Waltzing round the World....and the Wicked Witch from Washington....

It was January 1988 and having now completed over two month on board ship, I was beginning to know my way around and settle into the job. As Cruise Staff, our job was to run the on-board activities, as well as manning the Social Centre. We were required to be present at cocktail parties, of which there were many and to attend dance classes which, particularly for single passengers was a very important part of their social scene.
Due to the high number of lady passengers travelling alone, the company hired four male dance hosts, who, in addition to any male member of the Cruise Director’s staff and that included the Cruise Director, Deputy Cruise Director, Programme Co-coordinator, Social Director, Cruise Staff and even the Stage Managers would be required to dance every evening with the single ladies.
This became known around the department as ‘Dances with Wolves’ due to the over-eagerness of the said ‘ladies’.
Before and after the main show of the evening, there would be an hour’s dance set which, for the single ladies, even if it meant rushing through dinner would not only attend, but would position themselves around the edge of the ballroom floor so as not to be missed.
Some would count the number of dances each other lady had and complain strongly if she hadn’t had the same number.
It was a war zone!

Predominant amongst the complainers were two ‘ladies’ Kissing Annie and Irene Martin.
Kissing Annie pointed out, in no uncertain terms that she had been promised by  one of the Directors of Cunard, she would have at least one dance each evening with every male member of staff and that was the only reason she had booked the cruise.
Annie would dance with her husband, who, I should point out had a long leg and a short one. (He wore a block under one shoe). As soon as one of the staff was available and that could have been as you were escorting a lady back to her seat, she would leave him in the middle of the dance floor, follow us off the floor, tugging at our jackets as we took the lady to her seat.
I pointed out to her politely that we were here mainly for those ladies without a partner, to which she replied that her husband was disabled. I retorted with a smile that Bart (her husband) didn’t seem that disabled when he was playing table tennis for most of each day, to which she then threw back at me the so called promise made by the Cunard Director when she booked her cruise. You couldn’t win!
The other quirk with Kissing Annie was sleeping sickness. She always sat with her husband on the front row, waiting to pounce, but would have to sit ‘dance-less’ for the duration of the cabaret show. As soon as she sat down, she would fall asleep, so much so, that Bart had to tie his handkerchief to her wrist and throughout the cabaret performance, as Annie started to nod off would pull the hanky to try to keep her awake.
Being on the front row, the continual pull of the white hanky was so obvious and disconcerting, we had to make all cabaret acts aware, in case it put them off their stride. It would have been less noticeable had she been allowed to fall asleep.
I think she also suffered from Alopecia, as she always wore head gear; during the day she would  wear, albeit a different combination of colours, a knitted hat, then, in the evenings, a wig.
It’s interesting when you get to know these people! It turned out they had made their money out of stretch nylon covers!

That first World Cruise, I did wonder about the choice of dance hosts. There were four in total, all well over six feet tall and none of them were very good dancers. I didn’t profess to being a fantastic dancer, nor was that requirement necessary, but I could at least get around the floor in the quickstep, waltz, foxtrot and the basic Latin dances. I was also a reasonable height for the generally petite women. The hosts would shuffle round the floor, their heads towering above the rest of the dance couples, their partner’s head coming to just above their navel.
One of the hosts was hired as a teacher for the son of the Managing Director,  so that he could be with them on the World Cruise – his dancing abilities were never part of his resume however, dancing was thrown in as part of his job.
During the dance sets the regular staff, would spend most of their time at a dispense bar, hidden from view and would send one, then another out to ‘do his bit’. Their conversation was mundane and repetitive, usually about their sexual conquests and became even more boring after a few drinks and so I left them to their inane conversation and spent my time doing what we were meant to do, humouring Kissing Annie and the rest of the ‘Wolves’.

Within the first week of the World Cruise, problems started with Irene Martin, the woman who became a horror story as the cruise progressed, She would visit the Chief Purser on an almost daily basis complaining of her cabin, the food, the guests at her dinner table, accusing her fellow guests of cheating at Bridge and accusing the staff of not giving her sufficient dances in the evening.
I was usually mentioned in dispatches during these complaints that I was the only member of staff who cared about her. Frankly I was just doing my job; chatting with her occasionally and humouring her to the best of my ability. She was one of a group of ladies who had previously travelled with Holland America Line, on the Rotterdam until the line stopped doing world cruises, at which point many of them transferred  to QE2.
Few of them ‘got on’ together and were incessantly bitching about one or the other and continually comparing QE2 with the Rotterdam, complaining that on the Rotterdam they would have ‘this’ and on the Rotterdam they would have ‘that’.

Ships are renowned for having ‘professional complainers’, who will find anything to complain about in the hope of getting travel credit on their next cruise. The more a company listens to these complaints, of which Cunard Line were guilty, the more they would complain.
Irene Martin was a past master at this and made it perfectly clear she wanted all of her complaints formally prepared by the Chief Purser, that way, it would be on record for when she returned home and made complaints to her Travel Agent.
The file of complaints from her grew by the day, as did the complaints about her from other passengers. The guests at her dinner table asked to be moved, leaving her dining alone.
She was a slightly built Jewish-American woman in her mid to late seventies, with a clipped Eastern European accent. She always wore a wig, which looked more like a rat sitting on her head and in the daytime would wear a polo shirt, black lycra tights and gold shoes. In the evening she would almost always wear a kaftan and on formal nights, wore around her neck, a silver coloured plastic medallion on a broad ribbon, which she boasted of winning, dancing the Cha Cha Cha with David, a dance host on the Rotterdam.

After circum-navigating South America, the ship called at Los Angeles where we embarked more passengers. Amongst them was Dorothy Hyman travelling with a male guest, who it transpired was David, the former dance host from the Rotterdam.
When Irene Martin discovered he was travelling with Dorothy Hyman, she went into a jealous rage, proclaiming, for all to hear that Dorothy Hyman had stolen David from her during their cruise on the Rotterdam, that Dorothy Hyman was paying for him to travel with her and that by now, she was probably riddled with Aids, as he was gay!
The woman was a nightmare!

To be continued.....................

The beachbum