Semi-Detached (13 page)

There
wasn’t much point in sticking to one line, because you had to let it sink and
lie. So we had six or seven lines strategically dangled into the murk close to
the posts where the crabs lived. A bucket, half full of water, was kept standing
by, but it had to be moved out of the way of fat men in blazers complaining and
slipping on the ooze, or pale-faced women fussing as their husband’s outboard
motors passed over our heads and tripping over us anyway as we lay flat out on
the jetty.

The
trick was to pull up slowly. With their one free claw waving about like
maddened mini-pliers, we had to flick the crabs off the bacon and into the
bucket. None of them were huge. They could be anything from three inches across
down to house spider size and green (though the bigger ones sometimes had a
tinge of red around the claws and were especially prized because they looked
more like proper crabs from a fishmonger) but all of them could pinch hard. The
tenacious ones could only be induced to let go by crab-wrangling —grasping with
a thumb and forefinger just behind the big front claws, where the edges of the
shell have armoured sharp points. If we missed and it fell on the jetty. the
angered crab scurried off backwards with both pincers raised, and we had to
show off to any girl spectators standing by and squealing with awe.

By half
tide, six or seven kids with six or seven lines each, several buckets seething
with catch (which might also be tipped half over so that little girls could
squeal some more at the crustacean mat), orders being shouted and boys lurching
to get hold of the biggies comprehensively occupied the entire jetty and constituted
a constant’ and efficient public nuisance. The day was rounded off by
ceremoniously up-ending the bucket over the quay and admiring the particularly
big ones running off for home, sometimes with the front legs of one of their
neighbours clutched in their claw.

But all
this had to be fitted in between the real business of being at the boat. My
father’s second joke went like this. ‘Saintly Dai arrives in Hell.’ (They were
all dredged from some folk memory of a Cardiff swamp.) ‘What are you doing
here, Dai?’ asks Pugh. ‘Didn’t you go to heaven?’

‘Oh
yes. And there’s lovely heaven was: all fluffy clouds and blue skies. And I go
to St Peter. I say, “What shall we do today?” And St Peter says, “Well, Dai, I
thought we’d do a little harping.” So I play the harp all day. And the next day
I go to St Peter and I say, “That was lovely. What shall we do today, then?”
And St Peter says, “Well, Dai, today. I thought we’d do a little harping.” So I
picked up my harp and played it all day. And the next day, I went to St Peter.
I said, “What shall we do today?” He said, “Well, Dai, today, I thought (pause
for effect) … we’d do a little harping.” I said, “To hell with harping, and
here I am.”‘

‘What
shall we do today, Daddy?’

Daddy,
with a little smile, puffing up the sails on his boat: ‘I thought we’d better
do a little harping.’

‘Wouldn’t
it be nice, if just for a change, we spent the day on the beach?’

My
father, reaching for a halyard, ‘Don’t be silly. This is great sailing weather.’
Or, ‘We have to press on.’ Or, ‘We have to make the tide by five o’clock.’ Or, ‘It’s
bound to improve by the afternoon.’ Or, ‘Let’s stick the sails up and see what
happens.’ Or, ‘We don’t want to sit here in this noisy harbour all day.’ Or, ‘You
went ashore last week.’

So we
went sailing. The implication was that, somehow, it was the boat itself that
would mope if we didn’t.

Very
occasionally, if a torrential downpour combined with a freak Essex tornado and
if the boat were in some very safe harbour (‘You cannot leave it unattended at
anchor in this weather!’) my father could be constrained to take a day off from
harping. Even then, he would linger on the slippery quay to gaze longingly back
at her, while the rest of us charged hurriedly out through the rain to take the
bus to nearby Ipswich. Here he retained his full coxswain’s outfit: sea boots,
- Breton fisherman’s cap and barnacle-encrusted oyster-dredger’s smock. Wrapped
in a capacious yellow ‘oily’, he shuffled through shopping centres,
periodically holding up a
wetted finger as if he half-expected a flare
to bang above Dorothy Perkins and summon him back to the vessel. We hid in shop
doors to disassociate ourselves from him.

I can
measure the progress of my adolescent life by my father’s boats. Where other
suburban dads might have fulfilled their status anxieties with bigger, newer,
shinier, faster cars, Elwyn went for ever-larger, dumpier, more impractical
barques.

They
were hardly yachts. The home-made Enterprise dinghy was abandoned in Itchenor
and replaced by a ‘Yachting Monthly Senior’ called
Dunlin,
after the
dull bird that sits on the mud. It had a pale-blue hull, retro portholes and a
cabin, which was quite an achievement in a boat which wasn’t much longer than
an open dinghy. You opened the doors, pushed back the hatch, and, like some
floating pup tent, there were two berths slap on the floor, separated only by
the wooden slab of the centreboard case. Being nine, I could just about stand
up in the well. Adults crouched and cursed. There was enough room for my mother
to squat, giggling, over a
bucket.

Oh
dear. To a sensitive Epping boy, unwonted glimpses of the white pudding of his
mother’s bottom, wedged on a plastic bucket, were the stuff of nightmares. My
father, in particular, seemed to delight in inflicting his morning ‘ablutions’
on us. The boats did get bigger. The groins, pumps, cocks and gurgling
mechanisms got more Heath-Robinsonesque. But fifteen feet, twenty-four feet or
twenty-nine feet — what did it matter anyway? There was nowhere to run to. My
parent’s carefree, hospital—trained frankness was met with concentrated
adolescent disgust. We bonded as a family, in the most intimate, revolting way
conceivable to an adolescent. Sometimes I had to wait days to get the boat to
myself for a crap. And did they care? They laughed.

He kept
Dunlin
off the Harlow Sailing Club, which owned a patch of agricultural
land by a creek in Maylandsea. It took an hour chugging across John Betjeman’s
favourite county to get to this outpost. Even when we were ‘nearly there yet’,
we still seemingly had miles of bleak flat-lands to cross before the car pulled
off the main road and lolloped down the track to the water’s edge. Not that the
water was often around. The sea struggled to reach this far.

My
father would match his screeching to the car’s as it scraped its sump across
the potholed track. Harlow Sailing Club itself was no more finished than the
rest of Maylandsea: one of those small-holder plot-lands, linked by unmade
roads and then abandoned to the whims of the owners. Caravans, black sheds and
Californian ranch bungalows were haphazardly jostled together. We left
scrupulously planed Harlow to come to desperately unplanned Maylandsea.

At the
age of eight I sat in the car eating egg sandwiches, while my father helped
manoeuvre massive tubes of concrete into muddy holes to build the clubhouse. We
played rolling games on the sea wall when they went to dig moorings. Three or
four men pushed a boat out across the mud, holding on to the sides to stop
themselves sliding under, and sprayed filth everywhere, trying to get a
three-foot-diameter concrete pill with a chain on the end of it dug into the
bottom.
Dunlin
was anchored to one of those.

Once he
had done his bit, my father never really went near the place again. ‘They’re
only interested in dinghy racing,’ he said dismissively. He wanted to go
harping. We used the little boat to go off to explore the mud and slept in a
caravan he had bought, in a field near by.

Opposite
the end of the two-mile creek was Osea Island. It had been a refuge for alcoholics.
To begin with we rarely went further than its steep shingle beaches overlooked
by massive elms topped with heron’s nests, from where you could look across at
what we were reliably informed was Anthony Wedgwood Benn’s country estate.

We
always seemed to be coming back late on the ebb tide, probably leaving it until
the last possible moment. Even the tiny
Dunlin
had to feel its way up
the gut. It was powered by a hot and dangerous-looking Seagull outboard engine,
with its unprotected flywheel and a battered fuel tank. This latter was
decorated with a picture of a jaunty yachtsman in a striped shirt. He had the
whole engine lifted on to his broad shoulders and with his knotted scarf and a
pipe, looked as if it brought him nothing but joy.

As
likely as not, our own Seagull would fail at a critical moment. Time was short,
the tide was in danger of leaving our mooring dry and the thing would sputter
to a halt. The boat would continue to sweep serenely forward, but the extreme
silence following the raucous clatter was broken by the natural sounds of the
gurgling water, the swishing of a bow wave and the hysterical shouting of my
father.

‘Take
the helm! Take the helm. Keep her heading upstream. Don’t let the tide drag you
down on the other boats. Keep the bow up!!’

Being
close to our own buoy (that’s why we were motoring not sailing), we were
amongst other sleek vessels whose expensively painted hulls slithered past on
either side. My mother would put on a look of determination and grasp the
tiller with white knuckles, not something she was ever encouraged to do except
in cases of the direst emergency. We knew better than to chatter or play or
make smart remarks. And my father, with the urgency of a landing boat commander
on D-day, frenziedly wound a knotted cord around a metal spindle on the top of
his engine and repeatedly yanked at it. Sometimes the rope whipped up and
caught him on the face. Sometimes the engine harrumphed and made wheezy choking
noises but inevitably it failed to ignite.

‘It’s
the plugs. They’ve oiled up again. Keep the bow ahead, ahead!’

The
boat would gradually lose momentum. My mother, completely unscientific about
the process of steering, would grip the tiller harder and look about her
anxiously, while my father leaned over the red-hot casing and fiddled with a
spark plug, his shirt bunched, his face streaked with oil (no pipe, no knotted
scarf and definitely no joy), anxiously stealing looks to see whether the boat
was going to prang itself on some trim racing vessel.

‘Boat
hook! Get a boat hook.’ My mother would teeter outboard and try to hook on to
another boat with the end of a pole.

‘Hold
on to a stanchion!’ He knew that other boats’ fancy wires and silvery metal
protrusions might easily ping off, or crumple like silver paper. On several
occasions, they did. Then my father would hold his head in his hands and give
way to gloomy prognostications about insurance premiums. But mostly, after a
few moments, the tide would win, the boat hook would slip out of my mother’s
grasp, and my father would throw himself into a panic; trying to get some sails
hoisted or the lifting keel up, while the stricken vessel drifted quietly and,
indeed, imperceptibly on to the mud.

Nonetheless,
we went exploring further out on to the broad estuary itself, bounded by land
so flat that all harbours were a surprise (at least to us) and dominated by the
twin blocks of the Bradwell nuclear power station. Opposite them, during
depressions, shipping companies would anchor redundant ocean-going freighters
or tankers, but most of the miles of open water were shallow It was possible
when the evening was still and the winds were light to spend a good minute
gummed to the bottom before anyone noticed that you had touched.

‘We’re
aground!’ he would suddenly bellow at the top of his voice.

‘Are
you sure?’ my mother might venture, helpfully, looking about her.

‘Get
the plate up!!’

He
would lumber forward, with the energy only granted to overweight doctors at
times of imagined distress, to heave at a gnarled nylon rope around a pulley
system and try to wrest the lifting keel from the abominable suction.

Usually
it took several others heaving too. And the mud was not the problem. The pulley
system was. When it finally gave way with its usual lurch, the team fell
backwards into the cockpit, the unattended tiller yawed round, and the boat,
now floating again, generally looked after itself.

Imagine,
if you will, a wooden box: twenty foot long by about four foot high, narrowing
at both ends. It contains five people, my family, like transported slaves,
lying head to foot, on narrow bunks. My head is three or four inches from a
gently perspiring ceiling. My father’s legs are ingeniously slotted into a
little opening immediately beneath my head.

My
mother is on the other side of a small companionway. My sister lies stretched
out forward of her in a separate box, separated by an eighth-of-an-inch
plyboard panel and a curtain. My older brother is wedged into the pointed bit,
between canvas sacks full of sails and a length of anchor chain. It is nearly
one in the morning. We have lain in this way for about an hour, ever since the
late-night shipping forecast came to an end. It is dark. Not a twinkle of light
pierces the enclosure. We are peering into the blackness and waiting, and we
are on holiday in our second boat —
Xara.

The
boat is floating in a narrow channel in a gut, in a slick of mud in the middle
of saltings some two or three miles from the nearest habitation. Outside there
are trickling sounds and a universal, low oozing and plopping. A sea bird
mews. Inside there is only the sound of breathing and the occasional rustle of
nylon sleeping bag.