Soon after disembarking from two weeks on the high seas, we encountered a friend who asked where we’d been. When we told him we’d crossed the Atlantic Ocean, he said he had, too…more than 60 years ago. We were going to compare notes — our crossing was on the Celebrity Eclipse, his was on Aquitania, a ship Cunard scrapped one year later — but our memories were two weeks old and his were made when he was two years old.
End of that story.
Our friend’s mother was a War Bride, and if any group of people deserves to have their stations-in-life capitalized just like Presidents and CEOs, it’s the women who left everything behind to settle and start families like his mother did, in North America. The Cunard ships of that era were essentially to transport servicemen and immigrants, and this is an appropriate topic today because this week 15 North American War Brides are making the return trip on the Queen Mary 2.
Presumably, they are doing so courtesy of Cunard but, even if they aren’t, it’s a nice touch. For these War Brides, it’s billed as a Sentimental Journey. They’re returning to their roots, 65 years after so many came the other way. Suffice to say, that trip was on a ship that didn’t even remotely resemble the one above, the Queen Mary 2.
With each passing year, there are fewer War Brides left. With each passing year, that connection to our past gets weaker, and it’s impressive that Cunard is making an attempt to remind the rest of us what “cruise lines” once meant.