THE man in the Veuve Clicquot champagne bar spluttered on his bubbles. As a 30ft wall of grey water reared like a stallion and violently enveloped the window just feet away, he sank back, mouth open, into his leather chair. It was the calling card of a force nine North Atlantic gale that battered the
Queen Mary 2 for most of the next day, generating seas rated one notch below phenomenal. “It’s a bit frisky,” said the captain.
For my mother, Joan, it bought back alarming memories. In 1954 — on her debut crossing to New York as Assistant Purser First Class on the original Queen Mary — she spent three days confined to her cabin with seasickness. “It was horrendously rough,” she recalls. “We were strapped into our bunks to stop us falling out. We rolled so far you thought it would never go back. I lay there listening to creaks and crashes as stewards dropped trays of crockery. Several people were injured.”
Four years later, after another grim crossing with 100 casualties, including many broken bones, stabilisers were fitted. It was too late for my mother. After returning from that first tumultuous voyage, she vowed never to go on a liner again. Certainly not an Atlantic crossing. And never in November.
So, 50 years later to the month, for a special treat, I took her on a transatlantic crossing in November. I’m a good son. This, however, was a very different experience.
QM2, the world’s largest, longest, tallest, most expensive liner, made light of the forbidding ocean. There was some pitch and roll but the extra-thick hull, long bow and four 70-tonne stabilisers proved solid companions. Apart from the odd terrifying wobble on her high heels, Mum found it an absolute breeze.
Alongside the superior stability and dramatic growth spurt — on Southampton dock we craned our necks to look at a vessel six decks higher than its predecessor — there were satisfying echoes of the ship she had briefly called home.
Without lapsing into historical pastiche, QM2 offers a high-tech, contemporary take on her glorious 1930s grandparent. There are sinuous curves, sweeping staircases and massive murals on the Art Deco themes of transport, travel and nature, while the arabesque swirls of the Royal Court Theatre and ornately patterned ballroom floor of the Queen’s Room hark back to the age of Noël Coward, cruising and cocktails.
At first sight, Cunard appears to use the mahogany, maple, earned the Queen Mary the "ship of beautiful woods" label. But in these safety conscious, less romantic days, the QM2 has become the ship of beautiful, flame-retardant, synthetic panels.
Like the old liner, this is a floating gallery, with a £2.6 million art collection, but the biggest jog to Mum's memory was the extraordinary 1,347-capacity Britannia Restaurant. Along with the torchère lights, classic columns and illuminated glass ceiling, there is a huge hanging tapestry of QM2 in New York - a direct nod to the famous Atlantic chart in the old first-class dining room. Walking through the Britannia's dramatic entrance in black tie felt like stepping back to a more civilised age.
"The Queen Mary was an elegant lady but this is just beautiful," Mum told me over the first formal dinner. "It has really caught the feel of that era."
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"There was dancing, deck games and a lot of fun," she recalled, "but we were primarily trying to get people to and from America as quickly as possible. Now it's much more about leisure and enjoyment."
So from the moment we slipped out of Southampton as a band played reggae next to the Pavilion Pool - "it didn't happen in my day," said my mother primly, "we didn't know what reggae was," - we plunged headlong into QM2's wonderful itinerary: art auctions, wine tasting, pub quizzes, bridge sessions, fashion shows, IMAX movies in the world's first floating planetarium and lectures on Sidney Bechet, one of her favourite 1950s jazz artists.
