Coasting (16 page)

By mid afternoon, the depression was centered somewhere over the English Midlands. The wind paused, the river flattened. There was an abrupt silence, then a thrush began to sing in the trees close by the boat. Wood pigeons gobbled. A fish jumped. I was getting the dinghy ready to row over to the village when the wind came back, this time cold and dry from the northeast. Gusting slantwise across the river, it leaned against the eleven-ton bulk of the boat and made pens, papers, ashtray, matches slide gently off the edge of the table down in the saloon. It blew all night. I lay in the bunk in the fo’c’s’le reading Darwin by lamplight, tipped by the wind at a slight, oblique angle to the rest of society on the shore.

On Monday, the first ships sailed from Portsmouth. I watched them go in old-fashioned black and white. The movement of the boat, restless on its mooring, made the picture shatter every few seconds, then put itself back together. That hardly mattered, because it was such a famous picture—a picture as famous, at least in England, as
Mona Lisa
or
The Boyhood of Raleigh
. It showed pipe bands, bunting, flags, kisses, tears, waved handkerchiefs. Thousands of little Woolworth Union Jacks fluttered on the quay in time to the oom-pah, oom-pah of martial music. The camera dwelt in close-up on the faces of the girls, on the sooty trickles of mascara on their cheeks, on hooded infants held up on grandpas’ shoulders. It tracked across to the boys on deck, who looked as if they should still be in school as they waved their caps in the air and the wind rucked up their pigtail flaps around their bare necks. As lines were cast off, the camera homed in on the margin of black water between the dock and the gray hull of the ship, widening slowly from a pencil line to a canal. And they were off. Girls, their shoulders
quaking, searched for their powder compacts; the grandfathers frowned at a memory; the infants shook their happy flags like rattles. The colors of the saloon aboard my own boat were running together; I was dabbing my face and blowing my nose with paper from the kitchen roll in the galley.

Absurd. It was like crying over a bad movie in an empty cinema. I had thought my own skepticism about this political adventure was waterproof; not so. The insidious British genius for impromptu ceremonial could dissolve a skepticism like mine in a few moments. The families on the shore, the receding ships, the bands and streamers had me blubbering with silly pride in Queen and Country. It was lucky that no recruiting sergeant was on the prowl around the Yealm that afternoon—he would have had a tough time getting rid of me. Never mind my flat feet and falling hair, never mind my middle-aged belly, I’m your man, I’m here!

I switched off the set, angry with it, angry with myself. This was not how a detached coaster ought to feel: it was an involuntary throwback, like a genetically inherited disease—some sort of patriotic dystrophy whose course was triggered by the sound of bugles and the ripplings of flags.

But the Ancestors would be smiling in their chipped gilt frames. Colonel William, Major General Herbert, General Sir Edward and the rest hadn’t had much to smile over in the last forty years. Humped about by moving men from parsonage to parsonage, council estate to village and back to council estate again, they had never looked happy with their billets. Medaled and uniformed, as spruce as if they’d just stepped out of bandboxes, they had silently suffered this century behind their glaze of varnish and watched the family fortunes crumble. They had, presumably, perked up a little for the two World Wars, but they had spent my lifetime looking increasingly offended at their own spectacular irrelevance. They’d turned into fossils, beached up on the shore of a world of trades unions, winds of change, atheism, jeans, video clubs and one-parent families.

At long last there was something on television for them that they’d understand. Great-great-grandfather Herbert,
who’d put down a rising of Looshai tribesmen in Bengal in ’59, was back in his element this afternoon, suddenly in touch again with the rising generation; just as the rising generation, lectured by Mrs. Thatcher on how they must return to “Victorian values,” were suddenly, magically, back in touch with their lost forebears.

I have in front of me a letter written from aboard the
QE 2
, a day or two after embarkation for the Falklands, by a twenty-one-year-old subaltern in the Welsh Guards to his mother.

Even when one has allowed for some regimental ghostwriting, this is strange language coming from a man born in 1961. It is a letter written in a dream. The prospect of war has floated its author clean away from England of the 1980s. He is writing from a realm of such plucky unrealism and moral simplicity that it would be hard to locate it in any actual period of history. When a real Victorian, my own great-great-grandfather, embarked for India as an ensign in 1840 at the age of twenty, he too wrote to his mother from his ship:

The tone of the new Elizabethan is infinitely more elevated than that of this young Victorian. When the Empire was a matter of political fact, the dangerous business of policing it was just a job that young men of the middle class were automatically expected to do. They had little or none of the zealotry, the heady sense of being on a religious and national crusade, that the Welsh Guards officer brought to the phantasmal imperial exercise in the Falklands when the real Empire had disappeared long, long before he was born.

Everyone was embarking for somewhere. On the rising tide I rowed the dinghy up into the village and loaded it with pacific supplies like bags of charcoal for the stove, new wick for the lamps, a mackerel line and, in case the mackerel line came to no good, some tinned sardines and steak-and-kidney pies. At midday I embarked for—I wasn’t sure where. I crept as quietly as I could, with the engine keeping up a stream of warlike remarks, down the Yealm into a brisk blue day on the open sea.

I had been singlehandedly in charge of the boat for less than a week, and was shivering with adrenaline and nerves as I did everything to Commander King’s ghostly orders. I checked the shrouds overhead to see they were clear, wound up the heavy sails on their winches, tidied the foredeck, wrapped ropes round cleats, until the whole boat was tuned and taut, braced against the wind and plowing splashily ahead. She did not sail like a yacht: her trawler hull drove heavily, bullishly, through the water, shouldering it
aside and raising plumes of sunlit spray over the bows. She didn’t so much lean to the wind as yield to it unwillingly, exposing as little of her hull below the waterline as she possibly could.

With the reactionary engine shut down, I listened apprehensively to every sound in the sudden quiet. Ropes creaked and banged in their wooden blocks. The freshwater supply slopped and gurgled in the fifty-gallon tank under the cockpit. The chains of the steering gear rumbled with every small adjustment to the wheel. The short, sharp waves marched steadily alongside, breaking against the hull in a continuous low hiss. Once, I caught the noise of an intruder’s footsteps, but it was only the rhythmical
flop-flop-flop
of loosely packed books in the saloon shelves.

Gosfield Maid
lumbered along under sail at about four sea miles an hour, but it felt as fast and heart-in-mouth as flying, with the water foaming past under the gunwale and the boat’s wake breaking up behind her like a jet trail. I was utterly absorbed in the anxious business of simply staying afloat, living from moment to moment and from wave to wave.

Anxiety kept me very much busier than I need have been. I was frightened that the compass was wrong, that the tidal current would carry the boat miles off course, that fog would come down, that I’d lose my landmarks, that the wind would blow up into a gale, that I’d spring a leak—that somehow or other, this intense, private, shivery pleasure was eventually bound to turn into a string of bubbles.

I had the floorboards up to check the bilges. They were dry. Were they too dry? I blackened the chart with crosses, and kept on dashing out into the cockpit with the hand-bearing compass to see if Bolt Head and Prawle Point were still where I’d last left them, or whether they’d made a break for it and escaped over the horizon. From three miles off, the Devon coast was still winter-brown in the April sun; its headlands, cliffs and outlying rocks looked like a crumbled and half-eaten fruitcake on the edge of the sea.

The egotism of a man by himself in a boat is bolstered by everything that he can see. Out on the water, you
are
the
centrifugal point of the world through which you move, carrying the great disk of your horizon with you as you go. The first lessons in navigation entail an almost-scientific proof of the magnificent fallacy that the universe has been constructed for your convenience alone.

Bolt Head and Prawle Point are important for their
relative bearings
—their bearings in relation to you, which alter with every move that you make over the seafloor. The land in general turns into a wonderfully protean material: cliffs slide in and out from behind one another; new hills slowly enfold themselves round cities; houses and trees wander about the landscape, meeting and separating, while you stay fixed on your own lumpy patch of water.

This is just a prelude to the higher egotism yet to come. I had on board a sextant which I meant to learn to use sometime, together with Maria Blewitt’s
Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen
. The book began by sketching out an intoxicating fiction:

Forget Copernicus? I had spent my life trying, pretty much in vain, to remember Copernicus. I was delighted by this navigator’s view of the universe, in which everything was just as it seemed to be, with the sun, moon and stars as mere satellites, tastefully disposed about the globe, and man the navigator at the epicenter of the whole ingenious piece of clockwork.
Geocentric
and
egocentric
are one small typing
error apart; in celestial navigation, I had at last hit on a cosmology I could live with.

“Sometime, old boy,” my father said, “you’re going to have to learn that the world does not revolve around
you
.”

Thirty years on, I was learning the very opposite. With the headlands changing places and the sun going west, the world was turning round the axis of
Gosfield Maid
and I was back to Ptolemy.

Far out on the rim of the world, and in some danger of dropping off it altogether, there was the faint angular silhouette of an enormous ship. I couldn’t tell what it was—maybe an aircraft carrier, maybe a cruiser, but it looked big, naval and Falklands-bound. Seen from the center of things, its distant shadow was comfortingly insubstantial, anyway; an irrelevant distraction from the really important business of ropes, compass points and log readings.

I had never known a privacy so deep and self-contained as this. It was temporary and spiced with fright. It was bounded by Devonshire on one side and the task force on the other; but for the moment at least it felt absolute: an isolation, and an equilibrium, often dreamed of but never experienced till now. Lurching airborne through the sea, with lots of sunshine, a good library and the kettle just coming to the boil, I thought: I wouldn’t half mind spending eternity along these lines.

But the wind was fading and
Gosfield Maid
was down to three knots, then two and a half, against a foul tide that was picking up in speed as the English Channel tried to empty itself into the Atlantic Ocean. Off Start Point, twenty-four miles and seven hours out of the Yealm, I gave in and got the engine going. It came to life with a burst of patriotic blather.

The sea here was suddenly troublesome. Start Point sticks out into the tidal stream, a mile-long breakwater of solid granite. When the tide is running, it piles up against the headland and pours round its end in a confused mass of white water—eddies, whirlpools and frothy, pyramid-shaped waves. When a strong wind blows against the grain
of the tide, the place is dangerous, a sickening switchback ride over an indignant and frustrated sea which will do its best to spit you out and suck you down at the same time.

There was not enough wind to do that today, but there was a broad stretch of water ahead, rippling, off-white, like a field of grazing sheep. As soon as it came into sight, the boat began to slew and stumble through the waves, even though their tops were barely breaking. Following the instructions in the pilot book, I tucked myself in within a half-mile of the shore, waited until the lighthouse shifted round from northeast, through north, to north-northwest, and steered for it, aiming to shave past the rock with fifty yards or less to spare.