Last year, my son, having just enlisted in the Army Air Corps, spent an exciting few weeks on board HMS Ark Royal, Britain’s only aircraft carrier, during a combined military exercise off the coast of Scotland. It was to be the ship’s last voyage.

Click photo to read Ark Royal notice

A week or so ago he sent me a poignant notice that had gone out to potential buyers of the Ark Royal, days before it was formally scrapped.

It saddened me. A ship has a soul and a dry dock is a cemetery.

I recalled how in 1976 I once rounded a cliff on the East coast of Taiwan not far from the port of Hualian. It was a bright sunny day and sky and ocean were an arching expanse of life-giving airy blue, and every shape on shore was etched with light and shadow.

There below us in a breaking yard was an ocean liner – dazzling, white, with fine lines, knife-like against the background of hills.

Only closer inspection showed that the great yellow funnel was hanging at a gruesome angle, and all the masts were gone.

SS Chitral

With a shock I recognised her. She was SS Chitral. She had been the pride of P&O’s Far East passenger run. In 1962 I had celebrated my ninth birthday on her. My mother, brother and I had spent the whole summer travelling in her from Yokohama to Southampton. She took me to boarding school.

My mind was flooded with memories: islands at sunset in the South China Sea, the Tiger Balm Gardens in Hong Kong, Hindu temples in Singapore, the snake temple in Penang, a boy climbing a coconut tree in Colombo, the lights of Aden glinting in a velvet dusk, mysterious lines of camels plodding by the Suez Canal, turbanned Gully Gully men producing chicks from my ear in Port Said, a baboon looking solemnly at me from on top of a rock in Gibraltar.

It was a different age then. The buildings in Hong Kong were colonial and rather small, it was normal to take rickshaws, and all the Chinese ladies wore cheongsams. In Singapore the men wore white suits, or crisp shorts and long socks. The East was green, mysterious and deeply romantic, even for a boy of nine. It was full of colour and smells. Later I was to recognize something of Kipling’s era in those memories. I was experiencing the British Empire in its final fading – but at the time it did not seem like that. It was a journey through an illustrated school atlas, opening up a very diverse world, a bigger book of life.

And central to everything was the ship we were travelling on, the shuttle that carried us between all these different tapestries. For those five weeks it was our home. While my mother bathed blissfully unconscious of us on the sun deck, my six-year-old brother and I explored every deck, every galley; we tried every hatch, every ladder. Once my brother caused consternation by climbing one of the masts; he had to be rescued by a sailor.

I close my eyes now and I recall her. Her spotless wooden decks on which we played quoits, cricket and sack races, and where at the end of the voyage there was a fancy dress party; the swimming pool full of salt water; the tearooms facing the main deck where you had to walk softly because here were the grown ups – quiet, faded men in grey suits, waistcoats and white moustaches with ladies in flower dresses and hair styles that now you only ever see in Agatha Christie episodes on television. In my memory they were always taking tea and biscuits. (Oh, that rich, wonderful tea. Sweet and spicy. P&O tea. I’ve missed the taste ever since).

But the pride of her was in the bow, as she ploughed proudly and confidently through and over the grey and green hills of the waves. And the soul of her was in the stern, where I would stand for hours, tasting the salt on my lips, feeling the wind in my hair, watching the gulls blown above my head, while the flying fish and dolphins kept pace with us, skimming the foam of our wake.

It was liberty, a feeling that infinity was something you could touch – the first time I was ever really conscious of the potential that life had to offer – and it was all the generous gift of this marvelous, beautiful ship.

Under a huge, unimaginable sky that rolled on forever…

Fourteen years later, a young man feeling my way into adult life, I stood on a cliff, looking down at my once proud travelling companion, my ocean steed, broken and shamed in her death throes, and again experienced something new, and shocking: a sense of mortality.

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