Coasting (40 page)

In fog, you have to trust your instruments
.

I went through the routine that I’d been taught by Commander King. I put on a life jacket, Every two minutes I stepped out into the cockpit and let off a long blurt from the compressed-air horn. I watched the needle on the depth-sounder jittering around the thirty-five-fathom mark. I checked the chart. So long as the needle didn’t start to
back round the gauge, the boat would stay at a distance of two to three miles from the shore. So long as I maintained a strict course of 040°, we were on target.

Out in the cockpit, I listened for ships’ engines. Once, a long fold of breaking sea came muscling up on the starboard beam—somebody’s wake, but I couldn’t hear whose, nor could I securely guess in which direction the ship must be traveling. Every time I worked it out, it was going somewhere else.

I had hoped that the first sound of Aberdeen would be the voice of Dolly Parton. It was the faint, but still horrible, moan of the siren on Girdle Ness, followed by the triple bell on Aberdeen North Pier. I prayed that the radar reflector, a boxy polygonal contraption which was rigged to the top of the mizzenmast, was making a fine splash on somebody’s screen, and continued on course into the fog.

I did not dare turn and head for the harbor. Its mouth was wide enough, about two hundred and fifty yards between the piers, but it was surrounded by rocks, and the pilot book warned of “continuous” oil traffic inside the harbor. I couldn’t tell now whether visibility was down to ten yards, or a hundred. At a hundred, I’d be safe enough, but at ten, if it was ten, I would at best be in a state of high panic. It seemed a lot safer to squeeze past Aberdeen, keep a mile or two offshore, and anchor as soon as I could pluck up courage to nose into shallow water without taking the risk of going aground on rock.

Several engines were audible now, and every few minutes the water ahead bulged with the wash of an invisible ship. The pier bell rang definitely just astern of
Gosfield Maid
, and I reckoned that I must have safely crossed the main channel into Aberdeen. From now on, there should be only inshore fishing boats, of
Gosfield Maid’s
own size and speed, to tangle with.

I felt the noise in my spine before I heard it—a hysterical jabbering, like a rioting crowd in a Middle Eastern city. It was a noise to run from, a noise that summoned images of abandoned bodies sprawled in streets, and running people, and the muffled popping of machine-gun fire.

In fog, you have to trust your instruments
.

Then I saw what it was. The closed circle of sea round the boat was water no longer—it was a solid mass of skidding, flapping, wriggling birds. Ragged puffins were apparently mating with herring gulls, kittiwakes, guillemots and terns. The birds were beyond counting. There were thousands of them—as many birds as there were citizens of Aberdeen, yawping and screaming in joy as they fought and plunged and beat their rivals off with their wings. I had planned on scenes of pretty wild dissipation, but not on this crazed and deafening orgy.

Gosfield Maid
had managed, in thick fog, to locate the city’s main sewage outfall. The stuff was bubbling up from the seabed. The few spots of water which the birds had left visible were stained dark with excrement—and the birds were in heaven. Jostling their neighbors, stabbing into the sludge with their beaks, they were behaving exactly like people who’ve hit a crock of gold. The still air smelled foul. I motored out of the cacophony with a handkerchief pressed against my nose.

But I had missed Aberdeen. A mile or two farther on, groping through the fog, listening, watching the instruments, waiting, heart-in-mouth, for a nasty surprise to loom suddenly on the beam, I thought, at least this feels more like real life than my imaginary boom town, and if a boom town is essential to this story, won’t the birds do just as well?

ENVOI: A PECULIAR PEOPLE

T
his house is full of noises. The cornstalk rustle of the sea makes itself heard from a mile away across the flat and hedgeless fields. There are mice behind the baseboards, and the oak frames of the house creak like a boat’s. The four rooms are as low and small as cabins, the lath-and-plaster walls give off a hollow drumming sound when the wind gets up, and at night the house feels as if it’s afloat, pitching gently on its mooring among the owls and foxes.

I’ve been keeping a close eye on the wind. Three months ago I put up a fine black cast-iron weathercock above the chimney pots, but it buckled in the first gale, and the second gale tore the cockerel clean off its perch at the legs. Now the vane spins free in its greased socket and the broken cockerel is going to rust in the uncut grass.

This is not the weather for casting off: not yet. A stubborn mountain of high pressure is centered over Latvia and a deep Atlantic low is poised just south of Iceland, ready to swing in across the British Isles. There are southeasterly
gales in the Channel and the North Sea, and from the bedroom window you can see yellow surf breaking far out on the flats. Last week’s snow lies in panes of bubbled ice on the lawn. I’ve been feeding the sparrows with scraps: puffed-out and bloated with cold, they scratch and bicker in the frozen dirt around the back door. I work at keeping the fires going overnight and leave a spoor of mud, twigs and elm bark on the carpets. There are two of us now, and weatherbound in an anchored house, we fret our time away as ships’ crews do, waiting for the rumble of the chain on the winch and the inspiriting busywork of making a departure.

In May 1985 I sailed
Gosfield Maid
across the mouth of the Thames Estuary and into the River Blackwater in Essex. On my first circuit of the islands, three years before, I’d steered clear of this meager and featureless coast as too untrustworthy to do business with. The sea lathered over its maze of offshore sandbars; church towers marked on the chart were lost among trees that looked like lines of crouching mangroves in a swamp; I’d investigated the narrow swatch-ways leading inshore through the sands, and headed north for the broad, safe channel into Harwich.

It was different now: I could watch the serpentine pattern of the place unfold on a radar screen. Essex had hardly any vertical dimension at all; its character lay in voluptuous horizontals—the looping seawalls, the crescent sandbars, the curving throats of the river mouths. Painted in anfractuous splashes of light on the glass, it formed an abstract composition which kept on reassembling itself around the boat as I moved deeper into the picture.

The outlying shoals had turned the area of sea around the mouth of the Blackwater into a series of calm, marsh-fringed lagoons. Big ships holed up here in temporary retirement—out-of-work oil tankers, Panamanian coasters under Customs arrest, bulk container vessels waiting to pick up a cargo at Tilbury or Felixstowe. Nearly a dozen of them swung to their anchors, deep in farmland, with no one
apparently on board, growing rust stains on their plates and weed on their chains. In mercantile-marine circles, the Blackwater was reckoned one of the cheapest places to put a redundant ship out to grass.

I found a mud berth for
Gosfield Maid
. For ten hours out of every twelve, the boat was lodged, shoulder-deep, in soft ooze. At the top of each tide she floated clear with a tremendous peptic exhibition of farts and gurgles. Her library was carted off by dinghy in boxfuls, and she was colonized as rent-free accommodation by the gulls and the cormorants. By June, her decks and wheelhouse were caked in white guano, while the saloon smelled of must and desertion.

I found a mud berth for myself too, taking a cottage in the Dengie Marshes. It had been built to house a farm laborer sometime in the seventeenth century, and its cambered beams had probably been salvaged from a ship wrecked on the sands. In this part of Essex, wreckage was the most freely available of all building materials. Houses had been cobbled together out of bits of old ship, and they were fashioned to look like ships, with clinker-built topsides of white weatherboarding and curved mansard roofs.

This architectural absentmindedness about what properly belonged to the sea and what to the land was just one symptom of the general elemental confusion here on this boggy fringe of things, where England petered out into water and water petered out into England. Land and sea were constantly changing places. As the tide shrank away through the culverts between banks of cord grass, it left large islands of shining mud, looking more liquid than the ruffled water round their shores. When the sea came back, flooding in over the salt marshes, drowning the islands and opening sandy footpaths to navigation, it was arrested only by the ancient earthwork of the seawall: at high tide, an arbitrary frontier of piled rubble separated the North Sea from the waist-high corn which stood twenty yards inside the wall. Left to itself, on a spring tide the sea would lap at the cottage door and turn the Tudor farmhouse into an offshore atoll.

There used to be malaria in these marshes. When Defoe visited the area in 1722, he found it settled by a hardy tribe of bog people. The men of Dengie told him that it was customary for them to marry up to fourteen or fifteen wives in a lifetime:

The marshes were unhealthy but rich. The Dengie people made a lot of money on a small scale, working from a single boat or a plot of drained swamp, selling salt, butter, cheese, corn, fish and timber to London merchants.

With no great houses and no powerful county families, the marshes lay happily outside the usual class arrangements of rural England. They were cultivated by small farmers who were more like European peasants or American settlers than the general run of cap-doffing English tenants. The flat landscape with its mephitic air was no place for trespassing gentlemen; the nearby sea had no bathing beaches; the marshes were difficult to cross, with narrow lanes twisting round the maze of dikes and drains. The people of Dengie were left largely to their own smelly and profitable devices. When the culture of London spread out far beyond the city, and overran counties like Buckinghamshire, Middlesex and Kent, it kept clear of Dengie. Nor did the Scandinavian name of the place add to its charm: its suggestions of dinginess
and dung made the marshes sound like a very undesirable address.

When I moved in, it was like finding a neglected loophole in the English system. It was wide-open country. The silence of the place was thick and palpable; the level sweep of fields under a giant sky made it feel oddly suspended and provisional, a shimmering trick of the light. I liked its absences. There were no braying gentry voices, no taint of dry sherry in the air after church on Sunday morning, none of the squashed and deferential manners which I had thought inseparable from English village life. I warmed to the gaunt tabernacle on the village’s single street—The Chapel of the Peculiar People (All Welcome). The sect had taken their name from the First Epistle General of Saint Peter: “But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people …”

The Essex dissenters declined to recognize temporal aristocracies, preferring to elect themselves as a spiritual aristocracy in their own right. They were indeed a peculiar people, living at an oblique angle to the rest of England, so far out on the country’s watery margin that they had almost run away to sea.

Their architecture and religion were distinctively homemade. In the Dengie Marshes, people did things for themselves without benefit of clergy or the landed ruling class. The place was a hive of tiny, tax-free private enterprises. Up every lane there was a brick bungalow with a notice nailed to a tree, advertising the spare-time products of the industrious householder: B
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ABLES FROM
£7.50—L
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—C
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. In every garden shed, someone was knocking together something salable out of bits of junk. Under every glass cloche, something was ripening in the sun to raise another bob or two. At weekends, the local artists held their exhibitions at roadsides, hawking pictures of Thames barges at sunset to passing art collectors in their cars.