Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 597
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[Page 597]
(41)
I am sure she really did not believe us.
We attended the Olympic Games several times during the next fortnight. When they ended, Bill decided to stay on a week longer, but I took the coastal trains back to Marseilles, where I secured a good berth on the P&O, S.S. "Strathnaver" coming from Australia. After a five-day pleasant but uneventful voyage around the Iberian Peninsular, and across the Bay of Biscay we all disembarked at Tilbury on Sunday morning the 25th September. I had not been in England since I left it with Dunsterforce on the 18th January 1918: I expected to find it much changed in every way, and I was not mistaken. The boat-train whisked us up to London without delay, and I taxied with all my luggage from Liverpool St Station to the Oxford and Cambridge Club in Pall Mall in the heart of London's clubland, a few doors away from St James's Palace. I resided at the club for seventeen days, seeing the usual tourist sights and revisiting old haunts, also negotiating the purchase, insurance and registration of a used Ford vanette, into which I packed all of my considerable luggage and made a five-week tour of England and South-West Scotland, returning to the South of England to settle into the Old Mill House Hotel at Ringwood, in the New Forest, for the winter. The Chisholms had bought a roomy mews-flat in Connaught Lane near Marble Arch, and very kindly invited me to drive up to stay with them during the Christmas-New Year twelve-day period. The London weather was mild and rainless, and we had a very jolly reunion. On my return to Ringwood I spent some of my days fitting the vanette up as a comfortable motorised caravan; this type of vehicle was just becoming popular. I fitted in a proper thirty-inch bed, a nest of trays to securely hold my cooking utensils, a drop-leaf table with divided shelves underneath to hold crockery, cutlery, and eggs and packed food stuffs. Also I lined the sides and ceiling with hardboard. With the addition of curtains front and rear, it made a very compact, easily manoeuvrable, mobile home. On the 1st March 1961 I took it across the English Channel from Dover to Dunkirk to begin