Coasting (6 page)

Wherever I met him—in Wells in Norfolk, in Maldon in Essex, in Newhaven in Sussex, in Falmouth in Cornwall—his story was very nearly the same. He’d been divorced—last year, or the year before, or the year before that. He’d been made redundant when the factory where he’d had a quiet desk job had closed down. Prematurely retired from the world at forty or thereabouts, he’d sold up his semidetached in the suburbs, settled the mortgage and put what was left into this ramshackle ark which he was now listlessly trying to sell to me.

If we stood together in a salty puddle where the floor should have been it was: “You always expect to see a bit of water in the bilges in a boat like this. It’s a good sign. It means she’s able to breathe.”

In just a year to two, my double had turned himself into a Robinson Crusoe of the foreshore. He gathered samphire and knew how to fry seaweed. At low tide he set crab pots; at high tide he fished from the veranda of his back room. Once a week he collected his dole money. His postal address was care of John, or Eric or Hattie, whoever was landlord of the Old Ship, the Fisherman’s Rest or the Anchor on the quay.

“But what will you do when you sell the boat?”

“Oh … friends, you know. I’ll have to look around. I was thinking of getting a catamaran. A catamaran’s a very stable boat at sea.”

For now, my double tinkered his days away. He caulked the leaks in his home, not often to much visible effect. He sat with the
Ashley Book of Knots
open in front of him on the saloon table, plaiting the frayed ends of a piece of rope into a monkey’s fist. He laid in driftwood for the winter. He made plans.

All my doubles had plans. Lodged like hippos in their mud berths, they lived on dreams. Aboard every boat I was shown charts—as if the charts themselves were voyages as good as made. Charts of the Azores, of the Caicos Islands, of the Baltic, of the Turkish coast, of the French canal route to Marseilles … Every one was marked out with compass courses, distances, the likely landmarks ringed in soft pencil, the ports of refuge carefully arrowed in.

“If only this bloody weather would change. Suppose that Azores High drifts north a bit, into Shannon, say, I’d go next week.”

“I’m just waiting for an alternator. It was meant to be here Tuesday.”

“When my girlfriend stops working—”

“My only trouble is the dog—”

In the meantime they scraped at the layers of old varnish on their spars, messed with paintpots and reread their way through their soggy paperback libraries of adventures at sea. When September came and equinoctial gales tore chimney pots off houses and made boats groan and shiver on their moorings, and the holidaymakers all went home, the doubles were still there waiting for their breaks.

The margins of England are lined with these men and their rotting boats. Redundant in many more senses than one, they have crossed the seawall that defines the outer limit of society and live in a tidal no-man’s-land—Huck Finns going to gray, all talking in the accent of the same minor public school. The men from the Income Tax department have long ago lost touch with them. They are beyond support orders, electricity bills, door-knocking clergy on their rounds, colored circulars, credit cards and all the other privileges and interferences of civilized life. Visiting them—by dinghy, or in gum boots over a hundred yards or so of soft and smelly mud—I listened to them all telling me solemnly that they were “free.” But it was a freedom which they had all, with whatever little enthusiam or real hope, put up for sale.

In Fowey I found a boat. It wasn’t a romantic discovery. The tide had gone out, leaving the flats of the estuary gleaming dully and riddled with wormcasts. The boat was
stranded, propped up between baulks of timber and secured to the ground with a dripping cat’s cradle of ropes and chains. With its masts gone elsewhere, its wheelhouse sticking up at the back and its high, bulbous front end, it looked in silhouette like a cracked army boot.

Its owner had emigrated to Hong Kong, and for three years the boat had lain here untenanted and uncared-for. The local yard had given me keys and a warrant to view; and I slithered across the mud in city clothes, pushing past bait diggers forking worms into buckets. Each new footstep released another bubble of bad-egg air. The trees on the foreshore were speckled a dirty white with china-clay dust from the docks downriver and looked as if they had contracted a bad case of dandruff.

There’s always something absurd and disproportionate about any boat seen out of the water. The most graceful craft go dowdy and frumpish when you see them in the nude. This one looked gross—a huge and flabby Amazon. Her bottom had come out in an eczematic rash of limpets. The blue paint on her superior parts was bleached and peeling. Scabby, trussed, leaning heavily on her crutches, she looked incapable of ever putting to sea again.

My shadow scared a sunbathing family of fiddler crabs in the muddy pool which the boat had dug for herself as she grounded with the tide. They shuffled away across the pool floor and hid in the dark under her flounced bilges.

I found a boarding ladder under a dusty tree and climbed ten feet up onto the deck, which was the usual jumble of anchors, buckets, boathooks, ropes and things. A herring gull was taking the usual leisurely crap on the wheelhouse roof, and the neat deck planking had gone a furry green with guano and disuse.

Inside, the trapped air had a pleasant bruised-apple smell. The antique binnacle compass in the wheelhouse was locked on a course of 045°, northeast, bound for Devon, Somerset and the glum Midlands. The wheel itself was a proper ship’s wheel, brass-banded with varnished spokes of a size that demanded horny, capable seaman’s hands as big as dinner plates. I tried swinging it myself and heard heavy
chains rumbling in the cellarage as the rudder ground on mud, stones and dead crabs.

When I got below decks, I knew I’d found the right boat to run away to sea in. Brass oil lamps hung tilted in their gimbals. The dusty paneling of mahogany and teak, the red leather cushions on the settees, stuffed with odorous horsehair, the smoky overhead beams, the brass-bound charcoal stove, the rows of fiddled bookshelves (Hammond Innes next to
Admiralty Sight Reduction Tables, Volume 3
), made the place warm and clubbish. It was the Reform and the Travellers’ reduced to matchbox scale: a fine setting to go gaga in, to mutter reactionary nonsense over the port or snooze away the afternoon like a blubbery dugong in an easy chair. Secure behind its bolted portholes, one could remove one’s hearing aid, tell one’s old stories, live on one’s memories and be a ripe old bean.

I bought it that afternoon, and all winter the boatyard men chiseled and painted it to rights: scraping off the barnacles until the bare wood showed as pink as ripening plums; hacking out unwanted bunks from the fo’c’s’le; doing oily, indescribable things down in the engine room. I didn’t want a yacht; I wanted a one-man floating house, with a study-bedsitter up in the front, complete with library and writing table, a comfortable paneled drawing room in the middle, a kitchen, a shade cramped but sufficient for my elementary cuisine, and a proper flush toilet and washroom.

The boatyard took much the same attitude to my plans as R. T. McMullen might have done himself, had the sun’s rays ever shone on Polruan that winter. I put a long-haired sheepskin rug, bought years before in the Aleppo souk, down in the saloon.

“
He
’ll stink, when he gets the saltwater in he.”

“He won’t, because there’s not going to be any saltwater down there. I’m going to be a fair weather sailor.”

An Olivetti typewriter was set up on the writing table.

“
He’
ll go to rust.”

A portable television set was screwed down among the bookshelves in the saloon.

“He’s going to be off Land’s End, sick as a pig, watching
Dallas
.”

But I wanted to coast, not to sever myself completely from the land. I wanted to keep up with whatever gossip was going. A television set was just as necessary as a suit of sails.

I put pictures up on the walls: a Rowlandson cartoon called “Pleasures of Bath,” a nineteenth-century View of Damascus, a precious watercolor of Conway Castle by moonlight, framed photographs of friends and family, and another photograph, cut from a newspaper, of Margaret Thatcher in full and furious flood. With her clenched fist, her three strings of pearls, her chin thrust forward, her face cast in an expression of theatrical resoluteness under its wiry halo of swept-back hair, her eyes blazing with what might ambiguously be construed as either compassion or plain scorn, she was there as a reminder that this voyage wasn’t going to be a holiday from life. She glowered down from the paneling, England’s latest painted figurehead.

Books went aboard in boxfuls, and my predecessors began to look increasingly ill at ease in the company they were keeping. Hilaire Belloc was bunked up with Saul Bellow. R. T. McMullen found himself next to the poems of Louis MacNeice, and John MacGregor was squashed between Ian MacEwan’s short stories and Machiavelli’s
The Prince
. Everything by Evelyn Waugh, even his unreadable life of Saint Helena, was signed on for the voyage, and so were the complete works of Laurence Sterne, in the ten-volume calf-bound 1780 edition. Novels by Trollope, Thackeray and Dickens … poems in fat, broken-backed anthologies … The arrival one morning of
Valmouth
and
Prancing Nigger
by Ronald Firbank drew identical scowls from the mariners.

But it was an explorer’s, not an exile’s library; with books on British history, British geology, British birds, British flora, books on the making of the English countryside and on the sociology of modern Britain. I wanted to find out what, on earth or sea, made my peculiar country tick: Cobbett might yield a clue, so might Defoe—and G. M. Trevelyan,
and Nikolaus Pevsner, and Arthur Mee, and a whole rack of books with oppressive titles like
The Development of the British Economy, 1914–1950
,
Rural Depopulation in England and Wales
,
1851–1951
and
The Labour Government’s Economic Record, 1964–1970
. Even if one couldn’t read them, at least they’d serve as ballast and keep the boat sailing squarely on its waterline.

The boat was ready on February 24. It was Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent—just the right moment for even a disbeliever to take to the wilderness. High tide was at seven in the morning and it was still almost dark when the tubby hull was cranked down the slip into the water. It looked less like the launching of a boat than the eccentric submersion of a thatched tudor cottage. There was no champagne about. The wit from the boatyard yawned, shrinking himself as far as possible into his furry parka. “Give her five minutes, and all you’ll see will be the bubbles.”

She floated. By lunchtime she was fully rigged as a working ketch, with two stocky masts, her heavy sails sagging on their booms. Shackled to a mooring buoy in the middle of the estuary, she turned to face the incoming tide with a broad-beamed dowager’s stateliness. It was not that she waddled, exactly; rather that her age and bulk took automatic precedence over the younger, slimmer boats on the water.

I rowed away from her feeling house-proud as I’d never felt house-proud before. She looked like home. Up till now, home had always been a rented or a mortgaged box in someone else’s freehold, an unstable affair, floating adrift high in London plane trees. This big white boat, with her trimmings of (as yet) unscuffed white and blue, her books and pictures, her oak beams which had been approvingly described by the surveyor as “massive,” looked so much more solid and steady than any of the flats in which I’d recently capsized.

No flag wagged at the back of her. Whatever the rules said, I didn’t intend to sail under the British ensign. When I
crossed over the border from territorial to international waters, I was going to go there as a private person—in the Greek word, an
idiot
.

The boat had one visible defect: her name. The Gosfield brewer who had originally registered her as a British ship of 10.39 Gross Tons had called her the
Gosfield Maid
. This would be a fine title for a frowsty aunt who keeps cats and smells of camphor balls, but as the name of my boat I would have been happier if the brewer had chosen
Mon Repos, Laburnams
, or
Dunroamin
.

It is famously unlucky to change a boat’s name: you are pretty well guaranteed an early death by drowning. But it is permissible, as far as I know, to switch the letters about. Chuck GOSFIELD MAID into the air, let the pieces fall where they will, and they come out as DIE, DISMAL FOG. As mottoes for British voyages go,
Die, Dismal Fog
will do well.

IN THE ARCHIPELAGO

F
or four years now,
Gosfield Maid
has been slowly circling round the British Isles. When she first rumbled down the slipway into the Fowey Estuary, I had never taken charge of a boat at sea in my life. A retired naval commander let me play the role of an elderly midshipman, and in a fortnight taught me how to raise sails, drop anchor, steer a compass course and bleed a diesel engine. In the evenings I taught myself navigation out of books, with the watery yellow lamplight dodging all over the cabin as the boat wallowed in the wakes of passing china-clay coasters. On April Fools’ Day I left Fowey alone and nervously picked my way out into the English Channel. I had hardly set my course and made my first penciled cross on the chart before the land faded into the haze. First there was Captain Mitchell’s Californian ranch-style house on the hill, and the Coastguard lookout, and the striped beacon on Gribben Head; then an indecipherable gray scribble across the horizon; then just the intimidating whiteness of the blank page.