The cruise wouldn't have been complete without the obligatory children's fancy dress competition. I remember Mum discovering an old acquaintance of hers amongst the Himalaya‘s passengers, and this poor lady then somehow became lumbered with the responsibility for kitting me up for the show. I‘m fairly sure she didn’t travel the high seas armed with cabin loads of suitcases packed full of fancy dress outfits, but this didn't seem to slow her down too much. She managed to assemble enough suitable gear to make me bear at least a passing resemblance to a youngster from the backstreets of Shanghai, complete with long thin oriental moustache. If the pictures of the event are anything to go by, a lot of my young shipmates' parents must have known before we set sail that a fancy dress night was ... read more

We set sail from London on P&O's SS Himalaya on 11 September. Mum and Dad had booked the Himalaya because it was the very same ship that they had returned from England on in 1955, with six week old me in tow. Mum was apparently quite sick after my birth, so I never got to go to their home in the London suburb of Roehampton, but instead went with Mum straight from Guy's Hospital to the ship. I was told many times during my childhood that every one of the SS Himalaya's 1955 passengers knew that young Master David Sheehan was on board, as according to Mum I didn't stop screaming from the time we left London until we docked back in Melbourne. This was despite my parents trying to isolate the ship's company from the ... read more

Evidence from passport stamps suggests that we made two forays into France. On the first of these it looks like I went with Dad in late June, with Mum then joining us later, and the three of us then all making our way from there on to Switzerland. It seems that the three of us all then went back for a second time for a week in late August. The Channel Tunnel was only a pipe dream (no pun intended) in 1964, and on at least one of these trips we caught the overnight train from London to Paris. I remember being awoken in the middle of the night by the noise of the train being loaded onto the ferry, and then waking up in the morning to find us rolling through the fields of northern ... read more

1964 Diary Entry "The next morning we got up and dressed and went down to breakfast. After breakfast we started to pack for that day we were leaving for Copenhagen. At about 11 o'clock we caught a taxi to the airport. When we got there we had our baggage checked and then we went into the flight waiting room. Soon afterwards we were called aboard our S.A.S aircraft. When we got in we fastened our seatbelts and pre-pared for take off. Then we took off. We slowly rose and levelled off. By that time we were well above the clouds so I couldn't see anything. About half an hour later we started to go down. Finally we saw Denmark. Then we landed. At the airport we went through customs and passport control. Then we got a ... read more

1964 Diary Entry "The next morning we started to pack for that day we were leaving for Rome. At about 12 o'clock we caught a taxi to the airport. When we got there we had our baggage checked, had our passports stamped and then we went to the flight waiting room. At about 1 o'clock we were called into the aircraft. Then about ten minutes later we took off. We slowly rose to about 37,000 feet and there we levelled off. By that time we were over Italy. Then we started to go down and about ten minutes later we landed in Rome. There we went through passport control, health and customs and then a man in a private car drove us to the Excelsior Hotel. There we were shown to our room. After seeing it ... read more