The finest ocean liner of its day: the SS France

SOME JOURNEYS STICK IN our memories for a lifetime, particularly when they are of the kind you can never take again. Forty years ago this week I embarked on a transoceanic journey aboard one of the world’s last great ocean liners, an elegant mode of travel that has long since gone the way of the dodo bird.

My father has since retired from the university, but there was a time when his job as a French professor frequently took him across the pond for teaching and research. In 1970 he landed a yearlong exchange position at the University of Poitiers in east-central France and decided to take the family with him.

I was still a child at the time, and the news hit me like a bus. What, I was supposed to give up my home and friends and live in a foreign country for a whole year? So what if it was going to be “a wonderful learning experience”? As a matter of fact, I already had been to Europe for half a year in 1966/67, where I spent my entire first day of kindergarten in Paris crying my eyes out (I still remember this vividly – my mistrust of educational institutions probably goes back to this event). Protest as I might, there was nothing to be done.

My parents booked tickets on the SS France, the greatest ocean liner of its day. This was not a cruise ship, mind you, although the vessel did go on cruises during the winter months and the first class had a reputation for luxury. It was above all a means of transportation, and an affordable one at that. My parents calculated that there was little difference in price when it came to transporting a family with four kids, a trunk of clothes, and a very large dog by ship compared to a jet plane, and so they went for it. I'm glad they did.

We drove all the way to New York and embarked somewhere in Lower Manhattan. The France was a true floating city that had to be seen to be believed. Forty-six meters longer than the Titanic, it had entered service in 1962. It had been designed as a showcase for the French nation and received lavish public subsidies. The ship was twelve decks tall and displaced over 57,000 tons. With eight boilers and four propellers, it could do an astonishing thirty-five knots, second only to the United States in speed. This allowed it to cross the Atlantic from Le Havre to New York in just five to six days. It contained two swimming pools – one for each class – sports facilities of various kinds, grand dining halls, shops, bars, cafés, and a first-rate galley.

Everyone who has seen the film Titanic has a notion of shipboard life. But neither the movie’s depiction of first or third class life had any resemblance to our stay in second class (the France had no steerage). Our cabins were cramped and modestly furnished. Food was excellent but our dining hall was simple. I remember numerous visits to movies, and daily stops in the luxurious ship kennel with its fake lamp posts and fire hydrants, where we could take Max for walks until he gleefully returned indoors to enjoy the leftovers from the first-class galley. The crew made our stay as comfortable as possible, and the only real excitement we ever experienced was the emergency drill, which brought us all up to the boat deck in warm clothes and with our lifejackets safely tied around our chests. The captain was taking no chances with icebergs.

What I liked best was just standing on the deck, or else lying on the deck chairs, rolled up in thick red-plaid blankets. Ship life was good – and my heart sank when we finally sighted land once more.

My horror of moving to France had been growing by the day, and my eyes clung desperately to the green hills of England as we pulled away from Southampton. I’ve been an Anglophile ever since. When we reached Le Havre forty years ago today, things became serious.

 
The France was 46 meters longer than the Titanic

How did I make out in France? Life was good, magical even, with an historic old apartment in the heart of the ancient city and journeys to dreamlike sites across the country, including a trip to Spain and a summer vacation in Hungary and Romania. I loved France, developing a passion for medieval castles, Tintin books, baguettes, Nutella, and the BBC World Service that has never left me.

The trouble started at school, as you might expect. Since my French remained poor and the school was of the old-fashioned, decrepit kind – pure Third Republic – where the psychopathic teachers gleefully slapped and beat the students whenever they felt the inclination, I felt like George Orwell at his prep school, “a goldfish in a tank of pikes.” My older siblings did better, I think, but I never knew what hit me. And yet I survived it all somehow, and I wouldn’t erase the memory if I could. (When I started writing a new children’s book this week, I immediately drew upon those memories when it came time to describe a particularly sinister school).

 
Second life: The cruise ship Norway in 1983

We returned to New York the same way in the summer of 1971, and my memories from that journey are even more vivid. But alas, the days of the passenger liner were nearing their end. Already a year after our return trip, the France embarked on its first around the world cruise. Around the same time, the French government slashed its passenger ship subsidy in favor of the absurd Concorde project. In 1974 the Cunard Line sold the France to an Arab businessman who hoped to make a floating museum out of it. In 1979 a Norwegian cruise ship company acquired and renovated the ship, putting it into service as the SS Norway. It remained in service until a boiler explosion damaged it in 2003. It ended up in an Indian port, where it was finally scrapped in 2008.

In retrospect, spending a year in France at that formative age ruined me for Midwest living. Parents should give decisions like this a great deal of thought before taking the plunge. After experiencing “Gay Paree,” Andorra, San Sebastian, the castles of Rhineland, the beauties of Salzburg, and even the Romanian Riviera, "heading for the mall" or checking out the Quad Cities nightlife could never really hold my attention. Not that I didn't try, of course, but phenomena like "American Idol" and Glenn Beck just don't do it for me. I imagine my subsequent life would have been much happier if they could have excited me, but what does it matter? No wonder I ended up living abroad fulltime.

Transport has undergone a revolution since 1970, but I’m not quite sure if the revolution has been won or lost. Sure, we can get to places much faster than ever before, but when it comes to some journeys, I believe the journey itself is the destination. But that won’t concern me as long as I can remember a time when even I, a simple second class passenger, was “King of the World” for five precious days.