The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  On recovering myself I found that the dinghy was intact – the impression of sinking was due to the flood of water bubbling up through the centreboard case with the spurt of speed. This water continued to fountain into the dinghy in excited sloshes while I lay there floundering. I struggled into a sitting position, jammed the centreboard down to quench the flow, edged nervously forward in the boat now skidding and surfing over the motor launch’s wake, and called out, ‘Excuse me … thanks for the tow and all that, but … um … could we take her a little slower, please?’

  ‘Wot? Can’t ’ear yer!’ came back the reply.

  ‘Um … could we slow down? SLOW DOWN PLEASE!’

  ‘Wot?! ’Ang on. I’ll cut the motor – ’

  ‘No, no!’ I screamed. ‘If you DO THAT, you’ll – ’

  Too late. The young skipper gave me a smiley thumbs up and shouted below ‘ERIC! Cut the motor!’

  A half-second later, the roar of the engine died, the motor launch wallowed to a sudden stop, and Jack de Crow surged forward on a great rolling wave of glimmering foam. She nose-butted the launch’s stern with a resounding crack and sent me once more reeling, face-down this time, into the watery bilges.

  ‘So, wot was it you was saying?’

  Soon, however, I found myself gliding down the river under starlight at a steady pace in the more capable hands of the skipper of the boat. This was Martin, another thirteen-year old boy, who had taken control of the launch out of the enthusiastic hands of Eric and Rodney.

  ‘Sorry ’bout that,’ he confided to me. ‘They’re me mates, but they’re a bit thick sometimes. I’m tryin’ to get ’em trained.’

  Actually Eric and Rodney, when not in pivotal roles aboard ship, were thoroughly delightful, as was Martin. He had, he explained, inherited the boat from his grandfather. Most evenings he was on the river with or without his crew, exploring the backwaters, getting to know correct procedures in locks and marinas and equipping himself with the experience to run a boating business as soon as he could leave school. He had an air of purpose and quiet confidence rarely seen in one so young, and practical skills enough to negotiate Mapledurham Lock by moonlight unaided – no easy task when one is towing a small frail dinghy.

  Eventually the lights of Reading came into sight around a bend and just above Caversham Bridge Martin expertly cast me loose and turned his motor launch upstream. Just before he chugged away he called out, ‘’Ere! Wotcha gonna do when yer get to London?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ I replied. ‘Finish there, I suppose.’

  ‘Nah!’ came back the reply in triple chorus. ‘Yer wanna keep goin’. Take ’er to France. Take ’er to the Med. Yer could go anywhere in that!’ And off they went back up the river to their mums and dads and ’omework to be done before tomorrer. So that was it My Channel-crossing idea endorsed by experts. It was good to know there were other right-minded folk in the world.

  Capsize and Colleges

  Then rose from sea to sky the wild farewell –

  Then shriek’d the timid, and stood still the brave, –

  Then some leap’d overboard with fearful yell,

  As eager to anticipate their grave.

  —BYRON, Don Juan

  That night it was bitterly cold. A peep out from under the awning at midnight showed stars flashing like crystals of ice against a blazing black sky. But the next morning was the loveliest yet. A thick white mist lay over the river and my awning and decks were furred with frost. Swans ghosted in and out of sight, heraldic birds in a silver world, and the early sun spun the mist from the river in skeins of palest gold. Before it had fully lifted, there came from somewhere down the river a sweet whiffling chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff – not the harsh snarl of a petrol motor but the unmistakable sound of a steam-launch.

  Soon it came into sight, a little aff air of polished teak and gleaming brass, chugging upstream with a snowy plume of steam billowing from its shiny funnel. The waters furled cleanly away from its bow in a V that set the river mist swirling and Jack rocking gently against the pontoon, and the day had begun.

  Part of the point of a peregrinatio is that you do NOT say, ‘I must get to Windsor Castle by tonight, come Hell or high water.’ This annoys the Deity and He is likely to produce both of the above elements in copious quantities to make a point. Nevertheless, I had a commission to carry out. In a letter received some days before, my mother had set out in the clearest possible terms why it was imperative that I reach Windsor Castle by Saturday night: namely, so that I could attend the choral Eucharist there the next morning at St George’s Chapel in the Castle. Why? Well for one, the service and setting were exceptionally beautiful. Secondly, every one of my numerous uncles had sung there as choirboys in their youth and would expect their nephew to visit as a mark of respect. Thirdly, the Queen might just be there and if it wasn’t too much bother, Mother had a message to pass on to Her Majesty about tapestry wool or some such thing. I really can’t remember. All in all, I was given the impression that it would be a serious dereliction of filial duty if I were to fail to make it on time. Thus I set out that Saturday morning with a good will to row the seventeen miles down to the royal seat of Windsor.

  From the start things conspired to slow me up. A rowlock had begun to weaken around the woodwork and at mid-morning I had to pull in to a waterside boatyard to see if I could fix it – a messy and time-consuming job. By the time this was over, I found myself rowing into a boat race, a rather serious one, with motor-boats chugging up and down full of bossy men with megaphones telling me to creep slowly along the banks while the slim gulls-wing eights sped by, race after race.

  It being a fine Saturday of sunshine and clear skies, the locks were busy and often there was a queue. This meant balancing on one’s oars in the wake of much larger vessels charging in and out of the lock-cuts, ready to scramble for safety out from beneath a cruiser’s bows or row like fury to make it through the lock gates before some happy holidaymaker slammed them shut under my very nose.

  Thus it was that by five o’clock in the afternoon I had only just descended Boulter’s Lock and still had seven long miles and several more locks to go before I would reach my destination. Divine Providence all day had been throwing large hints at me not to continue this headlong rush downstream to Windsor, and in ignoring them I missed the rich literary heritage of gracious Marlow – Frankenstein was written here, The Wind in the Willows just nearby – and missed also the opportunity to call in at Cookham and speak sternly to a certain Mr Barber who lives there. He holds the unique appointment of Her Majesty’s Swan Keeper and I’d been keeping a running list of complaints about his charges and whiling away the lonely hours by thinking up some amusing swan-culling ideas I felt he should consider.

  By the time I had crammed my way in and out of Boulter’s Lock, I was shaky and sweaty with the effort. I was also aware that it had been three days since I had had a wash. My shirt was clinging stick-ily to my back, my skin was gritty with sawdust from my rowlock-mending efforts, and I was thoroughly fed up.

  Then as I plunged crossly downriver below the lock, a narrow-boat chugged up behind me. Sensing my urgency the skipper called out, ‘Want a tow? Where are you hurrying to?’

  ‘Windsor!’ I called.

  ‘Windsor? We’re going down beyond Windsor. Throw us a line.’

  Two minutes later I was sitting back in the dinghy, relaxing for the first time that day and apologising to the sky, the water and the trees for my bad temper. Life is good, I told myself. People are kind, the world is beautiful, and another night without a bath would do me no harm at all.

  After another couple of minutes, life got even better.

  ‘Like a beer?’ called the skipper, waving a brown bottle at me from the narrowboat’s stern.

  His mate started hauling the twenty feet of towline in closer and closer to the narrowboat and soon I was riding the wash, Jack’s nose just half a foot from the stern, swaying and surfing playfully like a dolphin trailing a liner’s wash.r />
  ‘Here we are,’ said the mate, leaning over the stern rail as far as he could go. I strained forward to reach the bottle … nearer … nearer … one knee on the foredeck … shift of weight a little more and … and …

  And life suddenly got a lot worse. Jack, creaming along at an unaccustomed speed, swerved under the weight on her foredeck and slowly, gracefully, inexorably turned turtle.

  I disappeared under the icy green water in a tangle of stays and ropes, and into the Netherworld.

  The River is a person. I did not know that until now. Up there in the sun and air the river is a highway, a playground, an artist’s landscape, pretty-as-a-picture in white and blue. But here, down below the surface, I make the acquaintance of the Lady. She is cold-limbed and amber-haired and her teeth are the colour of gravel. Her skin is stippled all with rose-moles and glassy shadows play upon it. She arrays herself in fresh and flowing weed; silver fish-scales hang in her ears. Her voice is too low for human ear, but as she sucks and nudges she tells me her woes. I am seeking a new husband, says she, and if you stay another year down here, you shall be King, King of the River, blind as an eel.

  Where is the sky?

  Somehow, eleven months later, I kicked free of rope and stays in the waterish gloom and surfaced spluttering and wide-eyed, still, to my astonishment, with beer bottle firmly in hand. The skipper hauled me dripping out of the river onto the boat where I placed the bottle carefully on the deck. Then, spreading my arms in an extravagant gesture of thanks, I knocked the rescued bottle straight overboard again. Without thinking, numbly and automatically, I cried ‘Whoops!’ and dived straight back into the water to rescue it. Only on this second immersion did the icy shock of the water clear my head and I realise that perhaps I did not have my priorities straight The bottle had, in any case, sunk like a stone – a sacrifice to the river-queen, and rather it than me. As the skipper hauled me out for the second time onto the barge, he said, ‘Please, please, forget about the beer-bottle. We have others.’ Then, with rueful eyes, together we surveyed the scene.

  Jack de Crow lay completely upside down in the water, her yellow hull wallowing half submerged like a strange luminous turtle On the broad bosom of the river floated various bits of debris – my parrot cushion, my pith helmet, my small rucksack that contained my writing equipment, wallet and so forth. The oars were making a spirited bid for freedom some way down the river, and only the Lord knows what had happened to the main baggage stowed in the dinghy – my rucksack, awning, mattress and sleeping bag. Gone to join the beer bottle no doubt, and live it up with the Maidenhead mermaids at the bottom of the deep green Thames.

  A little motor launch was coming up behind us and it spent a busy ten minutes circling with a boathook, hauling the flotsam from the river and returning it to the narrowboat. Meanwhile, I had stripped to my underwear ready to dive back in to see if I could right the dinghy. As I stood there shivering in the evening breeze, I thought about it. The usual method of getting a capsized dinghy upright again is to stand on the lip of the hull and, putting all one’s weight on the end of the protruding centreboard, lever the whole boat over rather as one might roll a small portly whale onto its back by hauling on its dorsal fin.

  The problem here was that there was no fin – the centreboard had not been in place when she tipped. If it had sunk, as was likely, I too was sunk. Turning Jack over would be almost impossible However, there was a chance that the centreboard might be jammed somewhere under the upturned hull in a tangle of lines. There was only one way to find out. Taking a deep breath, I dived deep into the icy green water and swam beneath the hull, soon finding to my relief the centreboard jammed against the submerged gunwale. So far, so good. I surfaced again for air, dived once more and went through a slow-motion blurry-visioned struggle to poke the board back up through the centreboard case. Drifting lines snatched at my limbs, a coil of the mainsheet snaked softly around my head and I felt the sharp twang of one of the wire stays slice into my toes at one point, but at last it was done. The centreboard was poking up and out through the exposed hull. I surfaced, gasping for air. It was almost a surprise to see the late sunlight still there and the reassuring bulk of the narrowboat floating nearby, the anxious skipper watching on. Finally I went through the routine of righting the boat – a slippery clamber up onto the yellow woodwork; toes jammed against the gunwale lip; a steady haul on the fin; and the slow rolling of the boat onto its side as I fell backwards into the river’s icy green bosom once more.

  Capsize!

  An agile sailor will clamber onto the centreboard itself as the boat comes half over and continue the rolling motion by hauling on the upper gunwale, even nipping over this and into the dinghy as she fully rights herself in one continuous move – a little like an acrobat staying atop a rolling barrel. This graceful manoeuvre I signally failed to execute; it was another twenty minutes of floun-dering and flopping before Jack de Crow was wallowing upright and I was sitting in her flooded bilges surveying the damage. Remarkably, there was hardly any loss. My rucksack had jammed tightly under the thwart and the various other items had been secured by straps, which seemed all to have held. Indeed the only thing irretrievably gone was my tin-whistle, which had been lying loose on the decking. And at least, I thought, as I began to shiver uncontrollably, I had had that much-needed and long wished-for bath.

  While I had been performing clumsy aquatic stunts in my underwear, those aboard the narrowboat had made their own preparations. As soon as Jack was upright again and bailed out, I was taken aboard, wrapped in a warm, dry dressing-gown and handed a large hot whisky and lemon. It all goes rather hazy after that. I remember protesting and the skipper’s wife pushing me firmly into a bunk-seat and assuring me that I would be delivered to Windsor that evening When I tried explaining through chattering teeth and whisky fumes that it didn’t really matter, it was just Mum and the Queen and St George’s Chapel and the choir and Sunday mass and something-or-other, it all came out rather garbled – I think they got the impression that I was due to attend my royal mother’s funeral service or something equally momentous. Whatever it was, the skipper’s wife held a hurried consultation with her husband up on deck and they both came down with a new steely look in their eyes, saying: ‘Don’t worry, son. You’ll not miss that service, even if we have to burn every stick of furniture aboard.’

  The next three hours passed in a golden fog of warmth and vague contentment. Hot coffee followed the whisky, a light supper of cheese toast and poached eggs came somewhere along the line, and then more whisky again. Meanwhile, all my clothes and half the contents of my sodden rucksack were drying in the engine room, draped over hot pipes and valves and grills. To this day I regret that I cannot remember these people’s names, though I do know that the skipper’s wife was marvellously beautiful; also that when I asked the skipper what his profession was, he rather shamefacedly admitted that he was a North Sea rescue officer, more accustomed to pulling people out of sub-zero waters than tipping them in.

  Several hours after dark, when my clothes were merely damp, my head had stopped swimming and I had finally persuaded them that they would not be receiving a letter from my solicitor concerning damages due, we reached Romney Lock just below Windsor. They were planning to get down to Weybridge that night and I had delayed them enough, but they still took some convincing that I would be alright – this stretch of the river was after all dark and empty, and they really didn’t like to abandon me. In the end, to reassure them I told them that I had a friend living here, right here, not five minutes walk from the river, a very old friend who would be delighted to see me and yes, I was fine, honestly. They could sense, I think, that I was being cagey but perhaps assumed, from earlier rantings, that this ‘friend’ about whom I was being so vague was in fact the Queen, or at least some member of the Royal Household, and that I was not at liberty to divulge too many details. In any case they allowed me to reload my dinghy, made a final offer of a bottle of whisky to take with me (declined) and waved
me goodbye with the faintest of curtsies and a royal bow as I rowed off to the bank, allowing them to chug away downstream into the night.

  Once their lights had disappeared, I climbed out onto the shelving bank beneath an ornamental willow and considered my position. I didn’t, of course, have a friend near here – in fact, I wasn’t sure where ‘here’ was. It was unthinkable that I should sleep aboard the dinghy that night, with my sleeping bag soaked through and Jack still awash with water. It would have to be a bed and breakfast – it was to be hoped that they would accept soggy five-pound notes. If I could find one, that is. I appeared to be on the fringes of some large, dark, empty park. The night was clear and starry but bitterly cold, and I was beginning to shiver. Grabbing my wet rucksack and hat I strode off across smooth grass beneath stately trees towards a distant solitary light. This turned out to be a lamp post by a pair of high elaborate wrought-iron gates flanked by pillars. On one of the pillars was a name carved into the stone and gilded with a crest above it, dimly lit by the lamp. At last I knew where I had washed ashore: the hallowed grounds of possibly the world’s most famous school, Eton College.

  The security at Ellesmere had been fairly ferocious. What it would be like in the school where Prince William was no doubt sleeping in some nearby dormitory, not to mention the various young Honourables, Viscounts and Marquises dotted about the boarding-houses? Any minute now I would be arrested and shot as a deranged stalker of adolescent boys; or, more likely, a paparazzo attempting a few sneak shots. My dishevelled appearance was unlikely to reassure anyone.

  Eton …?

  Slowly my mind clicked to a halt. By golly, I thought. I did know someone here after all. Not the Queen, but a Housemaster. He had taught at Ellesmere long before my time but remained good friends with some of my colleagues there, and I had dined with him once or twice.