Coasting (25 page)

Prepared for a slice of heroic adventure, they found themselves in the middle of a floating vicarage garden fête. The sun shone. The salt in the air glittered like tinsel. In the enclosed water of the Solent, the stiffish southerly wind did no more than prettily tousle the sea. Though I had made an important fuss of laying compass courses on the chart and calculating tidal streams, there was no navigation, since everyone could see exactly where everywhere was. There was no solitude, either. There was hardly any room at all in which to move.

White yachts went sobbing and strumming past our bows and stern, their crews decked out in primrose vinyl and braided captains’ hats. The whole Solent was a crazy-paving of interlaced wakes as I did my best to thread us through the pack of charging motor cruisers, fishing parties, ferries, dinghies, yachts. The entrance to the Beaulieu River was hidden behind a bright fleet of sailboards. A big container ship, leaving Southampton Water, scattered the small fry ahead of it like a pike in a pond.

“Racing!” shouted a furious Saturday admiral from his cockpit. “We’re racing!”

“He
seems cross,” my mother said.

I hauled
Gosfield Maid
round in a shamble of flapping sails and gave way to the Isle of Wight, which steamed briskly off to starboard. This was not how I had planned things. My idea, sketched out long ago, had been that I would pilot my parents across the lonely face of the sea in a neat reversal of roles; the son would turn father, with all a father’s air of calm and baffling expertise in the world.

The trouble was, I didn’t know the ropes. Learning to manage the boat singlehanded, I hadn’t bothered to take in their names. In any case, I was vain about not going in for the sort of salty talk which the amateur sailors liked to sprinkle over their prose in
Yachting Monthly
and their conversation
in yacht club bars. Let them keep their vangs and kicking straps and stays’l halyards—I meant to live in ordinary daily English. What I hadn’t reckoned on was that this made me perfectly unable to communicate the simplest instruction to my anxious-to-help father, who had done a bit of sailing in his time.

“No, not that rope. The other one. The one next to it—the one that’s tied to that cleat thing.”

“The topping lift,” my father said, producing a surprise trump. The points of his beard glinted in the sun. In his white cricket sweater, gray flannels and sneakers, still as long and lean as he had been in his twenties, he looked comfortably in command of the occasion. The passing yachtsmen would have nailed me as the unhandy passenger on this outing.

“So this is what you call research?” My father grinned, showing teeth that were as much in need as mine of restorative work. His grin took in the swarm of pleasure craft, the little waves, the high, holiday sky, the smell of suntan oil in the air, the water skier in her scarlet wet suit who was zipping by on the beam.

It certainly didn’t look much like a voyage of discovery, this weaving passage through the weekend crowds, with my father now at the wheel and my mother getting up a picnic in the galley. It was only too obvious what I was really up to. In my mother’s phrase, I was “going boating.” The water skier ran a needlessly fast circle round
Gosfield Maid
and made off toward Cowes.

“Anyone for pâté?” my mother said.

“We could lie hove-to … perhaps?” my father said, smoke from his pipe mingling with smoke from mine. “Back the jib and tighten up the mainsail …?” The deferential question marks in his voice almost, but not quite, concealed the fact that these were captain’s orders. We backed the jib, we tightened the mainsail, and the boat fossicked about on the water while we lunched in the open cockpit.

“It’s not usually like this,” I said.

“No, it must get very rough sometimes,” my mother said encouragingly. “But she’s a lovely little boat.”

I saw my entire voyage being wrapped up in a tarpaulin and buried at sea.

We floated through the afternoon, a family among all the other families who were playing about with their expensive toys. Off Spit Sand Fort I tried to save the day with a solemn disquisition on the changing sociology of boat ownership, the emergence of a new leisure class, the conspicuous excess of fat in this southern quarter of Mrs. Thatcher’s England. But the argument was rather spoiled by the sudden intrusion of a madman in a brand-new Princess motor cruiser with a flying bridge and tarpon deck, which he was using as a ballistic missle against
Gosfield Maid
.

“If to starboard red appear, it is
your
duty to keep clear!” I yelled as he roared past our paintwork. He banked, waved and shot away to carve up someone else.

“We’re a bit worried about getting into Hungary, with Daddy being a priest …”

“It may be a wise move to get a new passport. With just ‘Retired’ in it. What do you think, old boy?”

These were the voices of serious adventure and exploration. I’d always seen myself as the man most likely to disappear under armed guard at some frontier post with barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements, but now it was my father who was going to get the interrogation and a spell in the slammer.

“You’re not planning to go in with contraband bibles and prayer books, are you?”

“No, just bird guides.”

“Wear your C.N.D. badge,” I said, wondering whether my father would catch the echo from a quarter of a century back. “They’re very keen on C.N.D. badges, but you have to spend a lot of time explaining that you mind their bombs just as much as you mind ours.”

At the approach to Chichester Harbour I took over the wheel. Here, at least, there was need of some fine pilotage. I brought the Nab Tower behind us into line at 184° and headed for the beacon on the bar at 004°. The course was clearly enough marked by the evening stream of returning sailing dinghies, but I was determined to cling to every last
bit of expertise that I could lay my hands on. There was a gratifying lumpiness in the sea as it shallowed over the sand, and the boat lurched just enough to rattle the plates in the galley and dislodge the odd book from the shelves.
Leave the beacon half a cable to port … watch the shoal of broken water to starboard …

“You always used to do that when you were a little boy, when you were concentrating,” my mother said.

“Do what?” The incoming tide was sweeping us through the buoyed channel; a tufted sand dune whizzed past the window to starboard, looking as yellow as butter in the low, cold sun.

“Stick your tongue out between your lips. Like you’re doing now.”

Recalled to infancy, I moored the boat at the end of a jetty in a hideous marina. Fenders out, ropes tight, we were exactly two and a half miles short of 1951.

My father was a theological student at the college attached to Chichester Cathedral. During his training we lived in a rented house six miles away, at Aldwick. He was still addressed as “Major” then, a title which must have seemed an odd one for the boyish figure bicycling between his young family and his lectures, with his Artillery beret pulled down over his ears and his college scarf flying.

I hired a car from a garage in Chichester and we drove off in pursuit of that distant cyclist. The landscape was confusing. The narrow gritted lanes were roads now; they’d lost their tricky bends and their high hedges. The Sussex villages had run together into a dribble of brick and cinder-block. But we found our house easily enough: 12 Nyetimber Lane, Aldwick, Sussex, England, The World, The Universe, Space. We snooped about the grounds of the college and were stopped by a priestling young enough to be my son.

“I say, can I help?”

“Just looking round,” my father said. “I used to be a student here myself.”

“Really?” the boy’s surprise was understandable. My father’s beard sprouted from the hood of his blue plastic parka; the soles of his sneakers were beginning to come apart from the uppers. He did not look like anyone’s conventional notion of a canon of the Church of England. As a version of the boy’s own future, he looked distinctly alarming.

“Oh …” the boy said. “Well, I suppose you’ll know pretty well … where everything is …?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Goody.” The boy beamed vacantly, curatelike, and ground a lingering heel in the gravel before making his escape.

“That had him foxed,” my father said. “Have you got any baccy on you, by any chance?”

There was a particular memory which I wanted to track down—my father’s first sermon.

“Not a hope,” my father said. “I haven’t a clue where that was. I certainly can’t remember the sermon.”

“I can. It was on Scott’s last expedition. Captain Oates walking out of the tent into the snow. Greater love hath no man than this. All that.”

“Oh, lord.
Was
it?”

“It was Festival of Britain year. Captain Oates represented the spirit of British self-sacrifice …”

“It sounds
Thatcherite,”
my mother said.

“Oh, it was.”

“You’re teasing.”

“No, I’m not. It’s absolutely clear in my head, as sharp as a photograph.”

It was, too. A patch of icy sky showed through the chapel rafters. It was a 3:30 winter Evensong on a November Sunday. Half a dozen camphor-smelling ladies had turned up to hear about Captain Oates. My father wore his father’s surplice. His voice was surprisingly shy as it echoed in the whitewashed stone arches, failing to find its proper size.

“Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us in sundry places …”

I was determined to find this sundry place. It stood in a
railed enclosure of chalky turf, with a stand of bare trees a few yards from the door. At 4:20, when the service was over, it was dusk and the trees were mysteriously reclothed with foliage. With a sudden churr of wings, all the leaves turned simultaneously into an enormous flock of starlings. They made the dark sky black overhead for a minute or so, then settled again, gossiping noisily in the branches.

Now you know what a plague of locusts looks like
, my father said.

“Don’t you remember the starlings?”

“What starlings?”

“The starlings outside the chapel, after Captain Oates.”

“Wait a moment,” my mother said, “something’s coming back.”

“Half-past three. November 1951. Sometime in Advent. A chapel running parallel with a lane. Iron railings. Trees. Starlings. Scott’s last expedition. Somewhere in Sussex.”

“You’re sure this isn’t one of your fictions?” my father said.

“Absolutely positive.”

“Yes,” he said, “I think I—half-remember it.”

“I do,” my mother said. “Definitely. Yes. Jonathan’s right, dear. It was the starlings that did it. It was a very drafty little church.”

“There was a gaping hole in the roof.”

“It was this side of Chichester, I’m sure.”

We searched the Ordnance Survey map in the car. It was richly dotted with small crosses by the sides of minor roads, and we made a long, looping tour of the ecclesiastical architecture of West Sussex, up lanes that went nowhere, cutting through new housing developments and industrial parks, skirting trailer sites, wheat fields, vegetable gardens, recreation grounds. Somewhere near Runcton, or Oving, or Mundham, or Bersted, or—there was no shortage of candidates. The churches and chapels stood in woody tangles of spring green, their graveyards waist-deep in grass and thistle. The ink had run on the notices which were pinned to their doors, but one could still make out that Communion was celebrated here on the second Sunday of every month. Most were locked. The few that were open
smelled of dereliction, with streaks of birdlime down their aisles, bats in their belfries and the
New English Bible
which had been left on the lectern gone prematurely antique with the damp.

None felt right. “I’m all at sea on this one,” my father said, and it was true: between the Festival of Britain and the year of the Falklands War, there had been so much heavy weather, thick fog, leeway lost and tidal streams left uncalculated that it was impossible to work out where we were.

“Isn’t
this
it?” my mother said at a chapel like a tumbledown cottage, dwarfed by its yew tree and surrounded by tombstones. “I’m sure it is. Look—there’s where we saw the starlings.”

“No. There weren’t any graves. It was much more exposed. It was at quite a different angle to the road.”

“Perhaps they’ve changed the road,” my mother said.

“I expect it’s gone, anyway,” my father said.

“It must have been standing since about 1300,” I said. “They can’t have pulled it down.”

I was thinking of our old ancestor hunts on summer holidays—the way you had to peel the moss off the stone as if you were skinning a rabbit. The dead made themselves so accessible then; we’d collect half a dozen new relatives in an afternoon, their names, addresses, dates, occupations, even, sometimes, the diseases from which they’d died. No such luck now.

“Why don’t we call it a day?” my father said, glooming under the yew tree in his parka. “I must say, it doesn’t sound as if it was any great shakes as a sermon—”

“It was a fantastic sermon. You had me on the edge of my seat.”

“Captain Oates
. I still don’t remember it, you know.”

That night we watched the ten-o’clock news on television in the boat. The latest on the Falklands front was that Vera Lynn—the “Forces’ Sweetheart,” from a thousand military concerts and wartime radio broadcasts—had come out of her long retirement to sing what the newscaster described
as “a new patriotic song,” all proceeds to the Falklands Fund. Peter de Savary had put up the money, André Previn had done the music; the song was presented as a major contribution by the Home Front to the morale and welfare of Our Boys in the South Atlantic.

A lot of dust had gathered on Miss Lynn’s voice since I’d last heard it, warbling sweetly about bluebirds ohover the white cliffs of
Dohover
, but its dustiness was like the scratchy burr of a 78 played on a horn gramophone; it made it more evocative, not less; it brought back memories of the gallant little ships, the blackout, whale-meat steaks and London-can-take-it.

The song was called “I Love This Land,” and it hinged on the refrain: