The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  For my part, I would have been quite happy to swap places right then. I had had enough. This was quite definitely the most dangerous and stupid thing I had ever done and was also quite likely to be the last thing I’d ever do. I was being swept along at eight knots in a roaring world of darkness and glaring sodium-lights, which dazzled the inky black water with liquid orange slashes that baffled the eye. The pylons of Westminster Bridge surged by in a welter of echoing current not three feet from my left gunwale, and as I shot out from under the black arches I pulled sharply in towards the floating pontoon of Westminster Pier. Just before I was swept past the end, a wave slammed me against the pontoon’s steel rim and I grabbed a railing with both hands, determined to stop here before I was sunk by a passing ferry.

  I myself might have been determined to stop. Jack, however, was equally set on keeping going. The tidal current swept the faithless dinghy from under my feet, my arms were nearly wrenched from their sockets, and half a second later I found myself with my hands still clinging to the railing but with my feet hooked over the transom of Jack who was trying to race away downstream. The rest of my intervening body acted as a badly designed bridge between the two, hanging horizontally over the dark racing Thames and sagging slowly drinkwards.

  An agonising period followed in which I attempted to drag Jack back upstream to a position under me, an exercise involving more stom ach muscles than I customarily use and during which my mind absented itself and wandered away humming hymn tunes to itself un til the crisis was over. Eventually, helped by a rogue wave that swept Jack towards me for a moment, I had got her beneath me and was sitting once more in my proper place on the thwarts. Then I grabbed the painter and tied it firmly – very firmly – onto the pontoon railing. ‘That certainly won’t be coming undone again in a hurry,’ I told myself. ‘Here we are and here we stay,’ I said curtly to Jack as I started to climb onto the pontoon looking around for someone official to let them know they had a guest mooring for the night.

  Just then a resounding BOOOHHHM! shook the night, the sort of sound one associates with supertankers in foggy Atlantic sea lanes rather than inland river traffic. I turned to see an enormous ferry crowded with passengers just swinging in to dock at the pontoon. In twenty seconds, Jack would be crushed like a matchbox between ferry and pontoon. I took a flying leap back into the dinghy, fumbled furiously with the extra-secure clove hitches and bowlines I had spent a careful ten minutes tying and prayed to all the gods in Heaven to stop doing this sort of thing to me. Somehow I managed to cast loose three seconds before the giant stern of the ferry swung in with a grinding thud against the railings where I had been moored. Even so, the swirling kick of the propeller-wash sent me bucketing and spinning downstream into the darkness, and before I’d recovered myself I was a hundred yards down the river, helplessly adrift once more.

  Beneath Waterloo Bridge, the echoing swell of oily black waves decided me. If I survived this night, I would not be going to Europe. How could I have ever been so presumptuous? It was sheer folly to dream of crossing the Channel in a rotten little tub like this. If the choppiness was this bad so far inland up the Thames, how would it be further down the estuary and out into the Channel? It was unthinkable. No, I had clearly been indulging in a fool’s daydream, lulled by the exceptional conditions of the Bristol Channel that long-distant day and carried away by unrealistic – and all too typical – conceptions of my own abilities. If I got the blasted boat to Southwark Docks tonight, or indeed anywhere safe, that’s where she would stay until she could be shipped back to Ellesmere to lie among the dandelions for another thirty years. As for me, well, I wasn’t sure quite what I would do – possibly dedicate my life to God, join a monastery in a desert somewhere; anything so long as this heaving, bucking, swooping, blind nightmare stopped right now.

  Night Tide

  As Waterloo Bridge spat me out from under its booming arches, another pontoon on the left bank swept into sight. A little more carefully this time, I somehow oared alongside, grabbed at the huge black tyres that lined its edge and let Jack thump to a halt against the giant rings. I tied on, climbed shakily aboard and called out a cautious ‘Hello?’

  The pontoon was about fifty feet long and consisted of a long decking facing the river backed by a row of four rooms, each one with its door opening onto the deck. Keeping an eye out for approaching ferries that might suddenly want to dock, I ventured to call out a little louder: ‘Hello? Anyone there?’

  No answer. Funny. Each room had its lights on, and all the doors stood wide open. I went to investigate. The first room seemed to be a sort of mini-gym, with weights and training equipment and lockers along the walls. The second was a small television lounge; an old sofa and a few armchairs lined the walls and the television was on, the seven o’clock news quacking and flickering its bluish light over the shabby carpet. The next room was a small brightly lit kitchen: a toaster, a small hot plate and a kettle, and on the bench-top two mugs of steaming coffee. Visions of the Marie Celeste, of abandoned ghost ships riding the ocean waves, of ancient brigs manned by phantom crews, fluttered through my mind before I reminded myself that this was central London and not the still-vexed Ber-moothes, and the existence of a haunted pontoon was unlikely to have gone unnoticed within fifty yards of Somerset House. The last room explained the nature of the place, if not the mystery of its abandonment. It contained a large VHF radio, a computer, a desk and filing-cabinets, and over the back of two chairs hung a couple of uniforms; river-police uniforms, standard issue, not including pith helmet. I had better scarper sharpish.

  As I stepped outside onto the decking again, a fast motor launch zoomed up alongside the pontoon nearly swamping Jack de Crow, and I recognised it as the reckless vessel with the disco lights I had seen blaring up the river in the dark earlier. On closer inspection I also recognised it for what it was: a river-police boat, with two irate-looking river-policemen just hopping onto the pontoon. One of them was speaking into a walkie-talkie, and I heard him say, ‘It’s alright. We’ve found him. He’s on our pontoon. Over.’

  There was something very Who’s-been-eating–MY-porridge-ish in the way he said it. The other man stepped up to me, stabbed a finger at my chest and said with some asperity, ‘We’ve been looking for you!’

  Oh dear. I hadn’t thought the crime of impersonating a police officer would come to light so soon.

  ‘Hello, officers. Can I help you?’

  ‘We’ve been looking,’ he repeated, ‘and I quote,’ – here he consulted his notebook – ‘for a lunatic in a pith helmet out of control in a small dinghy without navigation lights, as reported to us by no less than three ferry captains. Can we assume that you are said lunatic?’

  ‘Well, this is, in fact a pith helmet, officer, but – ’

  ‘Right, yes, lunatic would seem to be an apt description then. Are you aware of the Rules of Navigation that demand adequate navigation lights on any vessel sailing between the hours of darkness on public shipping lanes?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Well, no. Well, I could make a stab at them … er …’

  ‘Are you aware of the dangers to yourself and to others of proceeding in such a fashion on this waterway at a time of maximum tide-flow?’

  ‘Um …’

  ‘And during our coffee-break?’ interrupted the other policeman in an aggrieved tone.

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  ‘Nescafé Gold Blend it was. That new stuff . I’d just poured it.’

  His senior colleague shot him a warning look and resumed his interrogation.

  ‘And the penalties for distracting us from our more serious duties?’

  ‘Penalties? No, I wasn’t aware …’

  ‘Where, may I ask, have you come from in that vessel?’

  ‘Er … Shropshire.’

  There was a pause. A glance between the two.

  ‘Blimey. Need a cup of Nescafé Gold Blend then? We’ll make some fresh.’

  Ten minutes later I was steadying my nerves with a hot mug of m
uch-needed coffee while the two police officers quizzed me about the whole voyage so far – Ellesmere, the Morda Brook, the Shrop-shire Weir, the Ironbridge Gorge and the passage through the Bristol Channel. Both had been all over the waterways of Britain and were flatteringly interested in the trip, and though neither revised their first opinion of me when it came to lunacy, they seemed to forget the penalties and charges of dangerous navigational practices on the night-time Thames as I took them along the Kennet & Avon Canal and up to Lechlade and back.

  They in their turn explained how, having received a call from a concerned ferry captain, they had flung themselves into their launch and sped upstream along the south bank to look for me, not wasting a second to lock up, turn the television off or grab their jackets. Meanwhile, I must have just crossed to the north bank and watched them speed by, mistaking them for another boatload of hooligans such as my tormentors up by Kew.

  Finally it came to the crunch – and Goldilocks had an idea. Could I leave the dinghy here tonight, and fetch her away tomorrow? Wilf, the sergeant, fixed me with a stony eye.

  ‘Are you a member of the IRA?’ he asked.

  ‘No!’ I replied in some surprise.

  ‘Is your vessel packed with Semtex or explosives of any kind?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right, you can leave her here tonight. Where are you going to sleep then?’

  I poked my head outside. With every wave Jack was slamming up and down against the pontoon tyres with a vicious jerk, rising five feet and then plunging into a dark trough of racing water each time. Sleeping aboard was out of the question.

  ‘I don’t suppose you know a cheapish hotel or hostel nearby, do you?’ I hazarded.

  ‘You are, my son, about two hundred yards from the West End of London. Hotel prices start at about ninety pounds per night. How much have you got?’

  ‘Um … forty pounds?’

  ‘You ARE a lunatic, aren’t you? Hold on, I’ll see what I can do.’

  He turned to a telephone, stabbed the buttons and leaned back in his chair.

  ‘Royal Adelphi Hotel? Good. Wilf here, Wilf of the River Police. Yes, yes. Look, got a room for tonight, have you? … Uh huh, yes, it’s for one of our boys …’ Here he looked me up and down; pith helmet, faded shirt, khaki shorts. ‘Plain-clothes division,’ he added, winking enormously. ‘Good, excellent’ (thumbs up). ‘Now what are your rates?’ (pause) ‘Now surely you can go lower than that … lower … lower. Okay, hang on.’ He covered the mouth-piece and whispered, ‘Is thirty pounds alright for you, sonny? It’s as low as they’ll go for the boys in blue.’

  I gave a delighted thumbs-up in return, Wilf confirmed the booking and hung up.

  ‘Good little place, the Adelphi – just off Trafalgar Square. Should suit you nicely. And now, what are your plans from hereon?’

  I sat and told him how ever since the Bristol Channel I had half thought of attempting to sail across to Europe, but that he would no doubt be relieved to hear that the last two hours had cured me of any such ambitions. I was going to go on and tell him that in the short space of time since passing under Lambeth Bridge, I had already mapped out several cosy options for a boat-less year ahead – settling down to produce an illustrated herbal of plants growing in arid regions of the world; taking up archaeology in the waterless wadis of Northern Africa; auditioning for a remake of Lawrence of Arabia – joining that desert brotherhood even – anything as far removed from the soggy pursuits of nauticalia as possible. But to my surprise, Wilf hadn’t responded with the same eyebrow-raised grimace as my previous confidants in this scheme. Instead he pursed his lips, looked at me thoughtfully and said: ‘Now why not, I wonder? Dover to Calais? I reckon you could do it if you had a mind to. Not now, of course. Go home to Australia for Christmas, but next March, say, when the weather’s getting warmer, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t.’

  I must have been gaping at him, because he continued: ‘You’d need to pick your day, of course, and you’d want someone to accompany you in a larger boat, but no, I don’t see any real objection.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said I, thinking of the dark and swirling waters beyond the pontoon lights, the looming bulk of the ferries, the swamping waves and the fear I had felt so recently. ‘Yes,’ I repeated, clutching for once at straws of prudence, of caution, of excuses not to go, ‘but where on Earth would I find someone prepared to accompany me across? I don’t exactly know anyone with a large boat, and – ’

  ‘Yes you do,’ interrupted Wilf. ‘Me. I have a trawler which I take across four or five times a year.’ (My arid herbs crumbled to fragrant dust.) ‘I’ll be going round about March.’ (Archaeology died a sudden death.) ‘Here’s my number. Give me a ring early next year and we’ll arrange an escort for you.’ (Lawrence galloped off and turned into the mirage he had always been.) ‘Don’t worry,’ he added cheerfully, seeing my face fall. ‘The voyage need not end here after all. There’s nothing to stop you and little Jack sailing all the way to the Black Sea! Have another coffee …’

  That night, although the bed in the Royal Adelphi was soft and comfortable, I may as well have been aboard Jack, bucking wildly on the Thames. All night the mattress seemed to sway and jolt on a tide of darkness; phantom ferries loomed out of the fogs of sleep, manned by politicians sipping sherry; and the giant figure of Wilf kept handing me a sheaf of secret documents and a toy boat and ordering me to sail to France in it, saying, ‘Don’t worry, my lad.

  You’re our man in Europe. Plain-clothes division.’ And when I found the toy boat sinking beneath me, someone kept saying in a rich avuncular voice, ‘That’s right … you can go lower than that … lower … lower … lower …’ until I drowned in the soft, thundering billows of slumber.

  And so I come to the last day of this long and winding tale of reeds and rivers, weirs and willow trees, swans and sails and sunlit days and the secret ways of Britain.

  I did not hurry that morning. Wilf had told me that the tide would not begin running out until one o’clock in the afternoon. Besides, Surrey Docks was only five miles down the river and there was no point in arriving at Tim and Babette’s barge until they were both home from work. I spent the morning exploring the National Gallery, trotting around Covent Garden and then visiting Kelvin Hughes, one of the best suppliers of maritime goods and charts. Here I found what I was looking for: a large map of all Europe and a good deal of Russia showing every navigable waterway, river and canal from Ireland to the Caspian Sea, from Norway to Turkey. And there in plain blue was a route through, from the tangle of canals clustered like varicose veins around Calais to the long single thread of the Danube running out into the Black Sea. It was, after all, possible.

  The last stretch down to Surrey Docks was straightforward. The day was dullish but warm, with no wind to speak of. Wilf had advised me to get straight across to the south bank and stay well over, thereby avoiding the faster shipping traffic that kept to the centre. In broad daylight and as the river widened I had more leisure to look about me and enjoy the novelty of being a spectacle on the river – and a spectator. Here was the newly rebuilt Globe Theatre, remodelled exactly as Shakespeare would have known it, and the only building in the City of London to be allowed a thatched roof since the Great Fire of 1666. Over there was the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral rising above the more modern bankside buildings.

  Tower Bridge passed by in its lofty blue and gilded splendour, and the Tower of London on the far bank, much cleaner and whiter than I remembered from a visit twenty-five years earlier. Old songs from a production of The Yeomen of the Guard flooded back and I went rowing down the river singing Tower Warders, Under Orders with its fierce brisk rhythm, and my favourite of all Gilbert and Sullivan songs, I Have a Song to Sing, O!, the sweet, simple rolling tune sung by the melancholy jester Jack Point.

  And so too, my own Jack was singing his own lap-lapping melody as we crept down the last dull-eyed miles between the warehouses of Wapping and Bermondsey to Greenland Pier and the lock entrance t
o Surrey Docks. There a young lock-keeper took me up the lock, opened a swing bridge between one compound and another, and I rowed through into the placid waters of the Surrey Docks marina. There was Ilanga Umfula, Tim and Babette’s smartly painted narrowboat in royal blue and yellow, and there was a warm yellow light pouring out into the greyness of late afternoon on this, the last day of October. I had arrived.

  The journey had covered something approaching 481 miles, I had traversed 160 locks and had been travelling for 59 days, statistics that to my mind seem meaningless. It had often struck me on the journey, whenever I reached for a map to show ‘where I really was’ on some stretch of the river or canal, in what odd a sense we use the word real. There I would be, tucked in a reedy corner of the river, an alder tree scattering its golden coinage on the black waters, a farmhouse drowning its warm red-brick reflections in the river’s stillness, and I would be reaching for a piece of printed paper to tell me something more real than the wet grasses and the rustle of reeds in an evening breeze. ‘Ah,’ I’d say, putting my finger on a squiggle of blue ink and red dots, ‘here we are!’ And I’d read out a name – Crowmarsh, Bampton, Oakhill Down – an airy nothing of syllables and spit – and then, only then, would I confidently plant my banner of recognition and turn away satisfied, no longer needing the cool bright air and the reedy curve and the red bricks fading into dusk.

  So I give the figures and statistics above merely to pay a nodding homage to our map-god, and then turn to better things: to the colours seen as September flamed into October and rivers merged with the sea; to the aerated minty smells of rushing water in deep locks and woodsmoke in country pubs; to kingfishers and coots and cloud-palaces in the sky; and to the goodness of people met along the way whose numbers defy arithmetic. Not because there were so many (though there were), but because each one held in the mind fills it entirely, floods every cell, admitting no others to jostle into a merely countable rank. There are no queues here, not in the Courts of Heaven.