Coasting (34 page)

I
t took a fortnight to restore my standing as a citizen and settle my differences with the authorities in London, then I was blessedly free to catch the morning ebb and set out on passage for The North.

The North!
When I heard myself using the phrase at dinner in Notting Hill, it sounded uncomfortably grandiloquent; after all, the train from King’s Cross to Paragon Station in Hull takes only two and a half hours—not quite the stuff of geographical epic. But I was conforming to the custom of the country. In the south of England, good manners demand that you speak of The North as if it were a fabulously distant realm. You should try to imply that places like Wigan, Leeds or Hull are well within the Arctic Circle and that they probably eat babies there.

People who live on small islands fall easily into this ostentatious way with the points of the compass. It is a famous specific against claustrophobia, and it endows the most tin-pot places with marvelous sweeps of airy latitude and longitude.

The Manx were expert at it. In Port St. Mary, on the southern edge of the island, it was reckoned improper to go north of the fairy bridge without giving at least a day’s advance notice of the journey. A shopping trip to Douglas, fourteen miles away, was something to be announced a week ahead. To go to Ramsey, farther north even than the great mountain of Snaefell, was justified only if you had relatives there, and then only on official festivals like Christmases and birthdays. A lot was made of the fact—if it was a fact—that tomatoes ripened in Port St. Mary a good nine days (make it ten) before their sun-starved cousins in Ramsey and Andreas; and tourists were encouraged to call the south of the island The Manx Riviera, a tag designed to suggest that the men of Ramsey went about in snow boots and fur hats with earflaps. On an island nine miles wide and thirty miles from top to bottom, this mythologized geography was a necessity: it gave Man depth and space, enlarged it with shadowy, unvisited regions, and rescued the Manx from stifling in their cramped quarters.

England was bigger than Man, but it wasn’t so very much bigger. As nations go, it was a Lilliput—less than half the size of Italy, less than a quarter that of France. Quite small American states, like Florida and Iowa, were bigger than England. But it was larger by a few square miles than Tennessee. Any country which can only just top the acreage of Tennessee needs to lay claim to frozen wastes at one end and palm trees and parasols at the other—an imaginary terrain which matches up to its sense of dignity and importance in the world.

So Hull was a long, long way from London. I was advised to pack warm clothes for the journey. “Up there, you get the wind coming straight off the steppes of Russia.” I was warned of midsummer nights of perpetual twilight in the high latitudes of England. Whenever I said “Hull,” someone would chime in, pat on cue, with “From Hell, Hull and Halifax, good Lord preserve us” and look smugly witty.

Aboard
Gosfield Maid
, trudging along at four to six knots, it was at least possible to honor this legendary English distance between The South and The North. Harborbound for
days on end by gales or warnings of gales, setting out on a morning and turning back after an hour of being rolled, slapped and tumbled, I made satisfactorily slow progress. It took three weeks to reach the Humber from the Thames—about the same time as most small boats take to cross the Atlantic. This made excellent sense: it put Hull at a distance of approximately 2,400 miles from Tower Bridge, which sounds just about right.

The character of the North Sea was bad but interesting. It was shallow, riddled with shifting bars and shoals. The sand in the water gave it a fierce crystalline glitter in the rare shafts of sunshine. There were patches of trouble even in calms, as the strong tide sluiced over the uneven bottom and the boat careened about in the slop. In any wind, the waves broke short and sharp, crowding on one another’s backs. In gales, watched glumly from the safe vantage point of a drenched promenade, with
Gosfield Maid
lying in retirement behind a harbor wall, the North Sea shattered into surf like boiling yellow cat-sick. It threw up sand, and more sand, and more sand, converting roads into temporary beaches and the ends of fields into strips of desert.

It needed to be watched with more suspicion than any other domestic British sea. There were plenty of harbors along the coast, but almost none of them were approachable in anything more than a stiffish breeze. It afforded rich opportunities for going aground: miles offshore, well out of sight of land, it was ridged and pale as it foamed over the shoals. I sailed cautiously from buoy to buoy, ticking each one off on the chart as I passed it; I listened to every shipping forecast, and ran for shelter at any mention of a wind of Force 5 or worse. More often than not, the big winds never came, and I’d sit out on a pier end in Lowestoft or Yarmouth, watching lazy waves nuzzling the sand and wishing that I were out at sea and nearer to The North.

The tricky and volatile nature of the water was offset by the extreme modesty of the neighboring land. The flats of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire rarely showed themselves at all by day. In fine weather, they formed a faint line, provisionally penciled in, between the cloud
banks and the sea; but they usually came out only at night, as a ribbon of shore lights, suddenly, surprisingly, close at hand.

Although it was deepening into summer, the sails of pleasure craft grew steadily fewer. Trawlers worked around the offshore banks, oil-rig supply vessels were busy gophering between the ports and the rigs and gas platforms, which stood out on the horizon in capitals—T   H   A   A   H   T … an eccentric way of spelling Money.

Somewhere off the hidden coast of Suffolk, a Dunlin flew in through the open window of the wheelhouse and took up a confidently self-possessed perch on the compass. Plump, long-legged, with a beak like a miniature scythe, it stood placidly watching me while I looked it up in the bird guide and checked its ID. I offered it cake crumbs, which it spurned.
Food
, said the bird guide:
Molluscs, crustaceans, worms, insects and their larvae
. No wonder. After fifteen minutes or so, the Dunlin grew bored with my company and flew off in the general direction of Lowestoft.

Farther north, there were puffins: gangs of disreputable dandies who took no care of their appearance and bobbed scruffily about on the top of the water, fighting and fishing by turns. As the sea began to empty of other craft, schools of dolphins homed in on
Gosfield Maid
and amused themselves with the boat, sometimes for an hour at a time. They skirled in the wake and came corkscrewing under the bows, showing good-humored snouts and serious eyes. Nor was it just the boat they wanted; it was my personal attention. If I stood out in the cockpit, they stayed in the wake; if I moved forward to the bows, the school came too. At night they put up a spectacular show—friendly torpedoes of phosphorescence, streaking brilliantly through the water, leaving zigzag tracks of light behind them in the sea.

In every account of long solitary voyages, from the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer” to the books of Francis Chichester and Jacques Moitessier, there is a ritual moment when the voyager makes friends with a gannet, or a pigeon, or a pilot fish or a dolphin. The occasion is both real and
symbolic. It signals the departure of the sailor from human society and his magical assumption into the community of Nature. From here on in, he is at one with the birds and the fish, his tie with the land formally severed.

On the North Sea it was easy to understand the importance of that moment. The coast was a mere six or seven miles off, I’d only left the land a few hours before, and I’d return to it in a few hours’ time; but the isolating power of the sea works with astonishing rapidity and strength. You can drop clean out of society in a day and find yourself at the center of a world where the concerns of society are of Martian remoteness compared with the grinning swoop of the bottle-nosed dolphin in your wake.

I heard, now, and tried to think about the news of British ships being sunk in the South Atlantic—
Ardent, Antelope, Coventry, Atlantic Conveyor
—and battles at Goose Green and Bluff Cove, but all bulletins from the Falklands seemed fictive and theoretical. The television in the saloon had taken to yielding only blare and fuzz lately, and its poor reception seemed to correspond with some failure of the circuitry in my own head. I listened avidly to the weather forecasts on the radio, but drifted off station when the same voice continued from the last report of barometric pressure to the first headline on the news. When I eventually tacked through the loitering bunch of big ships at anchor in the mouth of the Humber, I felt something close to what an astronaut in a satellite must feel when he re-enters the earth’s atmosphere after three weeks in outer space.

It was exciting to be back here at last. I found the needlepoint spire of Patrington Church, an old friend, and the stubby towers of Ottringham and Easington. The sky was huge and rinsed of color, the land below it flat, lonely, Mongolian in its level, sandy emptiness. A file of telegraph poles, a chicken farm, a collapsing barn of rusty corrugated iron were friendly human intrusions here. They had both the pathos and the assertiveness of homesteaders’ gimcrack buildings on the Frontier. The brown river, so much more
weighty and substantial than the land around it, flooded through, busy, broken, showing its fangs as it raced over the flats and rampaged in the deeps with muddy rips and whirlpools.
Humber
was a good name for it, with its echoes of
umber
and
somber
—a shady, sullen, lowering, earthy, gloomy river. It was hard to steer a clean course on it, and I could hear things falling about downstairs as the Humber got hold of the boat and gave it a few warning cuffs and clouts. With a westerly wind blowing into a fast westgoing tide, the river was in a very surly mood even by its own blunt standards of good manners.
Gosfield Maid
rolled and splashed upchannel, her decks awash in somber Humber water, collecting gobbets of brown cotton candy in her rigging as she went.

It was like trying to repair one’s relationship with an old family dog which has been stricken with amnesia. Down, Humber,
down!
Stop
snarling!
Perhaps it was just the boat that the river didn’t recognize. For I was idiotically pleased to see the Humber.

I’d lived for nearly five years on the river’s edge. Mrs. Jackson, my landlady, had warned me when I arrived on my first afternoon as a freshman at the university, “They say Hull’s a sight easier to get to than it is to get away from. There’s many more as comes here than as what leaves by Paragon Station. There’s a lot as only leaves this city in their coffins, love. How d’you like your tea? Sugar?”

I had hung on after graduation. I’d taught for a term in a Hull secondary school. I’d started a doctorate, reading a dozen novels a week, making desultory notes, playing poker in the evenings, getting married and unmarried, and generally kept myself in the way of the idle occupation that passed for “doing research.” The doctoral dissertation got as far as a rather short first chapter—a chapter so good that it seemed a shame to spoil it by making additions. In the easy academic climate of the 1960s I left Hull, undoctored, unmastered even, to lecture at another university.

But it was in the vacations, and in term-time evenings, that I fell in love with the city. I moonlighted from my studies as a private-hire taxi driver and roamed the dark
streets in a radio-controlled Vauxhall Velox. We were a scruffy fleet whose official slogan was “No. 1 for Weddings, Funerals, Functions.” It must have been under the heading of Functions that most of our business came our way: we smuggled duty-free cigarettes and whisky out of the docks in hidden compartments under the back seats. The cargo skippers who were our “fares” on these trips took care of the policemen at the dock gates. We went on all-night crawls of the pubs and clubs, the cars full of fishermen just home from a month on the Icelandic cod grounds. The clubs were smoky halls, full of trestle tables and rich with the smell of spilled Tetley’s Ale, where Whispering Willie cuddled the microphone close to his lips and confided to it a stream of homely filth about mothers-in-law and outdoor lavs, then surrendered it to the platinum blonde who sang “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” and “Red Sails in the Sunset” in a curiously seamless blend of movie-American and flatvoweled Hull. We stopped by the Continental, a surviving music hall where arthritic unicyclists made painful circuits of the stage and jugglers dropped their batons into the laps of the audience. The star performers at these places were invariably billed by the compère as having come “all the way from Leeds,” our local Vegas.

The function we were most often called on to perform, though, was to effect introductions. For two of my years in the city, I was Hull’s Miss Lonelyhearts, bringing a little warmth and light into the lives of speechless deep-sea trawlermen from Iceland, Norway, Poland and Denmark. They would collapse into the seat beside me, radiant with schnapps, and produce their one essential word of English.
“Girrrl!”

I’d been given The List along with my official license to ply for private hire within the city limits. It was soon more impressively adorned with footnotes than the single chapter of my dissertation—
“Fat blonde, won’t have Icelanders, ring three times, then quick double-ring”; “Old, skinny, likes Danes
, tips”;
“Lah-di-dah, picky
, £7—10—0.”

All the girls were older than I was; many of them were much the same age as my mother. They were friendly,
treating me as a colleague in their business and serving me cups of Nescafé in the front rooms of their furnished flats off the Beverley Road. When they had to pay the cab fare of their slumberous charges, they said, “How’d you like it, love, cash or kind?”

“Uh—cash, please, thank you.”

“Well, you know where to come if you want a bit of the other, don’t you, love? Ta-ta, dear.”

“Ta-ta.”

“Oh, and remember. He’s got to be back on his ship by eight. Get a car round here for seven in the morning, will you, love?”