The other evening Jane and I were listening to ‘White Chameleon’, a radio play by Christopher Hampton based on his childhood experiences in Alexandria in the 1950s, where his father worked for Cable and Wireless.  Chris, the character representing his childhood self, mentions early on how pleased his father was to be sent back to a city where he had been very happy on his first posting in 1936.

I pricked up my ears at once, because this was the very year that my parents met, on an Egyptian liner which plied between Marseille, Genoa and Alexandria. My father, Lyle, a very junior officer, was immediately smitten by one of the passengers, Laura Wilcock, a 25-year-old beautician and occasional model from London. 

Laura was fascinated by this tall, handsome young officer, known as ‘Slim’ to his companions, and - according to family legend - they spent every possible moment together.  Laura disembarked at Alexandria, travelled on to Cairo (where she managed to walk off with a piece of rock from the Great Pyramid at Giza) and, eventually, rejoined the ship on its return from another round trip.

The story goes that the captain and crew approved so thoroughly of the besotted young couple that Laura, instead of leaving the ship in Marseille and heading back to London, stayed on board and was allowed a free trip back to Alex. (After all, the ship’s motto was ‘Every passenger a guest’, though it wasn’t normally taken quite that literally). And it was in Alexandria that they were married, in whatever time it took for the ship to turn around.  Free hospitality continued until they reached Marseille, where they had a honeymoon while the ship did the full Marseille-Genoa-Alexandria-Genoa-Marseille run again, at which point Laura headed north and Lyle rejoined the ship.

Over the years I tried to wheedle out of them more details of what actually happened. My father stayed shtum, but, one evening, my mother, with a few drinks in her, came out with a couple of stories about their honeymoon in Marseille. The most lurid involved Lyle finally giving in and taking his bride to the bar which the ship’s officers usually frequented, only to be met by the sight of the captain, dressed in just a shirt, disappearing through a bead curtain at the back, accompanied by a rather large naked fille de joie.  (My mother was unlikely to have been terribly shocked; a previous fiance, a French count, had taken her to the notorious Bal des Quat’z’arts in Paris, as well as to a nightclub where the waitresses were dressed, soberly, as nuns, at least from the front, but just in garters and black stockings when they turned round).

All this was going round in my head, which meant that I managed to miss a certain amount of Hampton’s very moving play; though I did catch the moment when young Chris, just before leaving Egypt with his mother in 1956, is given a tarboosh by Ibrahim, the family servant, causing me to remember a photo of Lyle wearing that very headgear, a ‘fez’ as Brits usually refer to it, since this was mandatory for officers on Egyptian ships in Egyptian territorial waters.

Chris and his mother make for Port Said, where they are to join a ship heading for England, and he casually reveals that they travelled on a ‘battered old cargo vessel’ called ‘El Nil’. And, as you can see from the photo at the top, this was - in its heyday - the very ship where the couple who were to became my parents had met, twenty years earlier.

Poor ship. While my father had served on tankers during the war, losing two of them (one torpedoed, the other to a mine in, of all places, Liverpool harbour,) the sparkling white ‘El Nil’, ‘every passenger a guest’, must have been painted battleship grey, its brasswork tarnished, packed full of troops stubbing out their fags on the art deco sofas and throwing up in the lifeboats. Then postwar, who knows, trudging round the Med picking up what bits of cargo it could find.

This sent me up to the loft to look out the handful of black and white photos my mother cherished from that year, and which have come down to me.

While looking at them, I noticed for the first time that those which bore dates on the back varied between August and December.  This meant, surely, that there was something wrong with the story as I had always believed it.  Cramming their blossoming romance and sudden wedding into two crossings of the Med just didn’t make sense. How, for example, would they be able to arrange to be married in such haste. And one photo, dated December, has Lyle in civilian suit and trilby hat, with Laura in a jaunty hat and smart coat with masses of fur round her shoulders. If that’s not an outfit to wear to a wedding I don’t know what is.

In 2004 I had spent 10 days in Miami, seeing my mother once or twice a day at her care centre, taking her out to her favourite fish restaurant for grilled grouper or mahi-mahi, talking about anything that went through our heads.  One of the topics, I recall, was that first trip to Egypt, and I wondered again, aloud this time, how a 25-year-old beautician could afford a trip to the Pyramids on her own.  Mother smiled, and said that the tips in a West End salon were pretty good, then picked up the menu to see if any of the desserts tempted her.

Next time I visited Florida it was for her memorial service, where Rachel and Audrey, the amazing women who run the day centre Laura was so happy to go to, gave me the photo of her dancing with a Cuban guy the day before she died. So I’ll never know the truth.

But this is what I think must have happened. Of course she didn’t pay for the trip herself.  She went as the companion of some rich man from her wide circle of friends in London and Paris.  She and Lyle were, indeed, attracted to each other, and maybe managed to sneak away for some time alone, whether on the outbound or return journey.  Someone took the photo of her in the wide hat dated August, which must have been the month of the original trip, but whether it was Lyle, a crew member, or Mr Moneybags we shall never know.

If this is correct, then my future parents must have stayed in touch and arranged for Laura to take the train back to Marseille that December, this time for a free trip to Alexandria, where Lyle would already have taken the necessary steps to set up a civil marriage ceremony.

Whatever the details, I am grateful to Christopher Hampton for having written a play which caused me to re-examine a family myth and, possibly, come up with a more plausible version of the circumstances which led to me being here at all.