QE2 dream job
by Published on 3rd July 2016 07:32 PM
Published: September 28, 2003
FOR a year in the pre-Internet, even pre-fax, years of the late 1970's, Gregory Miller, my not-yet husband, and I put out the ship's newspaper on the Queen Elizabeth 2. We lived and worked on the ship as it traveled around the world, crisscrossed the Atlantic, pulled into steamy Caribbean ports. We put out The QE2 Times every day the ship was at sea: four to six pages of U.S. and international news, QE2 features and announcements, stock prices from New York and London, the New York Times crossword puzzle and other syndicated features. Passengers had it slipped under their doors each morning, and the crew grabbed it where they could.
For us, The QE2 Times was our all-expense-paid -- plus salary -- ticket around the world. In 1977 it took us to a gray and wounded China in the final throes of the Cultural Revolution, to South Africa deep in apartheid, to the string-bikini beaches of Rio while upstate New York, Buffalo in particular, staggered under relentless snowfall. The Son of Sam was arrested that summer, and New York's second major blackout struck, but we were crossing the Atlantic -- 30-odd times -- then spent the fall in the Caribbean. Spring had come to us in Spain, Gibraltar, the fjords of Scandinavia.
It was also our passport into the upstairs/downstairs life at sea, our entrée into British life without bad weather. We lived and ate with passengers but partied with the crew, and we had the run of the ship as we put out the village paper for this floating community of about 1,700 passengers and 1,000 predominantly British crew. We danced late into the night, dressed to the nines, among passengers generally 25 years older than we. But there were also countless nights in smoky crew bars, a sociologist's dream of officers and waiters, gays and lesbians, segmented here, mixed there, places of earsplitting music and laughter against the roaring engines of the lowest decks. Everybody smoked strong cheap duty-free cigarettes and alcohol flowed as freely as the waters all around us.
We were the only Americans working in this moving British outpost and came to know the ship as intimately as you learn the back alleys and byways of a village you love. Each day we had our beds made, our rooms cleaned, our meals cooked and served. When a reporter in Fort Lauderdale interviewed us on the beach about what we did -- and there we are in the yellowed clipping, in impossibly large sunglasses and minuscule bathing suits -- the headline called it ''the dream job.''
No employer has since paid us to sample Singapore's street cooking, to poke around the back alleys of Port-au-Prince in search of a special wooden carving, to stand at the very tip of Africa and watch two oceans come together. We have traveled since leaving the QE2 but never on the ship.
Not until our 25th wedding anniversary approached did we begin, in earnest, to think about returning. Around that time, we also realized the QE2 would be ending its fabled run of trans-Atlantic crossings, to be replaced by the Queen Mary 2, so it made a certain sense.
Of course it had occurred to us before. In the first year or two after getting back to New York, we'd sometimes say ''Let's go back to India'' or ''Don't you wish we were in Bali,'' but we were busy, newly married, starting careers. And after the children came, three in six years, life really got in the way. Now and again, once every couple of years, we'd say: ''Let's go back on the QE2.'' But we kept putting it off.
Within a couple of years, the job of QE2 shipboard editors disappeared, replaced eventually by TimesFax, now known as TimesDigest, and a daily ship's program. We felt like historical footnotes. Cunard had hired us to create the newspaper --we were told it had never been done at sea before --to replace the Labor politics and soccer scores of The Daily Telegraph, which had been wired to the ship from London. Clearly, that didn't initially seal our bonds with the British crew. For many, we two Americans were the living, breathing emblems of how Britain's glory had faded, and worse, it was Queen Elizabeth's jubilee year.
Peace came with time, and as it did, in issue after issue, we put out a paper with news from radio and telex wire service transmissions, and feature articles about passenger lecturers, including Dom DeLuise, Dr. Robert Atkins, Van Johnson, Lynn Redgrave. I went through the Panama Canal with Lillian Gish, and Bill Buckley asked us, over Champagne one evening, what we thought of the plotting of his latest thriller, which he was writing on board.
I SEE an impossibly young Jimmy Carter on many of our front pages, stories of Rhodesian strife, South Moluccan terrorists, SALT talks breaking down, poor Elvis, dead. Inside were recipes from the vast stainless steel kitchens and stories about odd British seagoing habits like dousing people with ketchup and vinegar and other awful combinations, then tossing them into the pool at their first crossing of the Equator. We closed each issue at 10 p.m. On the trans-Atlantics and the world cruise, we finished our work in evening clothes.
Working on a ship posed challenges unknown in an office. We crossed the Atlantic from Europe when storm waves battered the ship so badly that the anchor plunged deep into the seemingly impregnable bow, crippling the ship, forcing us into Boston, unable to reach New York. On some trips, as the ship bobbed and lurched, our file cabinets opened and closed all around us, lampshades banged, and we hung on tight to our typewriters.
But no other job would have allowed us to glide into Cherbourg harbor late at night, the ship ablaze, the music soaring, my heart nearly bursting. Or to have tea and a dazzling tray of pastries delivered to the office each day at exactly 4 p.m. Or to poke around the caves of Elephanta Island in India, to hear Sri Lankan children shyly say: ''Allo, tourists.'' To be asked, on the North Atlantic, by Gregory if I would marry him, if I would wear the engagement ring he bought from the jeweler on one of the upper decks.
So it seemed only right to celebrate our 25th by returning to the ship. We checked schedules, began to think of the European part of the trip. I looked at ads for long dresses, high heels, called my friend Christine who had gone around the world six times as a QE2 photographer.
Then instead we threw a party.
Something other than life was clearly getting in the way.
Was it that we'd just be -- well, passengers? Was it too little too late? And in the mix, since Sept. 11, was deep wistfulness, not just for a way of life, but for the world itself. The world was so different, so many of the places we had blithely explored were under new rules, new security, many possessed by an anti-American fervor we had never experienced.
Well, the party was great. And the QE2 will continue to cruise -- around the world, in the Mediterranean, to. Scandinavia. Maybe next year.
Drawing (Drawing by Sophie Blackall)
JOAN MOTYKA is director of employee relations at The Times.
Senior Site Moderator-Member and Friend of this Website
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