The S. S. Uganda Cruise 2

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The first few days of the summer of 1977 S. S. Uganda educational cruise were entirely at sea. The bullies lost interest in me after the first night, and the stormy weather of the North Sea gave way to the pleasant calmness of the Baltic. The skies brightened and I got on well with students from Edinburgh, as well as one of my fellow Manchester students, who despite being 15, had somehow smuggled a lot of beer on board with him, which he shared with me and others. As this was an educational cruise, we were expected to do school work. We were given work books in which to log features of the ship and the countries we were to visit, but as no one was checking on what we wrote, the book, including mine, had a tendency to fall overboard. We had to play quoits on deck, which I enjoyed and we were granted just one swim in the ship pool, and not again all fortnight, which was a real shame. There was a cinema for us, showing popular movies and some of the lads yelled like animals whenever attractive women appeared onscreen. We watched Logan’s Run, which features a brief nude scene and some lads behaved like total Neanderthals when that was on. Several girls in the audience walked out and I was glad I had seen the film before. I never tired of sitting on the deck just watching the sea, and occasional passing ships. A giant Japanese supertanker passed us at one point with crew riding motorbikes to get from one end to the other. We were officially only allowed in the education-passenger areas, but we soon found that by simply removing our badges we could walk freely among the ordinary passengers, if we just watched that our teachers never spotted us and they just treated the cruise as an excuse to be in their main bar all day. We had a routine lifeboat drill, received a welcome speech from the Captain, and got a tour of the ship including the main control bridge and the engine rooms which seemed more automated than manned. Often after the disco ended with the usual playing of Rod Stewart’s sailing I was expected to go right to bed, but I nearly always stayed up on deck for hours staring at the Milky Way in its full glory, unaffected by the light pollution of towns and cities. Day four was the day of our first port of call, the island of Visby in Sweden. The Uganda weighed anchor in the bay and we were taken to Visby on motor-powered boats. Most of the passengers rushed ashore. I took my first step carefully savouring my first footfall on foreign soil, wishing I had some Neil Armstrong type of comment to mark the occasion with. We wandered round freely, looking at castles, churches, etc. I was with two of my school friends. We had no real plans and suddenly found ourselves joined by a tall Swedish lady in a very transparent revealing top, with nothing underneath it, and bikini briefs, who somehow appointed herself as our tour guide. I can’t remember much of what she said and my friends later teased me that I was just completely ga-ga over her and that they never got a chance to talk to her at all. They sounded jealous. Eventually she just wandered off. We got back to the docks for the boats to take us back to the ship, sailing on to our next destination, Russia. Photo – postcard of the S. S. Uganda. I was glad to buy this card as though I took photos on and around the ship I never got far enough back from it to get a clear shot of the whole vessel in one frame. Arthur Chappell