Coasting (13 page)

Yet I could see the land creeping past the wheelhouse window. I shut my left eye and squinted, lining up a coppice of dead elm trees against the steel rigging of the mizzen shrouds. The trees were making definite but slow progress, while the boat stayed still. The land was a limping ship, making just a knot or two through the water, its decks littered with cars, cranes, containers, scaffolding, apartment buildings—a lifetime of accumulated junk. The long low vessel of England looked dreadfully patched and rickety, and I wouldn’t have put a penny on her seaworthiness as she shuffled painfully westward under a charred flag.

This was not a tired hallucination. I had set off in my boat on the assumption that England would have the grace to stay in her charted position. It was
Gosfield Maid
that was supposed to be making all the running on this trip. But within twenty-four hours of my departure, England decided to go off on a voyage of her own. I was pointing east by north for the Dover Straits; England was headed west and south for the Falkland Islands.

I was two miles out of Fowey when the country disappeared into the mist, and I had no idea what she was getting up to in my absence. Trusting to the compass, I felt my way up-Channel by numbers, marking the chart every fifteen minutes with a cross to show where I reckoned
Gosfield Maid
must be. On the extreme edge of my world there was the occasional pale silhouette of a passing ship, and sometimes the boat would give a sudden lurch as it hit the wake of something big that was too far away to see.

Six miles on, I met a pair of scallop dredgers working in consort, raking the bottom for shellfish with what looked like antique bedsteads. The fishermen waved as I went by. The sea is a much friendlier place than the land: when you see someone else afloat on it—at least in difficult weather and away from yachting slums like the Solent—you salute them to acknowledge a solitude momentarily brightened for being shared. You take an inordinate pleasure in what little passing company you can find. I warmed to the little black-and-white guillemots, shiny bath toys, that kept on diving ahead of the boat—there one moment, gone the next, leaving a space in the water as cleanly drilled as a bullet hole.

The warships made themselves heard long before I saw them. I was searching the haze for the loom of Rame Head on the west of Plymouth Sound when the VHF radio yielded a sudden harvest of clean-cut naval voices talking in jargon.

“Roger, Long Room … roger … roger and out.”

“Achilles, Achilles, this is Ajax, Ajax. Do you read, please? Over—”

It was an hour before the warships became actually visible—first as angular shadows, then as gray dirigibles apparently
suspended in the sky. Stealing cautiously up on these giants, I felt the walnut-shell littleness of my 32 feet of boat. Slab-sided, beetling, rudely engineered in what looked like bare cement, they made no concessions to the usual curves and frills of marine design. Her Majesty’s Navy was a seaborne industrial estate of displaced tenements and factories: it looked as if Slough, Milton Keynes and Newark had taken to the water for the day.

Each ship had a small forest of radar scanners sluggishly revolving on their stalks. Their huge propellers made the sea behind them boil for half a mile and more. I was scared of letting
Gosfield Maid
go anywhere near these wakes: caught in that turbid white water, she would be flung about like a dinghy.

I hung back to make way for a monster ahead. Its guns were masked in tarpaulins, clumsily wrapped Christmas presents, and in the deck space between the guns, men in the uniform of the Royal Marines were at drill, jerking and snapping to their orders.

“Slow-hope
harms
!” I could hear the simultaneous
crunch-crunch-crunch
of the rifle butts and see the limbs of the men moving stiffly in time. They were boys in sailor suits, with spots on their faces and unformed pudge noses. Poor kids, condemned to compulsory games.

“Pre—wait for it! Scent
harms
!”

The enormous ship breezed past with flying colors. The white ensign rippling on a jackstaff at the stern gave the thing an incongruous touch of daintiness: a single rambler rose trained on the wall of a high-rise by some optimistic tenant.

Keeping at a safe distance, I followed the Navy down the broad triumphal avenue of Plymouth Sound. Lined with forts, flagstaffs and monuments to the famous dead, the Sound was a place for ceremonial processions and state occasions. A civilian interloper, I sneaked along the edge of the buoyed channel, fearing summary arrest by the policemen of the water. At Drake’s Island the fleet wheeled left for the River Tamar and the naval dockyards; I bore right into the Cattewater, following the antique, but still good, advice of Greenville Collins:

In Sutton Pool I tied up alongside the trawlers by the fish market. I climbed a slippery ladder, a rope end in my teeth; stepped ashore and learned that war had broken out.

Even when you’ve spent just a few hours at sea, it is always a bit difficult to learn to walk on land. After water, earth is a sick-makingly unstable element. Your feet keep on encountering thin air where there ought to be paving stones; you have to crouch forward, raising your arms and bending your knees like a toddler, to balance yourself against the lurching street.

At first I took the news of the war as another symptom of this general topsy-turviness of things on land. I didn’t trust it, any more than I trusted the scaly cobbles of the fish market or its green filigree roof, which was swaying dangerously overhead. It seemed beyond belief.

It had begun six weeks before as a silly diplomatic comedy: a bunch of scrap-metal merchants had cheekily raised the Argentine flag over their campsite on the island of South Georgia. I had rather enjoyed the exploits of these jingoistic rag-and-bone men, and thought the questions raised about them in Parliament had sounded unnecessarily indignant and pompous.

Yet in the short time that I’d been away from land the thing had turned from trifling farce to a drama of the most frighteningly serious kind. Argentinian troops had invaded the Falklands, and the Governor of the islands had surrendered in Port Stanley after a short skirmish between a detachment of British marines and the Argentinians. Diplomatic relations with Buenos Aires had been broken off; a naval task force was about to sail from England to the South Atlantic to reclaim the colony.

No wonder that the warehouses and shops of Plymouth were pitching in a tricky sea. There were far too many wars
in the world already—too many bangs and flashes and screams and unattended bodies in suburban streets. Beirut and Belfast were at least explicable: those miserable twin cities were built on enmities so old and loggerheaded that it would have taken a miracle for them not to break out sometime into a state of open warfare. But this Falklands business, as far as I could understand it, was perfectly gratuitous. Two governments were preparing to kill each other’s soldiers, to go widow-making, for no better reason than that the exercise would be good for national pride or, perhaps, that it would create a handy distraction from the unhappy tangle of affairs at home.

I sat in a bar full of trawlermen trying to watch television. In dreadful color, behind snow showers of interference, the British Foreign and Defence Secretaries were holding a press conference. They were both speaking in the same unnaturally slow voice; that studied bass, bulging with
gravitas
, which politicians habitually use when they think they’re making History. The badly tuned television set gave them the faces of giant goldfish swimming behind the glass, and the lips of Lord Carrington went on slowly opening and closing, opening and closing, as if he were masticating ants’ eggs rather than words—soft, fatty abstractions like
Sovereignty, Integrity, Responsibility, Allegiance
.

I trailed out through the darkening city; on Plymouth Hoe I found a joyful hubbub in the Royal Western Yacht Club of England.

“Well, it’s four thousand miles at … what? Fourteen knots?” The man beside me frowned at his wristwatch as if it were about to come up with the answer.

“It’s more than that, Jack. It’s more like nine.”

“What,
knots
?”

“No—miles. Nine thousand miles.”

“Well, then. Nine thousand miles at fourteen knots …”

“It’s going to be three weeks at least, maybe four, even.”

“No—you could do it in ten days. Easily. Those Type 21s go at one hell of a lick. Thirty knots plus.”

“Yes, but what about Charlie Slowcoach? It’s the landing ships you’ve got to think of—”

Pink gins on silver trays were moving as fast as Type 21s. Men in dinner jackets and black ties, on the leeside of some formal binge, stood in an important group in front of the fire. Wives in long frocks sat out at separate tables, leaving their husbands free to run the coming war. The men were grizzled and pink. They shared the same old school of the Navy, and were of an age to have served in North Atlantic convoys and seen the beaches of Dunkirk. They were the corvette captains forty years on, and today’s news was working on them like a powerful injection of caffeine. They were alight with it. Their voices caroled.

“They’ve cancelled all leave—”

“They’re coming down from Wales—”

“They’re sailing from Gib already—”

“Endurance
is still down there—”

It was an evening to make old men feel young again. There was pure pleasure in their indignation at what Argentina had done.

The man at my elbow was saying: “It’s exactly as if Russia had come over and occupied the Isle of Wight without a by-your-leave.
Exactly
.”

“But I thought—”

“Exactly the same. No difference at all. It’s British soil.”

“Well, is it, quite?”

“Of course it is. Sovereign territory. British soil. The Falklanders are as English as I am. To a man.”

As the gins piled up on the bar, the talk spiraled in volume and excitement. We were on to the requisitioning of civilian ships now.

“Trawlers from Hull are going.”

“And Brixham too.”

“They’re going to need cross-Channel ferries—”

“And the QE 2.”

“I’d take my tub out there at the drop of a hat,” one man said, and opened a floodgate of happy fantasy. Could there, just conceivably, be a place for all of us in England’s great adventure? Supposing we set off tonight … The catamarans, at least, could make it almost as fast as the warships … And someone had a ketch down in the Med—wasn’t
that almost halfway to Port Stanley? Imagine the astonishment and terror of General Galtieri’s gang when they saw, approaching them over the horizon, not an armada but an epic regatta: it would be Cowes Week and Henley and Burnham rolled majestically into one. The Argentinians would take fright at the sight of the picnic hampers alone.

“I’d go.”

“So would I, Jack, if they’d have me.”

“I’m still on the Reserve.”

“They’ll have to call up the Reserve.”

“What about our friend here? Would
you
go?”

“Good God, no,” I said, then remembered where I was. “I only do six knots. I wouldn’t get to the Falklands until about this time next year.”

The picture window at the end of the bar framed Plymouth Sound—the pinprick lights of winking buoys, the bulky blue shadows of ships on the move. Whisky and the din of the war talk had gone to my head. I’d lost half the words, but it was a night made for the rollicking sentimental chauvinism of Sir Henry Newbolt and the poem that every small boy in England used to be forced to recite at school:

At least there was no chivalry in the fish business. I was awakened in the dark by sudden arc lights and a voice talking through loudspeakers.

“… six fifty … seven … seven fifty … eight. Any more on eight? Eight, eight, eight, eight—
Wemmidge.”

Maneuvering trawlers were stirring up the water of the
dock, and
Gosfield Maid
rolled and crunched against the harbor wall. Crapulous and underslept, I did my best to nurse the charcoal embers which were still just glowing in the stove in the saloon. The whistle of the kettle in the galley, six feet away, injured something vital in my skull. Moving too fast to shut off the noise, I bruised my shin on the first step of the companionway to the wheelhouse. A small boat never seems smaller than when you have a hangover. It is all obstacles and sharp corners. Its drumskin interior magnifies every sound.

“… whang, whang, whang, whang—
Jorkins.”

Shaved and necktied, I pulled the broad brim of my felt hat low down over my forehead to hide my bloody eyes and went out to make a brave breakfast of a hot dog and a paper cup of tea from the stall in the market. The predawn auction under the lights was the stuff of which really first-class hangovers are made. It was odd, boring, much too vivid, mildly repulsive and perfectly in keeping with my mood.

The auctioneer, dressed in a white coat like a medical attendant and carrying a microphone on a long lead, was working his way steadily down a line of buckets and trays of dead fish. A dozen fish merchants in raincoats and Tyrolean hats with feathers, their hands deep in their pockets, shuffled along behind him. Every bucket and tray had what looked like a bumper sticker lying on top of it, showing the name of the trawler which had landed the catch.
Our Tracey. Semper Allegro. Jayne Anne. Maaleesh
.

The group assembled round a tray of bleary-eyed Dover soles, fish and men regarding each other with exactly the same indifferent stare.