they are to be in such new and luxurious surroundings, their excitement levels will come nowhere near those of a young Yorkshireman who saw the United States for the first time from the deck of the Sylvania in 1962.