When I was a schoolboy I used to travel to the USA to visit the rest of my family for the summer holidays. The only way to go was by sea and however grand or lowly you were, we were all in the same boat. The quickest and cheapest was by either the “Queen Elizabeth” or “Queen Mary”. In tourist class on D deck, just above the waterline, it was £63 10s.
Despite being a schoolboy in tourist class I had some pretty remarkable experiences, but several were the result of being such an unusual phenomenon in the mid ’50s, an unaccompanied boy with an English accent. I got a lot of attention!
I have just been looking at my diaries for those trips and came across this picture of me, drawn by a fellow passenger. I’ve looked up his name, Peter Carlson in Google, but only find an artist who is 40 or 50 years too young. I wonder what happened to him? I think that the drawing is pretty good.
