Return to UK 1963

I bade a very sad farewell to Mombasa in early September and departed on the SS Uganda, a British India line passenger ship which, along with her sister ship Kenya, carried passengers between East Africa and the UK via Suez. I travelled tourist class - the only other class was first - and had the good fortune to find myself in a large group of similarly aged young people.

We lazed around on the hatches. Each lunchtime there was a different curry, and we vied with each other as to who could eat the hottest. In the heat of the afternoon we played chess in the saloon: one of the lads was the Nottinghamshire junior champion. We sneaked up to first class to meet some of the young people there, and the officers seemed fairly relaxed about it.

Our first port of call was Aden, not a very safe place to go ashore as the British were fighting an insurgency there, but we visited Crater Town where I bought a camera, a Kowa SLR which was a disaster as it was a complicated machine and I didn't know how to work it. By a miracle, a few pictures did come out, like this one of a passenger ship in the Red Sea with the coast of Arabia behind her.

We passed through the Suez Canal - this is the Red Sea entrance at Port Suez - stopped at Port Said for shore excursions, and then entered the Mediterranean. Stromboli was erupting when we passed between Sicily and the toe of Italy on our way to our last port of call, Barcelona.

We had a whole day in Barcelona and it happened to be a festival day, so we watched a colourful procession through the streets in the morning and then went to a bull ring in the afternoon. The bullfighting seemed very slow and highly ritualised and was only livened up when one of the picadors made a mistake and allowed the bull to gore the unprotected side of his horse, which it did to spectacular and bloody effect, with the wretched beast spilling its intestines across the sand - to the fury of the spectators.

It was a four-week journey so I arrived back in the UK with a few weeks to get myself ready to go up to university.