I thought that in my present soggy plight, this slim acquaintance might justifiably be taken up. It was even possible that my Housemaster might welcome me with open arms; I seemed to remember that he had an interest in sailing – might in fact acknowledge a fellow mariner in distress.
I knew his name but not which House he ran; a ring on the first doorbell I came to elicited a hollow reply from a speaker-phone set in the wall, which sent me off to an imposing Georgian porch down the road. Here I stood, composed myself and considered how best to initiate proceedings. I rang the bell there and waited until the door opened.
‘Johnny-boy! Hi! Remember me? That night at Ellesmere three, no, four, years ago? Sure you do! We had some laughs, eh? Well here I am, so let the party roll.’
Or perhaps, ‘
Hello, I’m hypothermic, in desperate need of food and warmth and a bed for the night. We HAVE met but I wasn’t blue then, I’ll explain over breakfast in the morning. All right?’
Or maybe I should …
‘Yes, hello. Can I help you?’
I blinked. This wasn’t the figure I remembered. John had been taller surely, with a moustache and brownish hair. This person before me was quite, quite different: short, silvery hair and wearing a skirt and blouse. It was, in fact, Mrs Doubtfire.
‘Is Mr Clarke here by any chance?’
‘No, he’s out this evening, I’m afraid.’
Inwardly, I sighed. My newborn visions of hot baths and soft sofas were fading even in their bright infancy.
‘Oh … Oh, thank you. No, no message. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye then,’ the lady replied and started to shut the door But just before she closed it, she glanced at me, poked her outstretched palm through the doorway and asked, ‘Is it raining? I thought it was fine.’
‘No, it’s not raining,’ I replied. ‘It’s quite clear.’
‘But you, you’re soaking wet! How on Earth …?’
‘I fell in the Thames at Maidenhead, you see, and I came ashore here and – ’
‘You SWAM seven miles from Maidenhead?!’ she exclaimed, door wide open now and eyes wide with alarm.
‘Oh no, no, no,’ I stuttered.
‘I think you’d better come in, dear, and warm up. Are you a friend of Mr Clarke’s?’
‘Yes … well, no … well, sort of.’
‘Dear me, I don’t think you’re well. Let’s leave that and sort it out later. Now come in and tell me all about it.’
And that is how I came to be sitting in the cosy parlour of Dame Jenny Jennings, Eton Housekeeper and surrogate mother and nanny figure to the sixty-odd boys of John’s house. Before half-an-hour had passed, she had indeed sorted things out. There was no question of sleeping on a sofa; there was a bed made up in the spare room. John was out late with a friend who was also returning to stay the night, so one more down for breakfast would hardly matter. Meanwhile, a hot bath was running and if I dug out my pyjamas from the sodden rucksack she’d have them dried and toasty warm in a jiff y, and after that a light supper of boiled egg and buttery toast soldiers.
When it came to bedtime, I was fully expecting to be tucked up by the good Dame, say our bedtime prayers together and kiss Teddy goodnight, but she contented herself with letting me know that she would leave a note for John to advise him of my presence and would see me in the morning about getting the rest of my stuff dry. Meanwhile, if there was anything I required, anything at all, she was just down the hallway.
I awoke early next morning. The large House was very quiet – all the boys were off on Half-Term – and soon I would have to saunter downstairs in Mr Clarke’s second-best dressing-gown (my clothes were still damp), wander into the dining room and nod hello to the other stranger there and attempt to explain to Mr Clarke why I had presumed on our somewhat slim acquaintance.
So I lay staring at the high white ceiling as a lozenge of sunlight crept slowly across it and birdsong filtered in from the garden trees outside, my thoughts churning like butter, wondering what on earth I was going to say.
A tap came on the door, a jovial voice called out, ‘Are you decent? Your morning tea, sir,’ and into the bedroom bearing a tray of tea things bustled, of all people, Keith – Keith of the Ellesmere Common Room, Keith of the Morda Brook, dear and familiar Keith whose presence suddenly made everything alright.
An hour later we were sitting down to that breakfast, and Keith, hooting with delight, was exclaiming about the coincidence that had washed me ashore here on the one weekend in the year when he was down visiting his old friend. And yes, of course John remembered me; in fact Keith had been telling him only last night how I had sailed away down the Vyrnwy and was last heard of somewhere near Bristol, and that he’d not expected to see me alive again – and now here I was devouring bacon before his very eyes. John, though a little bemused by the coincidence, was kindness itself – in fact, Keith was staying on another night so I must too. The gods were keeping their promise; I’d had Hell and high water, but now the rewards were dropping into place one by one as neatly as alphabet blocks clocking into a box to spell a word – three words, in fact; a phrase: something along the lines of MACKINNON: LUCKY SOD.
Oh, to be in Windsor on a bright October Sunday! The massive grey walls of the Castle rose above the town and the guards in their scarlet uniforms had marched straight off the lid of a Quality Street chocolate tin. From the battlements the town below looked as a royal capital should look, a toy town of red roofs and cobbled streets, of golden weathercocks and starlings in swift squadrons, and the river glimmering away in a silvery ribbon towards the south-east.
And I had no excuse to linger. I bade farewell to Keith and John and Dame Jennings and made my way through the grounds to where Jack was waiting. To my surprise she had been neither stolen nor con-fiscated, not even by some titled under-gardener, and apart from several trees’ worth of yellow willow leaves lying in her, she was fine and ready to go. I loaded her up, untied her and soon we were rowing steadily down the river watching Windsor Castle dwindle behind us into blue haze. We were heading once more for London.
London and the Law
A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping,
Dirty and dusty, but as wide as eye
Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping
In sight …
—BYRON, Don Juan
The Home Park, Old Windsor; Runnymede and the island where the Magna Carta was signed in ad 1215; a fleet of Harlequin ducks looking as ducks would look if they went in for Samurai dress code; the M25 motorway bridge in its grey pall of exhaust: these are dimly noted stages in the journey into London’s outer suburbs. I remember coming across a sailing vessel even smaller than my own just above Staines, a three-foot model yacht whose rudder and sheets were controlled by a tiny remote-control motor. It was being operated from the bank by a young man absorbed in the task of sending it tacking to and fro across the river, a ship from Lilliput manned by a phantom crew racing me down the Thames.
I remember also watching an exotic flash flying off into some treetops, a rainbow-coloured bird with a long tail and a piercing screech. It looked for all the world like a parakeet in vivid green, lemon yellow and azure, with a red splash visible on its back as it flew. I was thrilled to think that I had spotted a rarity, obviously a naturalised escapee, and was busy composing a letter to the Times and the RSPB about it when several miles downstream I came round a bend to see an extraordinary sight. In the middle of the river was a tiny island bearing nothing but three maple trees. The ragged leaves had almost finished now, and they were lying in crumpled brown swathes at the trees’ roots, but every branch was full of a rustling and squawking and fluttering – two hundred parakeets as bright and glossy as tropical fruit, looking like one of Jenny’s painted silk designs back in Shropshire.
Down through Staines and Chertsey the river bungalows crowd along the shore and fill the islands that punctuate the map with their intriguing names: Pharaoh’s Island, D’Oyly Carte Is
land, Dumsey Eyot and Penton Hook. There was an awful lot of hard tacking against biting wind under a cold clear sky, zigzagging to and fro past the waterworks of Sunbury and Hampton where my grandfather had been Chief Engineer during the War, and my mother and her brothers had spent their childhood playing among the filterbeds and gooseberry bushes and boating on the Thames. I moored that night opposite Hampton Court, with its famous maze, at a charming pub called Fox-on-the-River.
I woke the next morning to find the early sun combing the vapour off the river in phantom strands. The grounds of Hampton Court lay ice-blue and white on the opposite bank behind their high iron railings. I expected that night to have reached journey’s end: Surrey Docks just above Greenwich. Here, living aboard a narrow-boat, was a friend of mine, Tim, the brother of Rupert the vet who had brought me the original Jack de Crow. The idea was to sail up alongside, tap on a porthole and, when Tim appeared and asked with mild surprise why I was in a dinghy, casually mention that oh, I’d just rowed from Shropshire, thought I’d pop in. I was also rather hoping that he and his girlfriend Babette would not mind boat-sitting for a few months while I wintered in Australia, ready to return in spring to attempt the crossing of the Channel.
For this I had now decided to do, definitely. Why not? Jack de Crow had proven herself buoyant and stable and manoeuvrable in all weathers and conditions, tough enough to withstand the bumps and batterings sustained in locks and weirs, and it seemed that judging from the fine weather that had shone almost continuously about me, I was in fact a sun god upon whom it could rarely if ever rain.
With these happy thoughts revolving in my mind, I set off down the river on the last leg of the journey into the heart of London. The frosty morning was still as glass so I glided along with the oars paddling out their soothing rhythm on the silken surface, a steady ONE and two-three, ONE and two-three composed of soft creaks, splashes and clunks; it is exactly the same rhythm as the introduction to one of the famous arias from Carmen but lends itself equally well to any number of Latin dances, so I hummed my way through Sambas and Salsas, Rumbas and Tangos down those gentle suburban reaches towards Teddington and the tidal Thames.
At Teddington is an enormous weir and the means to measure precisely how much water flows down the river each day: in times of flood up to fifteen billion gallons. There are three locks, including the tiniest lock in Britain, designed to hold just one little punt or rowing skiff; and down this I went. It was a peculiar experience; I relived old nursery fears of going down the plug-hole when the bathwater is let out. But when the lower gate opened, I looked out onto a dazzling window of river and was once more seeing tidal waters, the first since Bristol.
I had arrived just before high tide, so the current was running upstream but sluggishly, hardly perceptible in its movement, and I had little difficulty in rowing on down the river against it. Down through Twickenham I went and moored for a while to explore Eel Pie Island, finding it to be a jungly little eyot with damp and fading bungalows crouched under thick foliage but with names redolent of a braver age, an age of exploration upon the world’s high seas: Coromandel House, Mandalay, Admiral’s Rest, Cape Cottage. There is something about all islands everywhere that is utterly enchanting, something wrapped up with weatherboard and whalebone, with seashells in dusty rows and thick pale-green glass in the windows, with telescopes and hibiscus and haphazard footpaths: Madeira, Nantucket, Iona, Norfolk Island, Inish Mor … these by their geographical isolation are linked by invisible isthmuses each with another, and here too with Eel Pie Island on a sunny Wednesday morning in late October.
Richmond Bridge, glowing honey gold above the green river, I passed by, and then rounded the broad bend to Kew. Just above Kew Bridge, however, the gentle monotony was broken abruptly by a noisy motor launch driven by three youths who roared up the river on a tidal wave of wash, steered straight for me and ducked aside with three feet to spare, sending Jack and myself heaving madly on the wake and scarlet with fury. The mast swung wildly to and fro, the bundled sail, gaff and boom thumped savagely from side to side, and a curling wave of filthy water bearing with it a debris of plastic bottles, polystyrene foam and frothy scum sloshed over the gunwale in a stinking tide. No sooner had I recovered my balance and picked the worst of the debris out of the bilges than I saw with dismay the launch returning. These youths were not in the same league as my three Reading lads; they were out for laughs and thrills. As they drew near, I could see a crate of shiny brown beer bottles in the cockpit and four or five empties lolling on the deck. Even as I watched, one of the crew picked up a pair of bottles, held one in each hand over the side and smashed them together, laughing at the sudden vicious tinkle of broken glass.
I tried rowing steadily on, ignoring the blare of the ghetto blaster propped in the cockpit and the shouted comments ricocheting over the water. The river seemed suddenly very wide and lonely and Jack horribly exposed. I steered in towards the Kew bank, but this too was empty of people as far as I could see in either direction. Before I could get close in, the launch shot between me and the bank on a snarling wave and started to describe a tight circle around me, a ring of savage foam and choppy water encircling the dinghy. Briefly half a dozen literary parallels ran through my mind – pirates, of course; the sea serpent that drew its deadly coils around the Dawn Treader; the tactics of killer whales in some half-remembered and highly inaccurate adventure story; the Hullabaloos in Coot Club menacing the peaceful Norfolk Broads with their wash and radio blare and reckless disregard for others. But literary examples, so enhancing in times of peace, are sadly inadequate when faced with genuine thug-gishness. Stripped of all romance, of plumes and pistols and parakeets, I was horribly at a loss and floundering mentally as much as Jack was by now floundering in reality on the motor launch’s wash.
These reams of philosophical musings only occupied a couple of seconds of real time before my body took charge of things. Tired of waiting for my confused brain to sort out sea serpents, Arthur Ran-some and eighteenth-century perceptions, it stood up in the violently rocking dinghy, held up my folded map case like an identity pass and to the amazement of my disbelieving ears shouted, ‘River Police! I have noted your vessel’s name and registration number, and you are exceeding the speed limit!’
Before my horrified brain could catch up with what it had just heard my body say and correct it (‘Er … no, sorry. Not true, actually.I’m just a helpless citizen and this is just a map case’), the three thugs had blanched, straightened up and cut their speed to a demure four knots before heading off up the river arguing in furious whispers: ‘Whose stupid idea was it in the first place? … Yer Dad’ll KILL yer when the police get through to ’im … Nah, ’COURSE ’e was river police like ’e said, cos ’oo else’d wear a silly hat like that, it must be part of the uniform …’
As I waited for the waves to subside, I bailed the boat, set the oars back in place and wondered what the penalty was for impersonating a police officer – what’s more, for bringing the Royal Thames River Constabulary into disrepute by carrying out the deception in a ridiculous hat. Ten years at least, I reckoned, as I took to the oars once more and rowed on somewhat shakily down the river.
On I slogged through Fulham and Wandsworth, alternately drifting and rowing past the extraordinary Wagnerian fantasy of the Harrods Depository in red terracotta, past the smart modern flats of Chelsea Harbour and under the splendid iron tracery of the Albert Bridge, where a thousand starlings rustled and cheeped and roosted in a cheerful, squabbling swarm. Soon the sun was westering and the sky was turning pink and gold beneath the clear cool blue. Night was coming on, and I decided to check the map. One glance confirmed what I had suspected: Southwark Docks were another eight miles downstream and quite unreachable that night. But where else could I go? As I rowed, the sky deepened to crimson and scarlet, a blazing furnace of a sunset the like of which I have rarely seen. The black silhouettes of the Battersea Power Station stood like cut-out cardboard shapes against the vivid sky. I could feel
also that the water beneath my keel was behaving in an uneasy manner. This was no longer the placid silk-cool Thames I had been used to; the outgoing tide had turned the river into a broad, wrangling churn of grey water that poured under the arches of the Grosvenor Bridge and on towards Vauxhall. Before I had reached Vauxhall Bridge, a new hazard was apparent. Huge ferries swept by, and their wake, rolling against the current, set the river waters sloshing and slapping in a racing chop. Between the sheer embankments of concrete, these waves rebounded magnified and sent Jack de Crow crashing and reeling from side to side in the deepening dusk.
Before I had reached Lambeth Bridge, it was completely dark and the waves were high enough to be sloshing over the gunwales. I was terrified. So choppy was the water that I could barely use the oars. Somehow I managed to steer myself inwards to the north bank, cursing the ferries as they churned up the river, lit up like Elijah’s fiery chariot and all unseeing of the little lightless dinghy bobbing down on the racing tide. Ferries were not the only peril. A smaller motor launch went zooming upstream along the further bank, red and blue disco lights flashing and some incomprehensible garble issuing from speakers, a jet of spray flung up behind from its rocket-like speed.
In the midst of all the fear there came one moment of sheer magic, as I realised that I had reached the heart of London. There I was, bobbing down beneath the Houses of Parliament and the landmark tower of Big Ben, just as it was striking seven. From my dinghy I could see into the lit windows of the Palace above me: a brief glimpse of some fan-vaulted ceiling, high panelled shelves lined with books in green and maroon leather with the gilt glinting on their spines. Some sort of drinks party was in progress: an assembly of figures in dark suits and silver hair, each with a cut glass of amber sherry in hand. As I passed, one youngish-looking man came to the window and stood staring out beyond the glass into the darkness over the Thames. He rested his forehead for a moment against the cool glass. He looked tired and a little glum, I thought, as though he longed to be away from that lit room, its secrets and its linenfold panelling. Perhaps he longed to be in a small sailing dinghy off to foreign parts on an outgoing tide under the stars.
The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow Page 14
