August 22, 2001




I'm a 51-year-old journalist and recent ex-broadcaster from Cape Town, now living with my wife just outside London.




I'm at that stage of life where nostalgia starts to mean something, when one goes quietly looking for the past. Mine was a past in which the Windsor Castle loomed large - for no particular reason, other than the fact that I was privileged to travel on her often, right up to and including her last Coastwise voyage in 1977 from Cape Town to Durban and back.




At this age, it is ridiculous to have to admit that one was hopelessly in love with a floating piece of machinery. From the time that I was a callow 11-year-old to the present, I have loved the Windsor - almost been in awe of her - because of what she represented; the milestones that she marked in my life, the curious fact that she was a link - a thread - that joined good and sunny happenings together in a golden youth spent in the African sun. I have - until now - always scoffed at the sentimentalists who attribute human qualities and personalities to inanimate objects - that is, until today when I went on the three-page virtual tour of the decaying Windsor - insultingly renamed after the wife of some Greek shipping magnate, and mouldering off Piraeus.




The Windsor - more than any of the others, and I have travelled on them, too - was eerily benevolent, solid, welcoming and comforting. It was a shio of immense character. The seasons in Cape Town - I overlooked the harbour - were punctuated by its siren, or hooter, or whatever, which I had come to recognise in the same way that one knows the sound of one's own car or the voice of one's cat.




As a boy of 12, I shall never forget a visit to the Bridge that had been organised for the children, when - under the command, I recall, of a Captain named Patey - A.G.Patey - I was given a chance to steer the Windsor Castle for a moment, and some very basic instruction in how to do so. The automatic pilot had been disengaged; for a moment I was Captain of the Windsor Castle. I need hardly add that they tactfully resumed command rather quickly - whatever in life I was cut out for, it was evidently not as a helmsman.




It is peculiar how one remembers trivia in the most minute detail. I have always had that facility. I can remember the way that the sun fell; the colour and the texture of the Lan-Air-Cel blankets that were used in the Windsor's first-class cabins; I can remember as though it were this morning the smell of the smoke from the funnel, the smells of varnish, new paint, oil, expensive curtains, petit-fours...antiseptic outside the hospital. I remember the ship's cinema, where shipboard pals and I used to hide behind the screen and watch in reverse all those late night films that out parents had deemed unsuitable. I remember the Huntley & Palmer biscuits and the sugar-cubes wrapped in Union-Castle paper. I remember so well the shops, the squeak of the radar thing that rotated on the mast, the unobtrusive service by impeccably mannered and wonderfully-trained stewards in the first-class dining room, with its Windsor Castle murals that were sometimes inexplicably covered by red velvet curtains. The lifts, the little room just opposite the purser's bureau where the switchboard operators sat...so much; so many sights, sounds, smells and associations.




And now, the Margarita L, rust-streaked and tired, but certainly in good enough order to go to sea again for many a year, lies at anchor 15 miles from Piraeus, up for sale. The asking price, I believe, is of the order of $8,000,000. I believe also that the boilers have been re-tubed and that the ship is in excellent order, but for one turbine that needs some work. Her original Union Castle furnishings are still in place.




I know that ship. She is alive. As a young man (she was withdrawn when I was 27), I knew her every nook and cranny. She has been a link that has joined together many of the major and happy moments and events of my life. My wife complains sometimes that I am a hopeless romantic - but she is scarcely in a position to talk; for the old Pendennis Castle had the same effect on her. When I told her last night that it had been unceremoniously dragged up onto a beach and cut up with welding torches in 1980, she was uncharacteristically silent for a very long time.




I'm a writer because I have a soul, because I notice things, because I hope I can temper the cynicism which the trade calls for with a streak of sentiment and a healthy dose of romance.


There is very little that I would not give to be able to go out there now, to be rowed out this minute to the old Windsor and left to wander her alone for a couple of hours to say goodbye, to touch and to remember a time when this lavender-hulled bastion of gentle and good breeding, this maritime momument to good taste, this living, embracing, steel-and-steam thing plied the seas and was good to me at the dawning of my life.




I shall be bereaved when she goes, believe me when I say that. There will be an empty, aching place in my life where the Windsor Castle once was. Indulge me, and believe it - I am hopelessly forlorn over the imminent demise of that ship. Its picture on the website which I visited this morning is a thing of infinite sadness and joy intermingled.




If the mechanical condition of the Windsor is as good as it reputedly is, then it is to be hoped that - from a purely pragmatic point of view - the owner can be convinced that nostalgia is a big - and growing - market among those with the money to pay. I know what I would do. And I suspect - because the owner is apparently taken out there from time to time, and spends time on board her in one of the cabins, reportedly all alone - that he has conceived some form of affection for her, and would have an uncomfortable lump in his throat at the going of her. After all, he is a staggeringly wealthy man, reportedly now in poor health, and he named the old Windsor after his wife, whom he presumably loves.




In return for her life, it could be that the old Windsor, spruced up and painted in Union-Castle livery again, British-staffed and shipshape, might well reward her owners handsomely in the nostalgia-cruise trade before the angels finally come for her.




I usually get paid for writing. This one I have done with love, and with an uncomfortable stinging behind the eyes.




GAVIN BARFIELD


barfieldg@radiotaxis.co.uk

Hi, I have a friend in Cape Town who travelled to Cape Town in 1964 is there anywhere she can find the Passenger Manifest for her trip? Thanks for your time reading this.


Dave

Dear GAVIN,
I hope you are the Gavin I got to know 1998 in Muizenberg?
I like your style and your passionate writing about this huge ship of former times I haven`t known before-thanks for sharing your intimate feelings (2001 -quite a while time ago- how is life today?).

I would like to end my note with one sentence you wrote me in 1999:
"The other person`s world is almost always more interesting than your own".

Best regards and a good new
year 2012
Dörte

Please answere me, even if you aren´t Gavin from the prosit. Do you live and work in East London ?